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Fatal Love, Courtly Love, Beauty- A Groundbreaking Discovery of Shakespeaare's Work Method?by Tue Sorensen "Like Dover Wilson before me, I have been surprised at how many passages in Shakespeare still lack satisfactory exegesis." - Harold Jenkins in his Arden HamletTwo Crafts in One Line Despite an on-going Herculean effort by academics everywhere to pluck out the heart of Shakespeare's mystery much of the work is still a conundrum. Acceptable interpretations of Shakespeare's poetry are hard to achieve because Shakespeare's lines have so many ambiguous meanings. Hamlet says in a frequently overlooked passage at 3.4.211-12, "O 'tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet." Surely the key to Shakespeare's complexity and flexibility of meaning lies in a conscious decision, and a singularly unique ability, to include multiple meanings in the very same words, lines and sequences, creating a structure of unequalled elasticity of signification. If this is so then we must not hesitate to reread and re-examine even those passages that are currently believed to be well understood. When for instance Prospero - so often identified with Shakespeare himself - says in his epilogue to The Tempest, "Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails," could this be more than a simple plea for applause? Could it be that the explanation for Shakespeare's not merely enduring but increasing popularity up through the past four centuries lies in that very swelling of his "sails" - his works - that the on-going academic effort breathes into them? Could Shakespeare mean by this line that the more knowledge you, the reader, bring to his work, the more meaningful it becomes? I am going to propose in this article that great artists use certain artistic conventions in their work which are responsible for the best works' universalism and timelessness. Shakespeare being the greatest artist of all, and having the greatest knowledge of the purpose of all art, I propose that Shakespeare's work contains the most elaborate and most sure-handed artistic conventions found in any form of art; conventions not established by any one artist but which have emerged from the collective cultural discourse and subsequently been identified by only a few keen observers. Conventions, finally, that encompass the full scope of the human condition, comment on all significant aspects of human nature, and contain the greatest fruit of the same wisdom of human self-knowledge that all religion, philosophy, art and science aspire to uncover. With the literary structures created by Shakespeare as a crucial frame of reference, I believe I have discovered the basic essence of the nature and use of these conventions. Shakespeare describes them to us in a wondrously definite way which in my view releases radical and revelatory new readings; readings that clarify both Shakespeare's work method in the crafting of his plays, and, more importantly, the messages contained therein which Shakespeare deemed so acutely imperative that he developed this work method in the first place, and turned his plays into "an armour of eternal steel" which could preserve his messages until such time as we achieved enough knowledge to swell his sails and make his project succeed. We live in the era of science, where the amount of knowledge derived from nature and produced by scientists has now been rising exponentially for at least 200 years. It is inevitable that modern science is now engaged in a process of reaching threshold after threshold that make new revolutions and paradigm shifts in all areas possible. We live now in an age of such vast knowledge that the only obvious areas that still elude us are those all-important ones of human emotion - such as love - and consciousness, including such related issues as cultural behavior - including art - and the development of history. I believe that it is these last bastions of mystery that the highest art in general, and Shakespeare's work in particular, encroaches on and informs us about. Great art is created by people who are ahead of their time. Continued scientific developments ensure that, eventually, society catches up with the progressive ideas of past thinkers. By the same token it is quite reasonable to suggest that we could be swiftly approaching an astounding break-through in our understanding of Shakespeare. The Conventions: The Three Stages In the course of enjoying Shakespeare's plays as a casual reader I found myself stricken, sometime in 1999, by an unexpected awareness of observing an emergent structure within the works. Having access to the libraries of the University of Aarhus at the time, I conducted thorough research into the plays themselves as well as much of what has been written about them, making sure that this was a hitherto undiscovered structure. There could be no doubt that it was. The identified structure takes the form of a set of artistic conventions functioning as the focal points around which to build conflict, character, plot development and dialogue. These points concern the description of the constituent elements of various emotional states and how these come into conflict with each other, develop, and eventually resolve their differences. The primary focal point is "courtly love" which is well-known to critics everywhere although it is often considered too simplistic, obsolete and inconsequential to be worth more than a passing mention in most Shakespeare analyses. A