When the circumcised are criticized and analyzed, how is the cast rated in this play?

Whether The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play is a question endlessly debated. Given the fact that Shakespeare most certainly never met a Jew would seem to render the issue moot, inasmuch as his Shylock necessarily, then, becomes a caricature (albeit a complex one) of any societal bogeyman – a convenient foil with whom to contrast (and, uncomfortably, compare) us. For sure, Shakespeare utilizes stereotypical aspects of what was thought to be Jewish: money-lending, parsimony, tribalism, ethnocentrism, etc., but clearly the main thrust of the play is not to muster contempt for Jews. Instead, his intent is to uncover facets of our own cultural and philosophical thinking that rarely are exposed or pondered. In this play, Shakespeare acutely explores the attitudes, prejudices, fears, and fascination with what it means to be foreign.

Shakespeare made sure we didn’t miss the point: there are a lot of foreigners in The Merchant of Venice. Indeed, when we are first introduced to Portia, she and Nerissa are enumerating (and denigrating) the foreign suitors who have traveled to Belmont to woo Portia: a Neopolitan prince, the County Palatine, a French lord, a young Englishman, a Scottish lord, a German duke, and a Morrocan prince.

But it is anatomical foreignness – the difference between the circumcised and uncircumcised – between Venetian Jew and Christian – that Shakespeare cleverly plays upon and then expands into allusions of castration. The vague nature of Antonio’s bond creates the first hint of such:

SHYLOCK:
Go with me to a notary, seal me there
Your single bond, and (in a merry sport)
If you repay me not on such a day
In such a place, such sum or sums as are
Express’d in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken
In what part of your body pleaseth me. [I, iii, 143-150]

The fact that Shylock is forcibly converted to Christianity at the end of the play compels us to assume that such mandated conversion was a kind of eye-for-an-eye Shakespearean consequence for Shylock contemplating cutting the genitals of Antonio in fulfilment of the bond. Note that this ritualized cutting of the genitals of the "gentle" gentile would have resulted in a kind of symbolic, perverse circumcision that, in turn, would have forcibly rendered Antonio, at least physically, to be "converted" into the Jewish world of male genital mutilation. This allusion is in no way attenuated when Portia, disguised as the judge Balthazar, reads the bond:

PORTIA:
Why this bond is forfeit,
And lawfully by this the Jew may claim
A pound of flesh, to be cut off
Nearest the merchant’s heart... [IV, i, 228-231]

Shylock seems to be momentarily surprised by the reading – as if it was not how he remembered the bargain:

SHYLOCK:
Ay, his breast,
So says the bond, doth it not noble judge?
"Nearest his heart," those are the very words. [IV, i, 250-252]

Clearly there is a joke here. Shakespeare knew that to continue the scene with any decorum, he would have to divert the focus of the bond from the genitals to the breast. The reference in the lines above to the flesh that is "nearest the merchant’s heart" can of course refer to the breast, but it can also idiomatically refer to that package of muscle and tissue that is "nearest" (and dearest) to the heart of any red-blooded male.

But these are by no means the only references to castration in the play. Antonio’s apparent homosexuality and the anguish of his unrequited affection for Bassanio provide still another symbol of sexual emasculation. Indeed, at the trial scene, Antonio resignedly declares:

I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death... [IV, i, 114-115]

A "tainted wether" was a castrated ram, a good candidate to be sacrificed for a meal since it could no longer provide breeding services to increase the flock. (The Christian Eucharistic allusion to the celibate Lamb that is to be killed and eaten resonates here too.) Antonio’s self-reference to a kind of de-sexed sheep subtly evokes a homophone with Antonio’s destroyed ships. This is not the first time that Shakespeare played with the sheep/ship pun. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Boyet and the ladies exchange indecent quips that begin with a woman referred to as a ship that could be boarded, and then quickly evolves into a woman’s body metaphorically serving as open pasture upon which Boyet, as a sheep, can graze:

MARIA:
That last is Berowne, the merry mad-cap lord:
Not a word with him but a jest.

BOYET:
And every jest a word.

PRINCESS:
It was well done of you to take him at his word.

BOYET:
I was as willing to grapple as he was to board.

KATHERINE:
Two hot sheeps, marry!

BOYET:
And wherefore not ships?
No sheep, sweet lamb, unless we feed on your lips.

KATHERINE:
You sheep, and I pasture: shall that finish the jest?

BOYET:
So you grant pasture for me.

