How comes it now, my husband, O how comes it
That thou art then estrangèd from thyself?—
Thy ‘self ’ I call it, being strange to me
That, undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self’s better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself, and not me too.
(2.2.119–29)
The scene in which these words are spoken is comical, for Adriana is unwittingly addressing not her husband but her husband’s long-lost identical twin. Yet the speech is too long and the pain too intense to be altogether absorbed in laughter.
Though the comedy rushes on to madcap confusion and though at the play’s end Adriana is blamed (erroneously, as it happens) for her husband’s distracted state—“The venom clamours of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth” (5.1.70–71)—her suffering has an odd, insistent ring of truth. The situation seized Shakespeare’s imagination, as if the misery of the neglected or abandoned spouse was something he knew personally and all too well. Amid the climactic flurry of recognitions, the play does not include, as it would have been reasonable to expect, a scene of marital reconciliation. In The Comedy of Errors, as in most of his plays, the substance of such a reconciliation—what it would mean fully to share a life—seems to have eluded him.
Occasionally, as in The Winter’s Tale, there is a glimpse of something more than a frustrated craving for intimacy. Hermione, nine months pregnant, manages lightly to tease her husband, Leontes, and her teasing discloses marital emotions that go beyond anxious dependence. Leontes, who has been trying unsuccessfully to persuade his best friend to extend his already lengthy visit, enlists his wife’s aid. When his wife succeeds, Leontes pays her a hyperbolic compliment whose potential awkwardness Hermione immediately seizes upon:
LEONTES: Is he won yet?
HERMIONE: He’ll stay, my lord.
LEONTES: At my request he would not.
Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok’st
To better purpose.
HERMIONE: Never?
(1.2.88–91)
As befits a play fantastically sensitive to intonation, there is nothing on the surface of these simple lines to suggest that anything is going wrong. But perhaps Hermione has already sensed something slightly edgy in Leontes’ response, and she instinctively tries to turn it into marital playfulness:
HERMIONE: Never?
LEONTES: Never but once.
HERMIONE: What, have I twice said well? When was’t before?
I prithee tell me. Cram’s with praise, and make’s
As fat as tame things.
(1.2.91–94)
There is here, as so often in the ordinary conversation of husbands and wives, at once nothing and everything going on. As befits convention, Hermione calls Leontes her lord, but she speaks to him on easy, equal footing, mingling sexual banter and gentle mockery, at once welcoming her husband’s compliment and making fun of it. Grasping his initial misstep, Leontes quickly qualifies what he has said, turning “Never” into “Never but once,” and then gives his pregnant wife what she says she longs for:
Why, that was when
Three crabbèd month had soured themselves to death
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand
And clap thyself my love. Then didst thou utter,
“I am yours for ever.”
(1.2.103–7)
This is one of the most extended marital conversations that Shakespeare ever wrote, and despite its slight air of formality—husband and wife are speaking, after all, in the presence of their close friend and others—it is powerfully convincing in its suggestion of entangled love, tightly coiled tension, and playfulness. Leontes and Hermione can look back with amusement at their shared past. They are not afraid to tease one another; they care what each other thinks and feels; they still experience sexual desire even as they go about forming a family and entertaining guests. But it is precisely at this moment of slightly edgy intimacy that Leontes is seized by a paranoid fear of his wife’s infidelity. At the end of the catastrophic events brought on by this paranoia, there is a moving reconciliation scene, but Hermione’s words then are focused entirely on the recovery of her lost daughter. To Leontes, whom she embraces, Hermione says precisely nothing.
The Winter’s Tale suggests that the marriage of Leontes and Hermione could not sustain—and could certainly not recover—the emotional, sexual, and psychological intimacy, at once so gratifying and so disturbing, that it once possessed. So too in Othello, a tragedy with strong affinities to The Winter’s Tale, Desdemona’s full, bold presence in the marriage—
That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world
(1.3.247–49)
—seems to trigger her husband’s homicidal jealousy. But perhaps it is wrong even to speak of that particular relationship as a marriage: it seems to last something like a day and a half before it falls apart.
At least these are couples. Many of the significant married pairs in Shakespeare have been divorced by death long before the play begins. For the most part it is the women who have vanished: no Mrs. Bolingbroke, Mrs. Shylock, Mrs. Leonato, Mrs. Brabanzio, Mrs. Lear, Mrs. Prospero. Very infrequently there is a faint trace: Shylock’s wife was named Leah, and she gave her husband a turquoise ring that their daughter Jessica heartlessly trades for a monkey. Even less frequently, there is a tiny hint, such as this one from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of what has taken a missing woman from the world: “But she, being mortal, of that boy did die” (2.1.135). But for the most part Shakespeare doesn’t bother.