rereading of the magnificent first chapter of C. S. Lewis' The Allegory of Love (OUP, London, 1936) however, should effectively counteract our unfortunate overlooking of this important set of conventions for long enough to consider its crucially central place in Shakespeare's works (see below for examples). "Central" is courtly love's literal position in what can be described as a threefold scheme beginning with a set of conventions preceding courtly love and concluding with another set that follows closely upon it. Despite their in hindsight obvious substance, the two sets of literary conventions that in this manner frame courtly love in the course of a typified Shakespeare play have not been critically identified before except in fragments dissociated from their proper context. I have taken the liberty of giving these conventions the apt appellations "fatal love" and "beauty". The structure that can be seen emerging from Shakespeare's plays takes the form of elaborate but definite processes of development going from fatal love to courtly love, and from courtly love to beauty (see below for examples). Change is the operative word as Shakespeare chronicles the characteristics of three stages of emotional vs. rational behavior, the elements of which flow into each other in complex, fluid patterns comprised as much by deep-buried themes as by plain-sight dialogue. Shakespeare being Shakespeare he sometimes makes it very hard to spot these developments. All three stages are represented to some degree in most of the plays, but some only scarcely so and some plays focus only on one or two of them or on certain attendant aspects or subsets of them, the most important of which is the relationship between reason and emotion, generally personified as man and woman, respectively. While a woman in the plays usually symbolizes emotion, we should remember that real people, gender notwithstanding, have both rational and emotional aspects to them, and that the female personification of emotion in the plays is intended to represent the emotional part of any reader, male or female. The reason/emotion perspective, however simplistic it may seem, is crucial to the understanding of the present interpretation. Reason and Emotion: "Reason, the physician to my love" The three stages, as described below, function as the hooks to which Shakespeare's descriptions of the interaction of reason and emotion can latch on and gain meaning. Reason is our rational capacity; our consciousness, language and articulated thoughts, and it is also the broad realization that the world around us functions rationally, i.e. what we today would call by the natural laws as described by science. Emotion is our natural instincts and emotions (incl. love); i.e. the genetic human nature that, together with the environment, influences our diverse behavior. In the poetic scheme, for Shakespeare as well as for Keats, reason and emotion correspond, respectively, to "truth" and "beauty". The conflict of the human condition, according to Shakespeare and other poets, is about how we reconcile these two aspects of ourselves with each other, i.e. how we attain the realization that truth and beauty are ultimately the same. Shakespeare's very point is that these concepts are not merely the "transcendental" mumbo-jumbo of raving poets and philosophers, but can become possible to understand entirely rationally once it has been established that human reason (one of the key elements of "truth") is a form of emotion ("beauty"); that what we call our rational capacity is but a substructure of our emotional capacity. It is only our cultural outlook that makes us perceive reason and emotion as opposites, and it is this erroneous outlook that Shakespeare, other poets and art in general are attempting to influence. In terms of evolutionary biology the argument goes like this: emotions have evolved by strictly scientific laws and every emotion exists for very definite evolutionary reasons. This is an important line of inquiry which crosses over into the area of the natural sciences and can be used to bridge art and science, turning them into an alliance that jointly helps to unlock the workings of the human mind. By way of his literary conventions and symbolic representations Shakespeare shows us how to increase our awareness of the possibilities for integrating "truth" and "beauty", and reason and emotion. It is of course of paramount importance to properly define concepts like reason and emotion in order to usefully work with them. Such definitions are difficult to come by, but will emerge in the course of the analytical process; indeed, the precise definitions of reason and emotion are undoubtedly part of the overall message of Shakespeare's work. Shakespeare's work tends to start out with an original situation where reason and emotion are united. The conflict starts as these two are split up and ends as they reunite. All of Shakespeare's plot devices must be seen from this ulterior perspective. The nature of the interaction of reason and emotion is defined by each part's origin as part of the other, and their future return to that unified state. It is more complex than this, but difficult to explain briefly - elaboration will follow in subsequent articles and on my website at sorensonian.com. In any case, between the split-up and the reunification comes a pitched struggle between the two, during which they do not understand each other. They both try to control each other, which generally leads to corruption and