‘Which is worthiest love’ in The Two Gentlemen of Verona?
The question posed by this chapter’s title, and the implications and stakes of which will be teased out in what follows, draws its terms from an exchange between Julia and her waiting-woman Lucetta in 1.2 of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Afforded the privacy Julia’s garden, the conversation broaches matters of love:
julia |
But say,Lucetta, now we are alone, |
|
Wouldst thou then counsel me to fall in love? |
lucetta |
Ay, madam, so you stumble not unheedfully. |
julia |
Of all the fair resort of gentlemen |
|
That every day with parle encounter me, |
|
In thy opinion which is worthiest love? |
(1.2.1–6)1
As the scene unfolds, it comes to light that Julia already favours Proteus, one of the play’s eponymous two gentlemen, over her other suitors. Nevertheless, the sequence of questions – first, whether to love, and second, whom to choose – reveals the parameters – and hence, too, the ideological underpinnings – of the love Julia is allowed. That she paradoxically seeks ‘counsel’ on whether ‘to fall in love’, that she solicits input on which suitor ‘is worthiest’, suggests a forced choice masquerading as a spontaneous, uncontrollable act. Julia seems satisfied with her choice, and remains steadfast even as Proteus renounces his vows and gives away her ring in pursuit of Silvia. This constancy in the face of increasingly unnerving deeds of inconstancy may serve to redeem Proteus (in some circles, anyway), but the thoughts, feelings and beliefs underwriting Julia’s devotion to a dishonest, unfaithful lover and Silvia’s would-be rapist are by and large foreclosed to us, as indeed they are to Julia herself. Depriving her of the corresponding lines, the playtext quite literally denies Julia this kind of introspection, or at least prohibits her from vocalizing it. In this instance, discursive limits are demarcated by those questions left unasked, by prohibited rather than permitted speech.
If the above offers us a glimpse into the different mechanisms by which ideology circumscribes discourses of love and desire, then it likewise provides an entry point for considering ways of (not) loving that defy or exceed dominant paradigms. Julia’s query about ‘worthiest love’ can thus be more broadly construed as an inquiry into love’s conceptual field. Most immediately referring to a choice in lovers, its phrasing allows for an interrogation of love in its institutional forms. Which is worthiest: heteroerotic love or homoerotic love? Romantic love or passionate friendship? Previous scholarship has amply demonstrated that these conflicts come to the fore in Two Gentlemen, with ambivalent results. In his path-breaking analysis of the conflict, Jeffrey Masten has shown that ‘though the play consistently places male friendship and male-female love at odds …, it is important to recognize that this cannot be seen simply as a contest between eroticized male-female relations and platonic male friendship, for male friendship and Petrarchan love in this play speak a remarkably similar language’. By the end, Masten argues, we witness ‘a massive restoration of the play’s homosocial power structure, a system no longer seen to be in competition with Petrarchan love, but underwriting it’.2 Yet, other critics have interpreted the collusion of discourses as undermining, rather than ‘underwriting’, social and sexual identity: for Stephen Guy-Bray, the play’s representation of heterosexuality ‘as a prosthesis, as part of the equipment or furniture of a man’, effects a ‘stress on substitution and interchangeability … to undermine the stable and individual self’;3 for Elizabeth Rivlin, ‘the way in which Shakespeare maps master/servant relationships onto bonds of romantic love and friendship’ exemplifies a mimetic service that ‘both shows the potential of Renaissance servants to rearrange social identities and reflects on the capacity of Shakespeare’s theater to generate and dismantle such identities’.4 In different ways, then, scholarly work on the play has already begun to grapple with questions prompted by Julia’s query, albeit mostly within the confines of love’s institutional forms.
