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 absurdity.
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.
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! If "madness"
and "love" disrupt the social order, they are, at least in
Shakespeare, very positive. They allow
people to transform and to
"Nature is an unbalancing act," Stephen
Greenblatt has remarked of another Shakespearean comedy. 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"? I mean that
they question the status quo -- they unbalance the rigid system, and they
introduce disorder and chaos in an overly ordered world. What I like to refer to as 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.