sorrow, but can go two ways in the end: in the comedies, reason and emotion reunify in harmony and beauty is triumphant; in the tragedies, fortune or folly prevents reason and emotion from uniting in the end and beauty is never achieved. What we see in Shakespeare, then, is a progressive and successive account of the development of characters that undergo the rigors of fatal love, courtly love and beauty. As they proceed up through the three stages they ultimately reach beauty, which is the understanding that truth and beauty (/reason and emotion) are the same. Shakespeare seems to say that, before attaining the beauty stage reason does not feel its own nature deeply enough to understand its emotional origin. Thus we have, for a start, three archetypal sets of literary conventions that Shakespeare had extracted from the collective cultural subconscious (via his own reading and thinking), rationally refined into the purest form ever seen in the history of literature, and passed on as perfect structures to his audience and all posterity: Fatal love, under the rules of which reason and emotion are violently opposed; courtly love, under the rules of which reason and emotion are still considered opposites but have begun to feel attracted to each other (giving rise to romantic love); and beauty, under the rules of which reason and emotion - truth and beauty - have been completely integrated with one another. Fatal Love: "Frailty, thy name is woman!" Fatal love is the inclination that reason should forcefully oppress emotion, because at this stage reason is mortally afraid of emotion, seeing unrestrained emotion as the cause of every disaster from lack of personal control and to the downfall of civilization. Love and passion, in other words, are considered dangerous and potentially fatal. Since reason and emotion are identified with man and woman, man (reason) must therefore keep woman (emotion) on a short leash. This results in misogyny - a stage that Hamlet briefly goes through early on - and many forms of brutalization against women, as seen in Titus Andronicus and Othello. On a much larger scale, when applied to the social sciences, it also results in patriarchal social systems where the status of women is extremely low. The popular archetype of the femme fatale is a prime characteristic and defining element of the fatal love stage: love, personified as woman, is dangerous to give in to and could destroy you. The ultimate femme fatale is Helen of Troy in the Iliad - her irresistable charms being responsible for the downfall of Trojan civilization -, and literature and mythology are full of similar archetypes signalling the dangers of untempered emotion (sirens, harpies, furies, vengeful wives and sisters, man-hating amazons, etc.). Shakespeare's ultimate femme fatale is Lady Macbeth who is in such poor control that she necessarily brutalizes herself before proceeding to corrupt Macbeth, whose reason is too weak to keep his emotions subdued (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth being two sides of the same reason/emotion entity). Lady Macbeth is not a statement on women, but purely an allegory on the destructive power of emotion caught in an increasingly self-corrupting spiral. Thus, any mention of misogyny, abuse of women or perceived danger posed by women in Shakespeare's plays refer to fatal love, enabling us to identify it. In Othello, Othello and Iago represent, respectively, the reason and emotion of the fatal love mindset, Iago being the emotion that fuels Othello's rationalizations, and Desdemona actually representing women rather than emotion. Shakespeare here recounts to us the fiction of the femme fatale, i.e. the male lack of self-control projected onto innocent women: the reason some men indeed think of women as dangerous. This angle is also used to a more limited degree with Demetrius and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream and in many other places. Shakespeare apparently likes to go beyond mere literary convention and usefully proceed to comment on the gender roles and sexual politics of the real world. But only with the understanding of the three stages is this wealth of new information revealed to us. In Love's Labour's Lost the three male main characters at first forswear the company of women, before shortly thereafter plunging head-first into the conventions of courtly love. This change; this development from one stage to the next is everywhere in Shakespeare, and puts to shame all those interpretations that single out just one little piece of characterization and make premature conclusions about an entire play on that basis (some mistakenly describe Hamlet as "a misogynist play", for instance, based on Hamlet's brief moment of misogyny which he quickly leaves behind). Beyond the characteristics already mentioned, fatal love is described by Shakespeare in far more detail as he associates the obvious features with the not-so-obvious ones, so that we only need to know of a few characteristics in order for Shakespeare to draw us into a process where he demonstrates to us the greater nature of the rules of this and the other modes of love, using our newfound knowledge as the basis upon which to teach us further! This is the true brilliance of Shakespeare: once found, a simple key can be used to unlock an avalanche of previously hidden meaning within his work. Courtly Love: "his words are a very fantastical banquet" Courtly love appears at the French courts around 1100 A.D., and from then on