Far from disputing the hegemony of romantic love and friendship in Two Gentlemen, this chapter hopes to elucidate some ways of (not) loving that find expression despite, or rather because of, its persistence. Or to quote Masten quoting Shakespeare in Love, my aim is to uncover ‘the very truth and nature of love in this play’ by beginning to explicate attitudes and beliefs typically understood to fall outside it.5 Excavating such ideas in what J. L. Simmons has aptly called Shakespeare’s ‘coming out’ play indicates, moreover, the originary status of critiquing love’s dominion for Shakespeare’s canon.6 The playwright’s earliest and most explicit treatment of the concept, Two Gentlemen deploys the word ‘love’ (in its various permutations) more than any other Shakespeare play – a total of 210 iterations, by my count.7 If critics argue forcefully for the primacy of textuality in shaping characters’ relationships, desires and senses of self, I would add that the constitutive texts are themselves constituted by the operative lexicon of love they structure and facilitate.8 The play’s ‘love-discourse’ (2.4.125) takes many forms, including ‘love-book[s]’ (1.1.19), love ‘stor[ies]’ ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ (1.1.21, 23), ‘love[s] … writ … in rhyme’ (1.2.79), ‘love-song[s]’ (2.1.18), ‘tales of love’ (2.4.125) and, of course, ‘love letters’ (3.1.323). This diverse array of texts animates and sustains the play’s investigation of ‘love- affairs’: not only the many types (‘foolish love’ [1.2.57], ‘erring love’ [2.4.213], ‘kind love’ [2.7.2], ‘true confirmed love’ [4.4.102], ‘love sincere’ [2.7.76]: which is worthiest?), but also their source, (e.g. ‘spring of love’ [1.3.84]), substance (‘love’s hot fire’ [2.7.21]), trajectory (before- and ‘after-love’ [3.1.95]), and strength (‘instances of infinite of love’ [2.7.70]). This preoccupation with ‘love-discourse’ conveys an anxiety befitting characters making their first forays into love. As the play’s organizing principle, it invites scrutiny of love as both ideological formation and discursive practice.
Returning to Julia’s question, for instance, we might ask: How is love’s worth determined, and why must we choose or at least prefer one instantiation over another? Why do gender and rank, among a host of other considerations, qualify a suitor for one type of love but not others? Given the play’s well-documented commingling of friendship and romantic love, why must the former conform to one profile and the latter another? Why not romantic friendship, which could accommodate either profile, or both? Why must love take the form of a pair, rather than a trio or some other more fluid network? What makes love compulsory? Why do we, or must we, love at all? These sorts of questions, although seemingly taken for granted by the dramatis personae, nonetheless inform the playtext’s conceptualization of ‘love-discourse’ and ‘love-affairs’. Indeed, they obtain as logical extensions of a more basic question: what are the conditions and/or constituent parts required for an expression or social relation to fall under registers of love and thus acquire the ‘love-’ designation? Or from a different angle: what cannot be read as ‘love-affairs’ or ‘love-discourse’? What remains excluded from the contents of the ‘love-book’? From the notes and lyrics of the ‘love-song’? From the pages and enclosures of the ‘love letter’? And on what grounds, exactly? Any attempt to parse these locutions, to figure out the cultural work of the qualifier, calls for further exploration of what counts as, and indeed what constitutes, ‘love-’ in the first place. That characters neglect to pose certain kinds of questions only underscores their value in discerning the discursive limits under examination in the play.
As the emphasis on languages of love, or rather loves, would suggest, my project benefits from the insights of recent queer-philological work, particularly Jeffrey Masten’s brilliant book Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time. Especially useful is his interpretive framework for etymological analysis:
Etymology, … in its lingering tastes of the past and present, forces us to develop ever-expanding lexicons of erotic and affective terms and their relations. Not only backward-looking history, etymology as a practice looks forward to remind us that words that seem identical and familiar to modern eyes and tongues we might better see as false cognates (“false friends,” as we used to say in French class) – words that only pass as “the same” as ours, words that, when pressed, release whole new contexts while also holding within themselves the genealogical seeds of their eventual direction.9
Masten finds a salient example in the word ‘sweet’ and accompanying rhetorics of sweetness, which feature prominently in Two Gentlemen. Although primarily interested in ‘the syntax of affective male relations’, Masten notes that sweetness ‘is spoken across kinds of relationships in early modern England, including those we would now separate into homosexual and heterosexual’.10 In Two Gentlemen, therefore, we see rhetorics of sweetness applied both to friends and lovers, both in homo- and heteroerotic contexts. In the play’s opening scene, Proteus wishes ‘Sweet Valentine, adieu’ (1.1.11), to which Valentine responds in kind: ‘Sweet Proteus, … let us take our leave’ (1.1.56). The very next scene reveals Julia cherishing the ‘sweet honey’ of Proteus’s love letter (1.2.106), in which Proteus himself pines for ‘sweet Julia’ (1.2.125; emphasis in original). Both Valentine and Proteus address Silvia as ‘sweet lady’ (2.4.36; 2.4.105, 4.2.112), and on one occasion Proteus calls her ‘sweet love’ (4.2.102). Yet further instances put pressure on, if not push beyond, categories of friendship and courtship: Lance refers to Speed casually as ‘sweet youth’ (2.5.2); Turio expresses gratitude to ‘sweet Proteus, my direction-giver’ (3.2.89); and, perhaps most titillating of all, the Duke enjoins his ‘sweet gentlemen’ (i.e. Proteus, Turio and Sebastian/Julia) to follow him in pursuit of the absconded Silvia (5.2.46). This portability of affect, erotics, and desire bears out what Masten describes as the ‘historical[ ] queer[ness]’ of sweetness vis-à-vis more modern regimes of gender and sexuality.11 It indicates, moreover, that sweetness operates as both constitutive element and destabilizing force for a wide range of affective and erotic relations.
