In 2011 I was commissioned to contribute a piece on any aspect of Shakespeare I wanted to explore, for a book called Living with Shakespeare: Actors, Directors, and Writers on Shakespeare in Our Time. It was edited by Susannah Carson for the American publishers, Vintage. I have edited it for the purposes of this book.
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.
Sonnet 144
It has been, and probably ever will be, up for debate as to whether Shakespeare’s Sonnets are autobiographical, but Sonnet 144 gave rise to a line of thought in my own mind whilst playing many of Shakespeare’s heroines. In all but a few cases, I found myself as a character in competition with another man for the love of the hero. I decided to try and chart the variations in this triangular tension through the plays I had performed in and perhaps even get closer to Shakespeare’s own feelings.
Romeo and Juliet was the earliest of Shakespeare’s plays that I played in, by which I mean the earliest written (1593–5) rather than the first one I performed. I played the part for BBC Radio when I was thirty but could sound a convincing thirteen. However young, Juliet seems more mature throughout the play than Romeo, who is to a certain extent dragged back by the boy culture which he is part of. Mercutio and his band of friends mock him for his lovesick moping over a woman, first Rosaline, and later Juliet (Act II, Scene 4).
Alas poor Romeo! he is already dead; stabbed with a white wench’s black eye; shot through the ear with a love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft.
Romeo is seen as deserting the gang, and this theme is developed further in the later play Much Ado About Nothing, when Benedick’s soldier companions ridicule his succumbing to love and marriage with Beatrice. In both these examples there is a tinge of jealousy and a fear of losing their mate to another mysterious world that they do not understand and therefore need to despise—the world of women and marriage, which they feel necessarily leads to a betrayal of the buddy culture in which they are stuck.
Much Ado was written in 1598, at about the same time that Sonnet 144 is thought to have first been circulated amongst Shakespeare’s closest friends. When I played Beatrice at the RSC in 2002, I felt very aware of the tussle that Benedick was going through between the strong male bonding to his army mates, and his tentative gropings towards a complicated grown-up heterosexual love for Beatrice. Shakespeare deliciously plays with Benedick’s pride in his soliloquy in Act II, Scene 3, when he has just overheard that Beatrice is in love with him and has to wriggle out of his own past pledge to remain a bachelor (Act II, Scene 3):
I have railed so long against marriage: but doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.
Even at this point he does not quite admit that he could possibly love Beatrice but couches his change of heart from male love to female in the more or less honourable excuse: ‘The world must be peopled.’ Maybe this was the philosophy of Shakespeare’s day. Physical love could be homo- or heterosexual, but the latter had to be surrendered to in the end in order to keep the species going. Marriage was a biological duty or imperative, while one’s true tastes and heart might lie elsewhere.
With this thought in mind, I found a way through the almost impossible ‘Kill Claudio’ moment in Act 4, Scene 1. At the prompting of the malevolent Don John, Claudio has slandered Hero and left her at the altar. Beatrice is distraught for her friend’s sake, and when Benedick entreats, ‘Come, bid me do any thing for thee,’ she responds with the unexpectedly harsh, ‘Kill Claudio.’ For me, rather than it being simply an irrational incitement to murder, the line became a different kind of test, whose subtext was: ‘Prove to me that you are willing to cut out from your heart the strutting misogynist ethos of Claudio and your old gang.’ At the same time I had to confront the fact that Beatrice is no pacifist saint. She herself would show no mercy to Claudio: ‘O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place’, or at least this is her boast, whose main purpose is to throw down a gauntlet to Benedick challenging him to be a ‘proper’ man, to be as brave and avenging as she would be if she could.
Benedick passes his test with flying colours and without having to actually kill Claudio. All the worlds are reconciled and the villain Don John is punished in the end. Only the ambiguous figure of Don Pedro, whose love for both Benedick and Beatrice is never quite expressed, remains unresolved. Benedick thinks he has the solution: ‘Prince, thou art sad; get thee a wife, get thee a wife.’ Somehow we feel that won’t fix Don Pedro’s ‘problem’.
‘Sad’ is the word that strikes one when considering Antonio in The Merchant of Venice (1596). It is sometimes thought that Shakespeare played this eponymous role in a play where the other characters, especially Shylock, eventually eclipse the person who had started as the central figure. In fact, Antonio opens the play with ‘In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.’ Here again is a triangular relationship between an older man, a younger man and a woman.
Antonio and the heiress Portia are both in love with Bassanio. Bassanio himself is caught between his loyalty to a man who has mentored and cherished him and whom he knows fairly intimately, and a woman whom he finds beautiful and amazing (and yes, is extremely rich), who has the mystique of a distant shimmering object that he knows very little about.
The adventurer in him is what both his lovers like about him. Bassanio dares to have a go at Portia’s dead father’s test—a suitor is presented with three caskets; if he chooses the right one he wins Portia’s hand, and if he does not he must remain celibate for the rest of his life—and he chooses the right casket. Just as he and Portia are about to celebrate his success, he hears of Antonio’s plight—the merchant has lost his ships and is being held to ransom by Shylock to pay him what he owes. Without a moment’s hesitation, Bassanio rushes to Antonio’s side. Portia, hurt by this but nothing daunted, decides to disguise herself as a lawyer and defeat Shylock in court. The realisation is painful to her that it is only by saving Antonio that she will find the way to Bassanio’s heart.
