Final Paper

The Implicit Critique of Love

The act of suffering within Shakespeare’s plays is fueled by love. Gooey, messy, torturous love, and what better way for a gifted playwright to emotionally appeal to an entire species than to use that one subject we all share a subliminal affinity to? I would argue that if one were hard-pressed to ask random passersby what author they most associate with love, nearly all of them would say Shakespeare. But simply because the man is synonymous with love doesn’t mean his portrayal of it is the standard to which all love should be held. In fact, Shakespeare’s portrayal of love is not pure and beautiful as many who aren’t familiar with him might think. It is cynical, to the point where one could question if it is not in fact harboring elements of resentment.
In Harold Bloom’s analysis of King Lear in his book Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, Bloom says, “The implicit critique of love, in Shakespeare, hardly can be termed a mere skepticism” (Bloom, 487). This is an elevated way of saying Shakespeare is a skeptic hiding seeds of disparity in arguably every one of his plays in which love, in any form, plays a role. To examine these plays from a perspective other than that of the infatuated audience member is to see that love is in fact the main problematic, and with love comes the inevitable idea of ownership. An example of the destructive effects of ownership is evident within Othello. It is under love’s blind intoxication that Othello kills his Desdemona. One would think the words of the woman he loves would mean more than those of the scheming Iago, but one thing Shakespeare portrays brilliantly in all of his plays is how impulsively we humans act when responding to fear. In plays such as King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, and Antony and Cleopatra, we see the characters’ fear of losing their object of desire dictating and twisting their fates. Even in Shakespeare’s comedies such as The Tempest, All’s Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, Pericles, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the audience is left with a happy ending, love is presented as a near-ridiculous entity, manipulating characters down paths no person should take.

So the question naturally arises, what is Shakespeare trying to tell us? If he were a true admirer of love we would see the characters in his plays choosing to make wise decisions based on their feelings for the person they care about, rather than making tumultuous decisions based on the fear of losing the thing they love. The image I have come to see is Shakespeare holding up a mirror, and in that reflection is the truth of how lost and absurd we really are. By providing parodies of that which we find normal and accepted behavior, such as a father’s desire to be loved by his children or a husband’s conviction of his wife’s loyalty, he shows the audience how destructive our blind emotions can be.
When one of Shakespeare’s characters loses that thing they most care about, the audience is left with a vacuous sense of nothingness. Though The Winter’s Tale is a comedy, Leontes gives a speech early on in the play that relates to this idea. He is speaking to Camillo about his suspicions of an affair between Hermione and Polyxenes.
Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh? A note infallible
Of breaking honesty! Horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight? And all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.
(Winter’s Tale, 1.2..283-95)

Since Leontes’ suspicions prove to be unfounded in the end, then his proclamation that states his reality is nothing if there is actually nothing going on between Hermione and Polyxenes, tells us on an extrinsic level that his entire world, including his love for Hermione is nothing… Ultimately this undercurrent of ‘nothingness’ leads my trail of thought to two related ideas; the existentialism of playwright Samuel Beckett in plays such as Endgame and Waiting For Godot and also the teachings of Buddhism.

In both Buddhism, and Beckett’s depiction of existentialist doctrine, there is an acknowledgement of the fact that with life, comes suffering. In Buddhism, a set of principles called the Four Noble Truths identifies what Shakespeare seems to be telling us. The first is the truth of suffering, followed by the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. As it is with love, the pursuit of pleasure can only continue what is ultimately an unquenchable thirst. Buddhism claims desire is the ultimate cause of suffering and the only way to escape suffering is to achieve the enlightened state of Nirvana. Beckett indirectly displays an understanding of these ideas in his plays, but unlike Buddhism, and I would argue Shakespeare as well, his intention is not to guide people towards an escape from all of this. He simply provides the spectacle and lets the audience make of it what they will. In Endgame, the characters Hamm and Clov are seemingly trapped in a purgatorial existence in which there are no answers, no dilemmas, simply impossible desires that only reveal how lost the characters are. For instance, in one scene from Endgame, Hamm tells Clov to check outside with the telescope. Clov does and replies back, “zero”. Clov asks why they go through the farce everyday, and Hamm answers that “it is routine”. Other instances include Hamm’s contemplation of what to dream about if he could ever sleep, and the continual question of “What time is it?” followed by the response, “Same as usual”.

Clearly Beckett’s understanding of mankind’s cycle of suffering is comparable to that of Buddhism and Shakespeare, though as I said before, his intention is not to guide us towards an alternative. In contrast, I believe Shakespeare does want to guide his audience, however indirectly. He portrays love from the perspective of someone who seems to grasp the temporality of all things. If he were available for comment I believe he would tell us that every moment is fleeting. We enter a world in which doom and suffering is inevitable and to escape this fact requires an escape from the whole system. To love another is to open oneself up to loss and the eventual mortality of everything. Shakespeare understood this, as does Buddhist doctrine, as does Samuel Beckett, but realistically it will never be the fate of mankind to reject the present moment’s pleasure in favor of avoiding eventual suffering. For how advanced mankind is we rarely exercise the willingness to learn from our mistakes, a fact Beckett understood too well. He produced a memorable quote in one of his novella’s titled Worstward Ho! that pertains to this discussion brilliantly. “Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”