Imbrications of this rhetoric with a similarly volatile love-discourse become clearest when Proteus arrives at court in Mantua. There, Pantino tells Antonio, Proteus shall ‘[h]ear sweet discourse, converse with noblemen, / And be in eye of every exercise / Worthy his youth and nobleness of birth’ (1.3.31–3). The pertinent exchange is worth quoting at length:
valentine |
Welcome, dear Proteus. Mistress, I beseech you |
|
Confirm his welcome, with some special favour. |
silvia |
His worth is warrant for his welcome hither, |
|
If this be he you oft have wish’d to hear from. |
valentine |
Mistress, it is; sweet lady, entertain him |
|
To be my fellow-servant to your ladyship. |
silvia |
Too low a mistress for so high a servant. |
proteus |
Not so, sweet lady, but too mean a servant |
|
To have a look of such a worthy mistress. |
valentine |
Leave off discourse of disability. |
|
|
proteus |
My duty will I boast of, nothing else. |
silvia |
And duty never yet did want his meed. |
|
Servant, you are welcome to a worthless mistress. |
proteus |
I’ll die on him that says so but yourself. |
silvia |
That you are welcome? |
proteus |
That you are worthless. |
(2.4.99–115)
Interweaving languages of sweetness and courtship, this chiasmus of rhetorics establishes a discourse that accommodates a trio of lovers in Silvia, Valentine and Proteus. The interplay of key words – ‘sweet lady’, ‘mistress’, ‘servant’, ‘duty’, ‘worth’ – bandied about by all three characters in almost stichomythic fashion – suggests a scenario quite unlike the traffic in women performed at play’s end.12 As Julie Crawford observes, ‘At the end of the play the marriages serve to recreate the triangulated economy of male emulation and identification, with and through the affections of women’.13 In striking contrast to this economy, which as numerous critics have pointed out establishes itself in the face of Silvia’s conspicuous silence (after her final line, ‘O heaven!’ [5.4.59]), the erotically charged invitation to service offered Proteus on his arrival at court includes Silvia as willing participant. Before exiting with Turio, Silvia says to Proteus, ‘Once more, new servant, welcome’ (2.4.116), to which the new servant replies, ‘We’ll both attend upon your ladyship’ (2.4.120). Irrespective of what happens later in the play, at this instant, in this situation, Silvia ‘welcome[s]’ Proteus as Valentine’s ‘fellow-servant’.