it quickly spreads throughout the art and literature of European culture. The conventions of the courtly love mode are very well known, and to illustrate the nature of this stage I need only refer to existing definitions: chivalry, honor and all things associated with knights; romantic love in all its varieties; princes, princesses and anything courtly - not excluding the concept of "sprezzatura", the effortless grace of the ideal courtier; scorning (sometimes married) ladies or chaste mistresses worshipped by hapless, doting suitors; monogamy/faithfulness as a strict doctrine; courtesy towards women, etc. Add to this a spouting of love poetry that borders on the silly. For, as Benedick says in describing Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing: "I have known when he would have walked ten mile a-foot to see a good armour; and now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes." (2.3.7-21) Benedick is describing Claudio's development from a fatal love character - in effect, an Othello - to a courtly love character infatuated with wooing. Shakespeare refers to courtly love, then, whenever he describes some aspect of the characteristic features listed above, and that is how we can identify it and put it into its proper context. In Shakespeare the courtly lovers typically consist of a male wooer and a scorning mistress - Orsino and Olivia in Twelfth Night being very distinct examples. There are different degrees of scorn, from total - like Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet, who has "sworn that she will still live chaste" - to not at all - like Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, who idolizes Claudio as much as he does her -, with Cleopatra being just in between, enjoying the full range of the game of both giving in to her wooer and being unattainable. Antony and Cleopatra should probably be read as Shakespeare's most detailed exposition of the conventions of courtly love - conventions which he understands better than we do, and of which we should therefore allow him to teach us. In terms of reason and emotion courtly love is when reason has gained enough control of emotion to give emotion a wider berth than before; to allow emotion to unfold more freely because it is no longer uncontrollable. Because women represent emotion, this means paying more attention and giving more respect to women. As reason and emotion - and man and woman - regard each other in this freer state, they are compelled to join together (feeling ever so slightly reason and emotion's mutual kinship), but only partially. They still see each other as in many ways mutually opposed, and are open to the union of only a limited portion of each other, namely the deepest, most inscrutable and idealized concept of all: love - thus giving rise to the notion of romantic love and, indeed, the notion of the "one, true love" so prevalent in fairy tales and romantic fiction. As with fatal love, Shakespeare's immensely detailed description of courtly love tells us more than we knew about the concept before, and empowers us to glean fabulous amounts of knowledge from Shakespeare's works because the dramatist in this way provides us with the knowledge we need in order to analytically unlock the true substance of his work. The more he tells us, the more we know, and the more we know, the more he can tell us. Where this upward spiral of enlightenment about the nature of art ends is in my opinion the question Shakespeare scholarship should now tackle as its foremost task. Beauty: "The more I give, the more I have, for both are infinite." The substance of beauty - the final stage of the interaction of reason and emotion, and the stage where the two have joined (or at least begun to) - is as yet a great mystery, but Shakespeare promises to inform us about it if we follow the clues he drops in our way. That is the task he sets for us at this juncture: Identify courtly love and pay attention to the way it evolves from there as per Shakespeare's description. Orsino and Olivia, for instance, both evolve into perfect mates for that play's beauty representations, Viola and Sebastian. How? Romeo evolves from his infatuation with a courtly mistress (chaste Rosaline) to an all-conquering fascination with the full-blown beauty character of Juliet. How? If we keep a look-out for the three stages in the course of our reading, the text will elaborate. One example is, in Henry V, the meeting between Katherine and Hal. Katherine, like France, represents courtly love while Hal and England represents beauty. The entire exchange from 5.2.98 to 5.2.277 is filled with allusions to, and - on Hal's part - evasions of, the conventions of courtly love. When Katherine resists him, for instance, Hal exclaims that he will certainly not die for love if she scorns him - a reference to courtly love poetry's common claim that men die from unrequited love. He ultimately convinces her to embrace a new custom; new manners according to which love can be more freely given, just as in Romeo and Juliet's relationship. Another example is As You Like It, where Rosalind, who is of the beauty stage, teaches Orlando to woo her the way it should be done, in so doing also teaching us, the readers, about the nature of beauty. Promoting beauty often involves ridiculing courtly love (as we also see in Don Quixote), as Touchstone does when he reels off tedious rhymes in the courtly love style to show what bad poetry it is and how easy it is to come up with ("He that sweetest rose will