KATHERINE:
Not so, gentle beast:
My lips are no common, though several they be. [II, i, 214-222]

(To fully appreciate the ribaldry here, we must remember that when Katherine refers to "common" she is referring to uncut, "common" [or "waste"] ground that was not enclosed and open to everyone’s use. Cf., Measure For Measure, [II, ii, 169-171] where Angelo’s "Having waste ground enough,/Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary/And pitch our evils there?" puns on "waist" ground as an allusion to prostitution.)

Antonio is not expressly linked to the reference to a ship in The Merchant of Venice, but the allusion to sexual waste and impotency that is caused by a whore’s [strumpet's] venereal disease and tied to the metaphor is plainly meant to connect him with his lost ships and with his emasculation:

How like a younger or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay –
Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return
With over-weather’d ribs and ragged sails –
Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strumpet wind! [II, vi, 14-19]

The echo of "wether" in "over-weather’d" in the penultimate line neatly ties the sheep/ship nexus to Antonio.

But in typical Shakespearean irony, Antonio is not the only one whose "family jewels" – in the literal and figurative sense – are the subject of a symbolic chopping block. Indeed, Shylock makes the unintended connection between the two in expressing his distress that his daughter has run off with her gentile lover and – worst of all – with his riches:

My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice, the law, my ducats, and my daughter!
A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,
Of double ducats, stol’n from me by my daughter!
And jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones,
Stol’n by my daughter! Justice! – find the girl,
She hath the stones upon her and the ducats. [II, viii, 15-22]

What with "stones" being Elizabethan slang for testicles, coupled with the reference to bags wrenched from his possession, it is small wonder that mischievous boys found it irresistible not to tease him about the sexual innuendo:

SALERIO:
Why all the boys in Venice follow him,
Crying his stones, his daughter, and his ducats. [II, viii, 23-24]

And still others in this play are – at least symbolically – bereft of their manhood. It cannot escape any reader of The Merchant of Venice that Portia is vastly more mature than the gold-digging profligate, Bassanio, whom she marries, and for that matter, is decidedly more mature than any other male in the drama. Disguised as Balthazar at the trial scene, she assumes two traditionally "masculine" roles, a scholar ("doctor") and a judge – roles that supply and supplant the masculinity wanting in the men around her. Knowing that among the several meanings of the word "accomplish" was the notion of "completing with an external appurtenance," Shakespeare has Portia and Nerissa metaphorically don what they, as women, do not anatomically own: penises.

PORTIA:
Come on Nerissa, I have work in hand
That you yet know not of; we’ll see our husbands
Before they think of us!

NERISSA:
Shall they see us?

PORTIA:
They shall Nerissa: but in such habit,
That they shall think we are accomplished
With that we lack. [III, iv, 57-62]

This shortly thereafter permits Shakespeare to give us a clue as to how best to read this often-troubling "comedy," inasmuch as to "turn," not only meant to "turn or convert into," but in its obscene sense, meant to "sexually accommodate":

NERISSA:
Why, shall we turn men?

PORTIA:
Fie! What a question’s that.
If thou wert near a lewd interpreter! [III, iv, 78-80]

Not only was he here tweaking the nose of the censor of his day (the dour Edmund Tilney, Queen Elizabeth’s Master of Revels), but Shakespeare was clearly inviting us to play the lewd interpreter in this play. To do so leads to a greater cognizance of the genitalia themes in the work. For example, the indentured boy, Launcelot, too, acquires – by puberty – what he previously "lacked," as is subtly portrayed by Shakespeare when Launcelot’s aging father, visiting him for the first time in a while, (and blinded by blowing sand), fails to recognize him. Phallic symbols serve as a prelude to the old man’s recognition:

GOBBO:
Marry God forbid! the boy was the very staff of
my age, my very prop.

LAUNCELOT: [aside]
Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel-post,
a staff, or a prop? Do you know me father? [II, ii, 63-66]

When Gobbo recognizes his son, he notes the changes that puberty has wrought:

GOBBO:
I’ll be sworn thou be Launcelot, thou art mine own flesh and blood:
Lord worshipp’d might he be, what a beard hast thou
got! Thou hast got more hair on thy chin, than Dobbin
my fill-horse has on his tail.