I linger over this exchange for two reasons. First, it brings into view, if only momentarily, the disruptive potential inherent in the hegemonic discourse of courtly love. Employing conventional modes of address, the ‘sweet discourse’ of Antonio’s court discloses one powerful way in which words exceed their normative meanings and become appropriated for resistant (re)formulations. In other words, the exchange demonstrates that courtly language contains terms of its own displacement. Second, it reminds us that not all trios enact triangulation or trafficking, and that affective and erotic moments such as this, no matter how seemingly fleeting or inconsequential, merit consideration apart from their place in the normalizing arc of narrative. Adopting James M. Bromley’s anti-teleological hermeneutic, we can read Silvia’s momentary interest in a courtly threesome as significant in its own right, regardless of its status elsewhere in the text, for positing an alternative to romantic love’s dyadic structure.14 Moreover, we can distinguish this fantasy of consensual polyamory sharply from the traffic in women mobilized in the play’s final scene, and with Melissa E. Sanchez’s radical queer feminist framework, separate out instances of sexual violence perpetrated against female characters such as Silvia from their own pursuits of masochistic or otherwise non-normative desire.15 To disregard such distinctions and assume, for example, that Silvia’s acceptance of Proteus as Valentine’s fellow-servant cannot possibly reflect her own wishes, that indeed it can only ever signify or gesture toward subjection in the service of homosocial, homonormative bonds of male friendship, is to accede dominant culture’s proscriptions of women’s subjective desire.16
My impression that the playtext does not, or rather need not, militate against a more generous, sex-positive reading of Silvia – one, however, that does not, or rather need not, overlook or diminish instances of violation and abuse – derives at least in part from the overt and extensive critique of love’s normative ideologies evident from the play’s beginning. As Masten points out, the first iteration of ‘love’, not coincidentally Valentine’s and also the play’s opening line, ‘Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus’ (1.1.1), ‘signifies in both directions; Proteus is “chained” by affection for Julia but equally bound to his male friend, to whom he speaks in similarly affectionate language’.17 This similitude simultaneously informs and undermines the play’s early attempts to distinguish one type of love from another, as when Proteus’s ‘honour’d love’ (1.1.4) for Valentine is juxtaposed with his ‘doting love’ (1.1.43) for Julia. The latter expresses itself in ‘groans’ (1.1.29), ‘heart-sore sighs’ (1.1.30) and ‘watchful, weary, tedious nights’ (1.1.31). It overwhelms and incapacitates the lover, effecting Ovidian metamorphosis in the manner Proteus describes:
Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphos’d me:
Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,
War with good counsel, set the world at nought;
Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought.
(1.1.66–9)
This is the stuff of Petrarchanism, a discourse instantly recognizable and, as Elizabeth Williamson demonstrates, thoroughly dissected in Two Gentlemen. The process begins, Williamson suggests, as ‘the play opens with a dialogue that encourages the audience to view courtly love as something superficial, made and unmade by words’.18 Following Guy-Bray, we might also say that love’s artifice stems from its ‘mediat[ion] through textuality’, since ‘to some extent at least, … relationships we might think of as especially personal and intimate are all formed out of pre-existing material, out of texts we already know’.19 In 1.1, Valentine and Proteus emphasize the textuality of romantic love, first in their banter about the ‘love-book’ and well-known tragic tale of Hero and Leander (1.1.19–26), again when they allude to mythologies of Love/Cupid (1.1.38–41), and a third time when they invoke an aphorism comparing ‘doting love’ to ‘the eating canker’ ‘in the sweetest bud’ (1.1.43–54). This emphasis on courtly love’s textuality, on its emergence from and persistent preeminence through works of narrative, not only demythologizes a dominant and particularly potent form of love, it also lays bare the process by which other, counter-normative practices and configurations may be put into discourse. Exalted male friendship, which from the play’s opening scene speaks nearly the same language as Petrarchan love, points in a similar direction, submitting to a similar impulse, despite its supposed homonormative status. Critical re-evaluations of the play’s representation of male friendship indicate, in fact, that the early inducement to deconstruct extends to this affective relation, as well.20
While critics continue to explore what Traub calls ‘the unstable boundary between philia and eros’, much less attention has been paid to divine or spiritual love (agape) in the play.21 Yet I would argue love’s most radical potential resides in its divinely inspired form. In Two Gentlemen, the god of godly love is Love, ostensibly of the cherubic order, reputed by various characters to have wings (2.6.42, 2.7.11), childlike mannerisms and features (3.1.124–5) and ‘not an eye at all’ (2.4.95; see also 2.1.66). ‘Love’s a mighty lord’ (2.4.135), claims Valentine, who earlier in the play had informed Proteus, ‘Love is your master, for he masters you’ (1.1.39). Add in a keenness for penetrative violence, as adduced by the plight of ‘love-wounded Proteus’ (1.2.113; italics in original), and our composite sketch of Love as the love-god Cupid is complete.22 This ‘chameleon