Demographers have shown that the risks of childbirth in Elizabethan England were high, but not nearly high enough to explain the wholesale absence of spouses from the plays. (Shakespeare’s mother outlived his father by seven years, and despite their age difference, his own wife would also outlive him by seven years.) Clearly Shakespeare did not want a Taming of the Shrew in which Mrs. Minola would have her own ideas on her daughters’ suitors or a King Lear in which the old king’s wife would dispute his plans for retirement.
There are few happy marriages in all of literature, just as there are rather few representations of goodness. But most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels have an important stake in persuading the reader that the romantic young couple, with whose wedding the work ends, will find their deepest fulfillment in each other, even if most of the marriages actually depicted in the course of the narrative are humdrum or desperate. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett have a miserable relationship, as do Charlotte Lucas and the asinine Mr. Collins, but Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy will, the reader is assured, beat the odds. Shakespeare, even in his sunniest comedies, had no stake in persuading his audience of any such thing.
“Men are April when they woo, December when they wed,” says Rosalind in As You Like It. “Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (4.1.124–27). Rosalind may not herself believe what she says—disguised as a young boy, she is playfully testing Orlando’s love for her—but she articulates the cynical wisdom of the everyday world. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, there are the same hard-edged sentiments tumbling inadvertently from the mouth of the simpleton Slender: “if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married and have more occasion to know one another. I hope upon familiarity will grow more contempt” (1.1.206–10). What is envisaged is an almost inevitable sequence summed up in Beatrice’s succinct formula, from Much Ado About Nothing: “wooing, wedding, and repenting” (2.1.60).
The tone in which these views are uttered is
not so much gloomy as humorous and jauntily realistic, a realism that does not actually get in the way of anyone’s wedding. At the play’s end Beatrice and Benedick too will embark on marriage, as do all the other lovers in Shakespearean comedy, despite the clear-eyed calculation of the likely consequences. Part of the magic of these plays is to register this calculation without inhibiting the joy and optimism of each of the couples. Shakespeare expended little or no effort to persuade the audience that these particular pairs will be an exception to the rule; on the contrary, they themselves give voice to the rule. The spectators are invited to enter into the charmed circle of love, knowing that it is probably a transitory illusion but, for the moment at least—the moment of the play—not caring.
Shakespeare’s imagination did not easily conjure up a couple with long-term prospects for happiness. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the love between Lysander and Hermia vanishes in a second, while Demetrius and Helena will cherish each other as long as the love juice sprinkled in his eyes holds out. In The Taming of the Shrew, a pair of good actors can persuade audiences that there is a powerful sexual attraction half-hidden in the quarreling of Petruccio and Kate, but the end of the play goes out of its way to offer two almost equally disagreeable visions of marriage, one in which the couple is constantly quarreling, the other in which the wife’s will has been broken. The end of As You Like It succeeds only because no one is forced to contemplate the future home life of Rosalind and Orlando or of the rest of the “country copulatives,” as Touchstone calls them (5.4.53). Since Viola keeps on the male attire with which she has disguised herself, Twelfth Night relieves the audience of the burden of seeing her dressed as a demure young woman; even at the end of the play Orsino seems betrothed to his effeminate boyfriend. Nothing about their relationship in the course of the play suggests that they are well matched or that great happiness lies ahead of them. In The Merchant of Venice, Jessica and Lorenzo may take pleasure together in spending the money they have stolen from her father, Shylock, but their playful banter has a distinctly uneasy tone:
LORENZO: In such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew,
And with an unthrift love did run from Venice
As far as Belmont.
JESSICA: In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,
And ne’er a true one.
(5.1.14–19)
The currents of uneasiness here—mingling together fears of fortune hunting, bad faith, and betrayal—extend to Portia and Bassanio and even to their comic sidekicks Nerissa and Graziano. And these are newlyweds with blissful prospects compared to Hero and the callow, cruel Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing. Only Beatrice and Benedick, in that play and indeed among all the couples of the principal comedies, seem to hold out the possibility of a sustained intimacy, and then only if the audience discounts their many insults, forgets that they have been tricked into wooing, and assumes, against their own mutual assertions, that they genuinely love each other.
It is worth pausing and trying to get it all in focus: in the great succession of comedies that Shakespeare wrote in the latter half of the 1590s, romantic masterpieces with their marvelous depictions of desire and their cheerfully relentless drive toward marriage, there is scarcely a single pair of lovers who seem deeply, inwardly suited for one another. There is no end of longing, flirtation, and pursuit, but strikingly little long-term promise of mutual understanding. How could earnest, decent, slightly dim Orlando ever truly take in Rosalind? How could the fatuous, self-absorbed Orsino ever come to understand Viola? And these are couples joyously embarking on what officially promise to be good marriages. There is a striking sign that Shakespeare was himself aware of the problem he was posing in the romantic comedies: a few years after these plays, sometime between 1602 and 1606, he wrote two comedies that bring the latent tensions in virtually all these happy pairings right up to the surface.
