Shakespeare’s Leap of Faith

Abstract

Shakespeare’s attitude toward self-effacing behavior is complex and ambivalent. The code of martial and manly honor calls for the repression of “womanly” feelings; and, in a world full of personal ambition, to be direct and honest is not safe. His preoccupation with the theme of appearance versus reality derives, in large part, from his awareness that Machiavels try to manipulate self-effacing people by pretending to subscribe to their values. He is afraid also of his tendency to enter into compulsive love relationships, and he makes such relationships the subject of about a third of his plays, most of which were discussed in Chapter 7. Sometimes he satirizes such relationships, sometimes he glorifies them, and sometimes he does both. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, it is difficult to determine whether the protagonists are meant to be perceived as foolish, doting lovers or as grand, romantic figures. Through much of the play the rhetoric supports both perspectives, though, as in Antony and Cleopatra, the emphasis upon the external forces that contribute to the deaths of the lovers obscures the destructiveness of their mutual morbid dependency and makes the play seem, by the end, to be a tragedy of fate.