Love’ (2.1.167), to adopt Speed’s phrasing, may often preside over a certain variety of heteroerotic coupling, but exceptions to the rule abound in early modern literature and culture. ‘[T]he multiplicity that defines Cupidean desire’, writes Jane Kingsley- Smith, ‘may be heteroerotic, but is also homoerotic, pederastic, maternal and incestuous’. Defying even those iterations typically and conventionally imputed to him, ‘Cupid represents love’s blindness, in the sense of its disregard for social hierarchy, and its transience, given that he can remove affection as easily as he imposes it. Though he plays a role in epithalamic poetry and masques, Cupid shows no necessary affinity with marriage and may just as easily inspire the kind of lust that leads to rebellion, murder and suicide’.23 On the one hand, then, Cupidean divinity signifies Love’s totality, encompassing the spectrum of erotic and affective possibilities, while on the other, Love’s tyranny at the hands of a fickle, vengeful god who enforces and flouts his own phallicly constituted commands at will. Although he declines to appear in the play, the close association between Cupid and Puck would suggest the love-god is more than a mere trope or motif. He inhabits Shakespeare’s worlds – Two Gentlemen’s Verona and Milan no less than Midsummer’s Athens.24
Compounding this entanglement of eros and agape is the incarnational theology of ‘God is love’ and attendant tradition of correlating Christ with Cupid.25 Rooted in medieval mysticism and later influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy, renderings of Christ as divine archer, with ‘Ovid and the Song of Songs’ their ‘dual provenance’, constitute, in the words of Barbara Newman, ‘a superb illustration of the medieval practice of “crossover” – the intentional borrowing and adaptation of courtly themes in devotional art and vice versa’.26 Absorbing Christ into Cupid and Cupid into Christ, secular and devotional art and literature from the Middle Ages onward depict Amor variously as supreme matchmaker and ultimate beloved. Writing about seventeenth-century religious literature, Richard Rambuss remarks, ‘To speak … of the allure of devotional life, of enjoying God as one’s lover, of Christ acting as Eros or Cupid, the arrow-armed male god of love: all this is commonplace here’.27 This conjunction informs the identities of at least two characters, Valentine and ‘Sebastian’, named for martyrs iconologically linked to dieu d’Amors through their association with divine darts or arrows.28 If sacred eroticism of this texture finds particular poignancy in the Catholic devotional practices out of which it first emerged, then it would seem Two Gentlemen, which in addition to its Catholic saints is set in Italy and teeming with references to confession (4.3.44, 5.2.39), penance (1.2.64, 2.4.127, 5.2.36, 5.4.168) and pilgrimage (2.7.9, 2.7.30), as well as rosary beads (1.1.18), relics (4.3.132) and other Catholic paraphernalia, foregrounds the porous boundary between eros and agape.29 To speak of godly love, therefore, is also, ineluctably, to speak of its erotic counterpart.
Thus understood as a hybrid of types and traditions, Love in Two Gentlemen embodies and enacts an irreducible tension that percolates the play’s love-discourse. Looking back at the terms Valentine and Proteus use to describe their heteroerotic desires, we might note that Petrarchanism and Ovidian metamorphosis echo the idiom of divine passion. Valentine, like Proteus before him, acknowledges, ‘life is altered now’:
I have done penance for contemning Love,
Whose high imperious thoughts have punish’d me
With bitter fasts, with penitential groans,
With nightly tears, and daily heart-sore sighs;
…
There is no woe to his correction,
Nor, to his service, no such joy on earth.
Now, no discourse, except it be of love.
Now can I break my fast, dine, sup, and sleep
Upon the very naked name of Love.
(2.4.126–30; 136–41)
As Speed points out to Valentine, ‘[N]ow you are metamorphosed with a mistress, that when I look on you, I can hardly think you my master’ (2.1.29–31). This Petrarchan notion of love as erotic violence has much in common with Augustinian caritas, where ‘[i]nsuperable love wounds the soul’s affections, inseparable love binds the power of thought, singular love destroys the capacity for action, and insatiable love “leads to the brink of death and makes one despair of recovery”’.30 Indeed, Valentine and Proteus find themselves in a position not unlike the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Gary Kuchar points out ‘the intersections between Pauline agape and Neoplatonic Eros in Sonnet 22’, which ‘bespeak a lover immoderately and insecurely in love rather than one enjoying anything like perfect mutuality’.31 How, then, are we to distinguish erotic love from spiritual love? Thomas Hyde submits a ‘poetic theology of love’ as one way to reconcile the tension inherent in the Cupid/Christ coupling: ‘In a Christian poem, Amor or Cupid can be a partial manifestation, a figure or image of the love that is God, but only if readers never confuse or forget the hierarchical relation between the figure and fact, between the fictive world and real one’.32 For Hyde, this is a matter of distinguishing pagan god from passion, ‘in a literary tradition in which Scripture provides an ultimate example of textual truth and therefore an ultimate model of poetic authority’.33 In this analysis, discerning agape requires reading literary professions of love and desire within and against biblical tradition, the implication being that one can and should distinguish between the two, and indeed that this strategy is optimal for comprehending relations between agape and eros in sacred and secular texts.