At the close of Measure for Measure, Mariana insists on marrying the repellent Angelo, who has continued to lie, connive, and slander until the moment he has been exposed. In the same strange climax, Duke Vincentio proposes marriage with Isabella, who has made it abundantly clear that her real desire is to enter a strict nunnery. As if this were not uncomfortable enough, the duke punishes the scoundrel Lucio by ordering him to marry a woman he has made pregnant. “I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore,” Lucio pleads, but the duke is implacable, insisting on what is explicitly understood as a form of punishment, the equivalent of “pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (5.1.508, 515–16). All’s Well That Ends Well is, if anything, still more uncomfortable: the beautiful, accomplished Helen has unaccountably fixed her heart on the loutish Count Bertram, and in the end, despite his fierce resistance to the match, she gets her nasty bargain. There cannot be even the pretence of a rosy future for the mismatched pair.
In both Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, virtually all the marriages appear to be forced upon one party or another, and the pattern of celestial peace seems infinitely remote. The sourness at the end of these famously uncomfortable plays—often labeled “problem comedies”—is not the result of carelessness; it seems to be the expression of a deep skepticism about the long-term prospects for happiness in marriage, even though the plays continue to insist upon marriage as the only legitimate and satisfactory resolution to human desire.
There are two significant exceptions to Shakespeare’s unwillingness or inability to imagine a married couple in a relationship of sustained intimacy, but they are unnervingly strange: Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet and the Macbeths. These marriages are powerful, in their distinct ways, but they are also upsetting, even terrifying, in their glimpses of genuine intimacy. The villainous Claudius, fraudulent in almost everything he utters, speaks with oddly convincing tenderness about his feelings for his wife: “She’s so conjunctive to my life and soul,” he tells Laertes, “That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, / I could not but by her” (4.7.14–16). And Gertrude, for her part, seems equally devoted. Not only does she ratify Claudius’s attempt to adopt Hamlet as his own son—“Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,” she chides him after he has staged the play-within-the-play to catch his uncle’s conscience (3.4.9)—but, more telling still, she heroically defends her husband at the risk of her own life, when Laertes storms the palace. Bent on avenging the murdered Polonius, Laertes is out for blood, and Shakespeare here provided, as he often did at crucial moments, an indication within the text of how he wanted the scene staged. Gertrude apparently throws herself between her husband and the would-be avenger; indeed, she must physically restrain the enraged Laertes, since Claudius twice says, “Let him go, Gertrude.” To Laertes’ demand, “Where is my father?” Claudius forthrightly answers, “Dead,” whereupon Gertrude immediately adds, “But not by him” (4.5.119, 123–25).
In a play heavily freighted with commentary, those four simple words have received little attention. Gertrude is directing the murderous Laertes’ rage away from her husband and toward someone else: Polonius’s actual murderer, Prince Hamlet. She is not directly contriving to have her beloved son killed, but her overmastering impulse is to save her husband. This does not mean that she is a co-conspirator—the play never settles the question of whether she knew that Claudius murdered old Hamlet. When Claudius confesses the crime, he does not do so to his wife but speaks to himself alone, in his closet, in a failed attempt to clear his conscience in prayer.
The deep bond between Gertrude and Claudius, as Hamlet perceives to his horror and disgust, is based upon not shared secrets but an intense mutual sexual attraction. “You cannot call it love,” declares the son, sickened by the very thought of his middle-aged mother’s sexuality, “for at your age / The heyday in the blood is tame.” But he knows that the heyday in Gertrude’s blood is not tame, and his imagination dwells on the image of his mother and uncle “In the rank sweat of an
enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love.” The dirty-minded obsession with the greasy or semen-stained (“enseamèd”) sheets calls up a hallucinatory vision of his father—or is it an actual haunting?—that provides a momentary distraction. Yet as soon as the ghost vanishes, the son is at it again, pleading with his mother to “Refrain tonight” (3.4.67–68, 82–83, 152).
If spousal intimacy in Hamlet is vaguely nauseating, in Macbeth it is terrifying. Here, almost uniquely in Shakespeare, husband and wife speak to each other playfully, as if they were a genuine couple. “Dearest chuck,” Macbeth affectionately calls his wife, as he withholds from her an account of what he has been doing—as it happens, arranging the murder of his friend Banquo—so that she can better applaud the deed when it is done. When they host a dinner party that goes horribly awry, the loyal wife tries to cover for her husband: “Sit, worthy friends,” she tells the guests, startled when Macbeth starts screaming at the apparition, which he alone sees, of the murdered Banquo sitting in his chair.
My lord is often thus,
And hath been from his youth. Pray you, keep seat.
The fit is momentary. Upon a thought
He will again be well.
(3.4.52–55)
Then, under her breath, she tries to make him get a grip on himself: “Are you a man?” (3.4.57).
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 14