After her success in the courtroom, there is a key scene between the disguised Portia and Bassanio where she tries to get him to give her the ring that he promised Portia never to remove. He manages to hold out and refuse to surrender it, and then Portia leaves, presumably well pleased that her betrothed has kept his pledge.
Seconds later Gratiano, Bassanio’s friend, runs after her with the ring. Bassanio has changed his mind. All Antonio had had to say was ‘My Lord Bassanio, let him have the ring: / Let his deservings and my love withal / Be valued against your wife’s commandment’. Portia has no words here to express it, but we must assume her hurt on realising how little it had taken to swing Bassanio’s loyalty away from his wife and back to the other man in the triangle.
In the fifth act of The Merchant the intricate knot of complex loyalties is exposed and no one escapes without a sting. Bassanio has to face his own confusion of emotions vis-à-vis his admiration for a young boy lawyer who showed exceptional skill, initiative, courage and intelligence, and to whom he is indebted for the life of his friend, and he must digest the fact that this boy was one and the same as his supposed golden wife in her gilded Belmont cage. Portia has to live with her husband’s uncertain sexuality, and Antonio has to stand by and witness and eventually bless the heterosexual bond between his beloved Bassanio and the woman who saved his life.
With Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida (both written in or around 1601) Shakespeare enters a darker, more misogynist phase. Imagine playing Cressida, reviled for her betrayal of Troilus, with no self-justifying speech to explain her actions to the audience or to posterity. It is as if Shakespeare abandons his own feisty creation like an unforgiving parent who has changed his mind about her worth.
Imagine, too, playing Ophelia, and being told that
The power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness,
or
If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go: farewell.
Remember that you are in love with the speaker (Hamlet), who has become, in most cultures of the world, the most eloquent voice of humanity’s psychological condition, and imagine being given practically nothing to say in your defence. Knowing, moreover, that ‘the noble’ Hamlet’s treatment of Gertrude is similar, you can see how one starts to wonder whose side Shakespeare is on.
In fact I have turned down the part of Gertrude more than once because she seems to me to be even more muzzled than Ophelia, who at least breaks out into a form of self-expression in her madness. Gertrude is told by her son that she is too old for sex:
You cannot call it love for at your age
The hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble
And waits upon the judgment.
With these words the child seeks to control the mother. This is a love triangle with an Oedipal slant. Hamlet wishes to kill his rival Claudius for usurping his dead father’s place not only on the throne but also in his mother’s bed. Not able to deal with his own complex emotions, he is vicious and oppressive towards both the women he loves, and in the most famous play in the world the woman’s voice is barely heard.
So it is that sometimes, while ‘inhabiting’ a Shakespearean heroine, we feel to be on the receiving end of a comment about our own sex that is distancing and alienating. Almost worse are the times when these comments are forced out of our own mouths. We are required to say, for example, as Viola:
How easy is it for the proper-false
In women’s waxen hearts to set her forms!
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we!
For such as we are made of, such we be,
or as Cressida:
and even Cleopatra chides herself for being
No more but e’en a woman.
With these self-condemnatory words, we and our characters are made to endorse a negative male attitude which is never quite disowned by Shakespeare himself.
Maybe I should give him a break here. In As You Like It (1599) the older male cynic, Jacques, is marginalised at the end and Shakespeare seems genuinely to love Rosalind. Likewise in Twelfth Night (1601) he spreads his gentle ridiculing of the madness of love even-handedly between both sexes and gives Viola the voice of insight among the self-deluded. She is the fresh breath of air in a pit of insanity. She has the audience’s ear and they are always on her side. One feels Shakespeare’s approval carrying her along.
In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare reaches a kind of apotheosis in his expression of sexual ambiguity. It is not so much a case of a love triangle as of several overlapping and contiguous love triangles. Viola is in love with Orsino and, disguised as his page Cesario, she must woo her own rival, Olivia; Olivia falls for the ‘boy’ Cesario and meanwhile Orsino, who is supposed to be in love with Olivia, must face his ambi-sexual attraction to his page. The play is often blissfully funny. It is painful and perfect.
I wasn’t thinking along those lines at the time, but the paradox is that as the disguised Viola I was acting out the young man in the triangular tussle between an older man (Orsino), a young man (Cesario), and a woman (Olivia). I even spoke lines that echo the recurrent theme of the Sonnets when Viola/Cesario chastises Olivia with
Lady, you are the cruellest she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy.
The beauty of it is that Viola uses her insight into the female condition to get close to Olivia, and it is that which draws Olivia to fall in love with her. Viola is the catalyst by which Orsino shifts from his unrequited objectifying and idolisation of Olivia to a more open-eyed mature love for Viola. That this transition has to be worked through the agency of a boy catalyst is a bittersweet solution. Having acted out a kind of man-to-man intimacy, Viola has had a privileged glimpse into the male world and knows Orsino thoroughly. Orsino looks at women with a fresh eye on learning that the boy he favoured and confided in was actually a woman. A real woman. By becoming her own rival in the guise of a young man, the woman achieves her love, and despite an unresolved twinge of pain, with Viola knowing Orsino almost too well, this marriage looks to be set fairer than most.
Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well (written around 1604) is caught up in a rivalry with Parolles for the love of Bertram. It is hard to know where Shakespeare stands on any of these characters. He makes Helena a bit of an oddball, and shows little sympathy for either of the men in the love triangle. Bertram is an arrogant, privileged young pup, while Parolles, his best friend and accomplice in deserting Helena, while enjoying the audience’s affection and laughter for much of the play, is finally shown up as a shallow swindler. With all the more revered and upright characters—the Countess, the King, Lafeu the old courtier, and even the Fool, not to mention all the characters she meets in Italy—endorsing Helena’s cause and expressing approval of her character, it would seem that Shakespeare himself was on her side.
To inhabit a character created by Shakespeare is a curious experience. To begin with, there is the inescapable fact that he never intended a woman to play the role, and, as I mentioned earlier, there is sometimes a feeling of discomfort at inhabiting the object of misogyny where presumably a boy player would have felt none.
There is one scene in All’s Well, for example, in which Parolles speaks to Helena with a disinhibited crudeness quite unlike any other I can think of outside the brothels of Measure for Measure or the Boar’s Head in Cheapside. Perhaps because Helena is not well-born herself, Parolles feels he can speak to her with an indelicacy he would not have used with a noblewoman. He tells her, for instance, that
Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese; consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach… Keep it not: you cannot choose but lose by it.
He continues:
Virginity is like one of our French withered pears, it looks ill, it eats drily; marry ’tis a withered pear. Will you anything with it?
Helena is not devoid of quips and parries to Parolles’s digs against her virginity, but to sit and listen to such lines one feels with the character: mocked, insulted and dirty. On the other hand, one can also feel in a strange way to be more equal, let in on the secrets of a club, albeit a pretty horrible one. From one of his closest associates, Helena is being educated as to the male ethos which Bertram is a part of, and it is all useful stuff to a relatively sheltered girl.
Eventually Parolles is exposed as a coward in a scene which completely opens Bertram’s eyes as to the true nature of the man he has been emulating, and from this point onwards, uncoupled from his blokeish partnership, Bertram is set free on the long (and still tricky) path to redemption and into the arms of his loving wife.
Imogen in Cymbeline (1610) falls victim to Iachimo’s desire to drive a wedge between a man and a wife, for who knows what personal reasons of his own. The name Iachimo shares its etymological root with that of Iago in Othello (1603/4), a fellow destroyer of marriage whose motives we never learn.
Neither man is indifferent to the goodness and beauty of the woman they are intent on destroying. Indeed they seem to be partly in love with them. Unlike Desdemona, Imogen survives to live with and digest the misogyny which the plot exposes in her husband’s heart. Like her, we are left with the question: How could Posthumus so easily believe the worst of his wife and decide to have her killed without ever giving her the chance to defend herself? And what motivates Iachimo? He has nothing personal against Imogen, never having met her when he forges his plan, and he barely knows Posthumus. One asks the same questions in the Othello/Iago/Desdemona triangle and to some extent in the Polixenes/Leontes/Hermione triangle in The Winter’s Tale (1611).
The answers must lie somewhere in the mutual ignorance of men and women as to the nature of the other. The physical attraction or biological compulsion towards someone one barely understands, leaves great opportunity for suspicion, and for the projection of one’s own self-hatred on to the ‘other’. The man can too easily blame the woman for his uncomfortable feeling of powerlessness.
Mutual mistrust is central to the relationship of Antony and Cleopatra, and one could say that Enobarbus makes up a third in the triangle. He is the mediator who loves Antony and is possibly in love with Cleopatra, but is in competition with her for Antony’s soul. In many ways they are mirror images of one another. Both love the powerful Antony, both witness his deterioration with sadness, one deserts him and one has a mind to.
Enobarbus is a shrewd social observer and the chronicler of his age, a satirist who often expresses the misogyny of the times and of an army man. ‘Between them [women] and a great cause, they should be esteemed “nothing”.’ But he is also a wise and broadminded man who finds Cleopatra infuriating but captivating and understands her in a way that Antony doesn’t quite.
Enobarbus is one of my favourite characters and perhaps—as Cleopatra, as an actor, and even as a woman—I find that I want his approval.
I want Shakespeare’s approval, too. Shakespeare is supposed to be invisible and undetectable within the lines of his plays, but just occasionally when you speak his lines in character, you feel you almost know the man and inevitably want to know him better.
I am trying to resist the too definitive idea that the ‘real’ Shakespeare is to be found in the Sonnets. We must allow him his shifts in attitude, his ambivalence, the changes of heart that we all experience as we grow older (‘A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age’), and so I have to lay aside my aching curiosity and accept that I can never know the man whose words I (mostly) love to speak and hear.