Yet, Two Gentlemen resists efforts to prise apart erotic love (in all its polymorphous/‘chameleon’ perversity) and spiritual love, much in the same way it obfuscates clear distinctions between Protestant and Catholic forms of worship – a premise at once terrifying and potentially liberating.34 The playtext figures the inseparability of eros and agape in Blind Cupid who, as Erwin Panofsky has shown, originated in Renaissance depictions of cherubic Love.35 Cupid’s blindness presents a representational paradox: in some figurations, blindness signifies a lesser love attributable to baser, carnal cravings, while in others, a sacred form of love grounded in Renaissance Neoplatonism and transcendent of lecherous desire.36 In the same play, then, Cupid’s blindness explains seemingly erratic, ephemeral and arbitrary erotic infatuation as well as supposedly more steadfast, substantial and spiritual love. In response to Valentine’s claim to ‘have loved her [i.e. Silvia] ever since [he] saw her’ (2.1.64), Speed avers, ‘If you love her, you cannot see her’ (2.1.66). The reason: ‘Because Love is blind’ (2.1.68). Similarly, Silvia maintains that due to his devotion to Julia, Proteus ‘should be blind’ (2.4.92). In 4.4, however, Julia compares her own features to Silvia’s portrait, and opines, ‘What should it be that he [Proteus] respects in her / But I can make respective in myself, / If this fond Love were not a blinded god’ (4.4.191–3)? In the first two instances, Love’s blindness blinds the lover from all visual stimuli, including the beloved. In Julia’s case, though, Love’s blindness reflects a mutability causing Proteus to shuttle, as per his namesake, between beloveds. If Blind Cupid presides over both types of love, then to the extent that characters identify as, for example, a ‘beadsman’ (1.1.18), a ‘true-devoted pilgrim’ (2.7.9) and ‘Love’s firm votary’ (3.2.58), both types constitute godly love. Or at least it becomes virtually impossible to know which iteration of love is (not) a directive of the love-god. Hence, in consecutive scenes, Proteus and Julia implore Love’s assistance, in the form of wings, to cross-purposes: in 2.6, having committed to violating his oath to Julia, Proteus apostrophizes, ‘Love, lend me wings to make my purpose swift, / As thou has lent me wit to plot this drift’ (42–3); in 2.7, Julia plots to follow her beloved Proteus employing ‘Love’s wings to fly, / … when the flight is made to one so dear, / Of such divine perfection as Sir Proteus’ (11–13). Appeals to Blind Cupid traverse the godly and the erotic, frustrating any attempt to differentiate one from the other.
Further complicating matters is the specularity of attraction purportedly governed by a blind deity. In a song often attributed to Proteus, we find the following lines: ‘Love doth to her eyes repair / To help him of his blindness, / And, being help’d, inhabits there’ (4.2.45–7). This paean to Silvia’s beauty ascribes to it a curative quality that could heal the blindness of Blind Cupid himself. This is the same beauty, of course, that impels Proteus to request Silvia’s portrait: ‘For since the substance of your perfect self / Is else devoted, I am but a shadow; / And to your shadow will I make true love’ (4.2.120–2). Silvia, for her part, though ‘very loath to be your [Proteus’s] idol’, agrees: ‘But, since your falsehood shall become you well / To worship shadows, and adore false shapes, / Send to me in the morning, and I’ll send it’ (4.2.126–8). This language of idol worship applies, as well, to Valentine, who answers in the affirmative when asked by Proteus, ‘Was this the idol that you worship so’ (2.4.143)? During the same conversation, Valentine recounts, ‘For in revenge of my contempt of Love, / Love hath chas’d sleep from my enthralled eyes, / And made them watchers of mine own heart’s sorrow’ (2.4.132–4). Different types of love, therefore, betray a specular quality even as they abide the commands of a blind deity.