find / Must find love's prick, and Rosalind", etc., etc.). In plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing we see complete beauty representations of both reason and emotion in the guises of Titania and Oberon and Beatrice and Benedick, who are kept apart only by a flimsy, vainglorious pride which is comparatively easily deflated, appropriately throwing the lovers into each other's arms. One of the most important complexes of new knowledge this interpretation releases is a new understanding of the rational (i.e. scientific), natural laws that govern the workings of the human mind. This is interesting because it ties in both to disciplines in modern hard science such as evolutionary biology and neurology and to the behavior and emotional state of individual human beings throughout the past and the present, providing astoundingly useful models of explanation by laying bare to popular scrutiny the full substance of those artistic ambitions that all art aspires to attain and which Shakespeare in fact achieved: the unification of truth and beauty, and of reason and emotion. The detailed explication of these principles is Shakespeare's primary gift to us: a "rationale of emotion" that provides a basic explanation of how reason and emotion work. Theory or Discovery? I very consciously use the word "discovery", rather than presenting these findings as theoretical structures that happen to have been applied to Shakespeare. At the on-set there was no theory and no application involved - the principles and observations described here (albeit with only a few of an infinite store of examples) are structures discovered as extant in Shakespeare's works; they are not preconceived notions imposed on the literature. However, the identification of these structures inside Shakespeare's work has subsequently enabled me to derive from Shakespeare a detailed (though, I hasten to add, incomplete) apparatus of literary criticism which I am proceeding to apply to other works in an effort to establish whether other great artists have relied on similar conventions. The results so far are encouraging: the three levels in Dante's Divine Comedy - hell, purgatory and paradise - almost certainly correspond to fatal love, courtly love and beauty, respectively, and I have espied the same pattern in for instance Mozart's opera The Magic Flute (Sarastro: fatal love; Tamino/Pamina: courtly love; Papageno/Papagena: beauty - "das höchste der Gefühle"). Shakespeare's contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes, joins Shakespeare in promoting beauty through an intensely ridiculing portrayal of the obsolescent conventions of courtly love as epitomized in the outmoded chivalry of Don Quixote. Then there is Goethe, Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen and many many others. A near-limitless supply of further examples can and will be added to this list. What this means is that these three sets of literary conventions are the carriers of classic literature's universal appeal and enduring popularity. And this can only be so because the three stages correspond to similar mindsets in actual human mental life. The Opening of the Cocoon Using the knowledge of the three stages - fatal love, courtly love and beauty - as a guide-line, we can coax a willing Shakespeare into revealing to us the definite meanings of previously ambiguous places in the text, eventually baring every mechanism, structural detail and specific message contained in his work. This will educate us not only about Shakespeare's work and the man himself, but also about our own, general human nature. The conclusion I draw in light of the discovery outlined above, then, is that Shakespeare's work, and the work of many other great artists in both poetry, prose, music and film, is a time capsule that, using the conventions described, preserves and promotes crucial knowledge in the guise of what some critics, using a term somewhat unfit for critical inquiry, have called "transcendental" art. The nature of such supreme art may be described more rationally as an opaque cocoon with tiny shifting spots of occasional transparency, allowing the audience only the smallest glimpses of the magnificent butterfly inside until such time as we gain the capacity to strip the cocoon of its silk trappings and put apparel on the hidden parts. With the revealing of the three stages and their mechanisms it may now have become possible to start the - no doubt long and arduous - process of unravelling the threads of Shakespeare's definite messages; possible to rationally analyze and understand the deeper nature of that for which history's greatest writer held such matchless passion. This is not a task that any one person can carry out; it is a challenge to which great academic resources must be devoted. Having seen many glimpses of it, I have no doubt that the information yielded by such analysis will be enormous and revelatory. The process of opening up Shakespeare's works in full will not be an easy task, but it will most assuredly be a delightful new challenge as well as an endlessly rewarding one. I present my initial findings in this and other articles and on my Internet website in the hope that some part of the academic community will see their relevance and significance and desire to take this course of inquiry further. "Who will believe my verse in time to come,Tue Sorensen, Copenhagen, September/October 2001 ________ Related Articles and Resources
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