love & madness
Death is an intrinsic and inextricable part of love;
and, although they may seem to be immiscible substances, in Shakespeare, one is
existentially embedded in the other.
Perhaps this is what gives Shakespearean love its intensity – and its
tragic depth.
I see a great many parallels between ROMEO AND
JULIET and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,
and although I realize that one is a comedy and the other is a tragedy, they
both seem to have at the core a love that goes to such extremes it is not love
at all, but madness.
These similarities occurred to me after I viewed the
two movies back-to-back, and then reviewed a few websites and re-read parts of
the plays on-line. I have to say I
found the "text and commentary" site for MND very helpful (
http://cmc.uib.no/dream/ ) even though my eyes feel very tired after reading
online. I ordered several books from
amazon.com & I even ordered my own copies of some of the movies. I like to watch them more than once -- I
find this intriguing and relaxing.
Perhaps what I find most inspiring about Shakespeare
is that love and madness are very closely related, as are love and death.
In MND, the "rude mechanicals" perform a
play for Theseus and the wedding party.
In it, hilariously inept actors stage
'A tedious
brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love
Thisbe; very tragical mirth.'
Although this is nice, absurd fun with many
malapropisms, the issue is that of forbidden, "outlaw" love (Pyramus
and Thisbe are prohibited from marrying because of a tyrannical father) -- the
bottom line is that they commit suicide when they are not allowed to
marry. So, the separation required by
the patriarch is a separation indead -- forever. That certainly echoes R+J.
It also echoes the intensity of Helena's love for Demetrius -- she so
desperately craves his presence that she pursues him -- although it could be to
the death. Death is a constant
undercurrent to love in all of Shakespeare, but in some places more than others. As the antithesis of unity, death posits
existential isolation, and the possibility that a nihilistic universe perhaps
exists, where everything can collapse to nothingness if societal strictures are
too rigid. As a matter of fact,
rigidity of all sorts leads to collapse and destruction - whether it be in
patriarchal roles (Taming of the Shrew) or in the case of gender and gender
roles. Gender absolutes are always
suspect -- the "pure woman" is usually not so, and the societally
desirable male (rich, powerful, proud) is usually the one person in the play
who is rotten to the core.
But, what is "love" in Shakespeare? In A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, lovers and
madmen are closely allied. If there is
any doubt of all of that, Act V, Scene 1 clears it up, when Theseus states that
lovers, madmen, and poets all possess "seething brains" and
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
But what could be more lunatic than what was
presented to Theseus at the beginning of the play? Egeus, Hermia's father, was asking Theseus to invoke an old law
and to put Hermia to death because she refused to marry the man her father had
selected for her!
The true madness is in the social order and in the
laws of society! After all, isn’t it
absolute madness to announce to your beloved daughter that if she doesn’t marry
the person you have selected, you will have her put to death? This is even more troubling than the
Abraham-Isaac story. At least in that
situation, God was asking him to sacrifice his son. Presumably there was a certain reason for it, besides political
and/or economic gain. If
"madness" and "love" disrupt the social order, they are, at
least in Shakespeare, very positive.
Love and madness allow people to transform and they make an absurd play
of social order. They allow mistaken
identities, bizarre self-delusions, and crazy spells to turn the world upside
down, precisely in order to put it aright again. It’s histrionic at times, and often wildly and bawdily humorous
(but only the audience is privy to the raucously funny situations – the
unfortunate characters in the plays are moved about like pawns on a great,
almost surrealist, almost Borgean chessboard of life. In the end, Shakespeare’s characters marry, political conflicts are
resolved, and enmities mended. That
applies to the comedies, at least. In
the tragedies, such worn-out or unworkable concepts as “honor” and “love at
first sight” are played out with all their absurdist ramifications, the
resultant being a total meltdown of the ancien regime, and a frightening
nullification of the supposed eternal verities. The end would be nihilist, if the false values weren’t in such
need of a razing. In R+J, the
sacrosanct institutions of aristocratic, family-based city-state governments,
and the church (most specifically, the Catholic church), are demonstrably
flawed, tainted by venality, lust, and a blind, progeny-devouring rage for
order and political sway.
"Nature is an unbalancing act," Stephen
Greenblatt has remarked of another Shakespearean comedy. Thankfully, there are ways to break apart
the rigid and life-denying political, social, and existential structures. In Shakespeare, nature complies, primarily
with storms, resulting in shipwreck and separation. At first negative, this ultimately yields positive change.
Love is an even more unbalancing force -- which is
good, because the society that is created is unhealthy, rigid, moribund, and
unsurvivable. We see this throughout
Romeo and Juliet -- especially in the plague-ridden walled city, and the rigid
social order that demands death (honor killings, etc.) to keep it alive.
Lovers and madmen are wonderful at producing
discourses of resistance.
What do I mean by "resistance"? What is a “discourse of resistance”? A discourse of resistance is one in which
the rigid structures, elitist hierarchies, and/or consumer-culture driven
dehumanizations are problematized and put into a different context. Further, the discourse causes a profound
questioning of the values that maintain the status quo -- they unbalance the
rigid system, and they introduce disorder and chaos in an overly ordered
world.
A discourse of resistance is, in essence, a
discourse of freedom. For me, that is
what lovers and madmen emphasize -- that is what they espouse, and that is what
I cherish in literature.