One way to understand characters’ obsession with idol worship is to argue for a shift in the play’s emphasis, from superficial to substantial love and desire. According to Maurice Hunt, ‘Shakespeare’s dramatic art prompts the conclusion that the romantic beatification of a “sainted woman” is less attractive than a more realistic, companionate love between men and women, a love courageously represented … by Julia’.37 Related to this shift is ‘a similar displacement at the end of this comedy—from a mighty god and his romantic love to an absolute deity and the more selfless love associated with the affective phases of Christian heart’s sorrow, repentance, and forgiveness’.38 However, Proteus’s reunion with Julia recalls the very terms of his apostasy. Owning his ‘faults’ and ‘all th’ sins’, Proteus declares, ‘Inconstancy falls off, ere it begins. / What is in Silvia’s face but I may spy / More fresh in Julia’s, with a constant eye’ (5.4.112–14). Here, as above, contradictions bound up in the figure of Blind Cupid reveal themselves in love’s specularity. Whether Proteus loves Julia or Silvia or someone else altogether, that manifestation of blind devotion – by which I mean, the full spectrum of devotion that simultaneously includes and confounds erotic love and spiritual love, situational intimacy and long(er)-term relationships – is initiated and sustained by the (in)constant eye. As if to remove any doubt about the endurance of this regime of love and desire, in the play’s final moments Valentine proclaims, ‘Come, Proteus, ’tis your penance but to hear the / The story of your loves discovered’ (5.4.168–9; my emphasis). Rather than elevate the discourse from erotic love to godly love, from eros to agape, Proteus’s revelations reinforce the impossibility of telling one from the other.
In collapsing distinctions between erotic and spiritual love, the playtext proffers not merely their coexistence but their interchangeability. More simply put, eros becomes, or rather always-already is, agape. As previously mentioned, this is both a terrifying and potentially liberating prospect. For Valentine, Love both authors and authorizes the polyamorous arrangement implicated in the play’s final lines – ‘[O]ur day of marriage shall be yours, / One feast, one house, one mutual happiness’ (5.4.170–1) – much as it does Silvia’s fantasy of a courtly threesome with her two fellow-servants and diverse other loves posited in the play: the tedious ‘cate-log … of condition[s]’ (3.1.272) Lance describes to Speed in 3.1; the homosocial collective of love-outlaws Valentine encounters and briefly joins in 4.1; the ‘pure chastity’ (4.3.21) of Sir Eglamour that endears him to Silvia in 4.3; and yes, even the love of Lance for his dog Crab as portrayed in 4.4. This Love allows, indeed comprises, Protestant and Catholic and pagan motifs and practices, with all the sexual connotations, whether procreative or sodomitical, they may betoken.39 In other words, Love underwrites both those erotic and affective relationships that buttress hegemonic, phallic, patriarchal culture and those that have the capacity to challenge or subvert it. So while the play may arc toward a particular kind of conventional ending, in the process it opens up myriad affective and erotic possibilities available to Shakespeare’s characters as well as his past, present and future audiences. These possibilities may not predominate or pervade the play, but they nevertheless offer a powerful critique of, and thus also function as a means to undermine, prevailing permutations of Love. In this context, as in the larger play and even Shakespeare’s corpus as a whole, the stakes of Julia’s query, to which I now return – ‘[W]hich is worthiest love?’ – could not be higher.
But I would like to suggest, by way of conclusion, a more emancipatory possibility, one not taken by the play’s so-called gentlemen nor their respective beloveds, but available even so to characters and spectators alike. In a culture where dominant ideas about love oscillate between Cupid and Christ, two male gods wielding divine darts igniting love and longing of the masculinist, phallic, penetrative order, where men such as Proteus dare to invoke the language of love when threatening to rape women such as Silvia (5.4.58), one might perpetrate the most radical resistance by simply refusing to answer Julia’s question. If the play invites us to critique love’s hegemony and the ideologies and discourses that enable it, then this critical examination extends to questions about not just how to love, but whether to love at all. If we find the play’s ending unsatisfactory, even despite critics’ attempts to justify characters’ choices along religious, political and/or cultural lines, then it seems to me that the most radical option, not to love, is perhaps the most obvious, not to mention most palatable and most queer, of all.