Shakespeare’s Love

Shakespeare’s Love is definitely not your modern romantic-comedy version of love. There is no real courtship for most of the couples and “lust at first sight” fits the bill much more accurately than “love.” This love more faithfully follows the “courtly love” conception of love; although it is not not always men falling in love with women from a distance here: Shakespeare allows women equal part in love. For instance, when Olivia meets Cesario she feels an instant attraction and quickly labels it love, without much knowledge of him. Olivia does, however, have some reason to believe she is in love with Cesario when he wins her over with his enactment of how he would woo her were he trying to. Still, the fact that Olivia cannot tell her “true love” apart from his twin and marries him does not convince me that this is true love. I feel that Shakespeare forces us to suspend our disbelief in thinking that this is possible if the share a lasting love. I do see that this scenario works well to exaggerate the comic quality of the play. Similarly, Orsino has little personal knowledge of Olivia other than that she is nearby beautiful wealthy countess, and yet he claims to be deeply in love with her. My notion of love does not line up with Orsino’s for Olivia and I think Shakespeare agrees with me here as he emphasizes that Orsino’s love is a bit superficial and exaggerated. I also found it odd that a budding relationship between Orsino and Viola was not really evident before he realized that she was a she and not a he, except for the hint that Orsino trusted Cesario without reservation in very little time. When he realizes that he is a she, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that there is nothing to do but get married. Was this really because of some misguided concept of love? I thought it may be because according to custom, it would ruin her reputation if it was found that they had been alone unchaperoned for a seriously significant amount of time. Again this “love” does not strike me as a type of love that could endure under today’s much more specific definition. The play makes me wonder if we ask too much of love today. After all, it is old news that birth rates are declining rapidly in Europe because potential parents are getting married older because they are looking for their respective “true loves.” People today are becoming pickier; we want to know everything about a person before we get married to him or her, not after. There is less willingness to stick it out if the going gets tough, unlike in Shakespeare’s time when divorce was a pretty strict no-no unless dire circumstances were at play. To understand Shakespeare’s notion of love, we have to put his plays into a Renaissance context and not view them with our 21st century contacts on. His love would have gone over much better with his original audience. We are critics of a piece which represents a different way of life altogether, so we are biased in thinking that the way we live now is the “right” way. (537)