LAUNCELOT:
It should seem then that Dobbin’s tail grows backward. [II, ii, 87-92]

This exchange thematically takes on more significance when we learn that a "fill-horse" is a "shaft-horse" (that ventured into mine shafts) and that the word "penis" etymologically comes from the Latin for "tail." Thus, just as Portia's and Nerissa’s assumption of male disguise and authority fills the masculine vacuum left by the immature men in Venice, so Launcelot’s puberty supplants the waning masculinity, generationally and anatomically, of his aging father.

But the most sublime reference to castration is in the last scene of the play when Portia and Nerissa pretend to discover that their new husbands have given away (unwittingly to Portia and Nerissa, disguised as Balthazar and her young "male" clerk, respectively) the rings that each man vowed by marital fidelity that he would never relinquish. This last scene is adumbrated by the earlier betrothal (and ring-giving) scene where the procreative purpose of an erect phallus is jocularly alluded to when Gratiano immediately announces his engagement to Nerissa following the betrothal of Portia and Bassanio:

PORTIA:
Is this true, Nerissa?

NERISSA:
Madam it is, so you stand pleas’d withal.

BASSANIO:
And do you Gratiano mean good faith?

GRATIANO:
Yes – faith my lord.

BASSANIO:
Our feast shall be much honoured in your marriage.

GRATIANO:
We’ll play with them for the first boy for a thousand ducats.

NERISSA:
What! And stake down?

GRATIANO:
No, we shall ne’er win at that sport and stake down. [III, ii, 208-216]

The proposal of the wager – as to who will produce the first male offspring, (i.e., "play with them for the first boy") -- with the making of the bet ("stake down") – dissolves into a crude phallic joke when it is noted that one cannot produce a baby with the "stake" in the down position. This earlier sexually-charged badinage carries over into the last scene when the ladies pretend to be incensed upon discovery of the relinquished rings. Nerissa is the first to display her contrived disgust, and in response her new husband protests:

GRATIANO: [to Nerissa]
By yonder moon I swear you do me wrong,
In faith I gave it to the judge’s clerk, –
Would he were gelt that I had it for my part,
Since you do take it (love) so much at heart. [V, i, 142-145]

"Gelt" here is the past participle of "geld" – to castrate. The irony of Gratiano’s words is manifestly evident inasmuch as the clerk (Nerissa in disguise) to whom he had given the ring is, as a woman, gelt (as it were) by nature, and when Gratiano wishes he had "it for my part," he says more than he intends, inasmuch as the "it," as penis, is indeed his "part," (not only anatomically but as a role in the mating rite of the marriage). Note, too, that when he says that Nerissa takes it "so much at heart" he is echoing the words of the bond – "nearest the heart" – that earlier played on the phallic significance of the phrase. The sublimity (and erotic perversity) deepens when we recognize that "ring" was an Elizabethan term for a vagina, so that when Portia taunts Bassanio about the relinquished ring (that she now secretly possesses) and about the "doctor" to whom Bassanio gave it, she tells him:

Let not that doctor e’er come near my house –
Since he hath got the jewel that I loved,
And that which you did swear to keep for me,
I will become as liberal as you,
I’ll not deny him any thing I have,
No, not my body, nor my husband’s bed:
Know him I shall, I am well sure of it.
Lie not a night from home. Watch me like Argus, –
If you do not, if I be left alone,
Now by mine honour (which is yet mine own),
I’ll have that doctor for my bedfellow [V, i, 222-233]

With the interplay (and sexual significance) of "ring," "jewel," and "thing" (as sexual organ), Portia describes to us -- the audience who knows that she was the doctor in disguise -- a fantasy of hermaphroditic onanism. A husband then – in the fantasy – becomes unnecessary, and brings the emasculation theme full circle. It comes as no surprise, then, that Shakespeare – again emphasizing the "ring" as vagina – ends the play with a caveat to husbands to satisfy their wives, even if it hurts. He has Gratiano declare:

Well, while I live, I’ll fear no other thing
So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring. [V, i, 306-307]

Is "What's in a name" what sin a name is?

Names have always figured in the mystery of Shakespeare. We know that he at times intentionally imbedded names of living persons into his fictional works. For example, the name of Richard Field, his boyhood (though older) schoolmate from Stratford who later became the careful London publisher of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, emerges momentarily (albeit in French) in Cymbeline in a kind of name-dropping cameo when Imogen (disguised as a male youth, Fidele) is interrogated by her Roman captors:

LUCIUS: ‘Lack good youth!
Thou mov’st no less with thy complaining than
Thy master bleeding: say his name, good friend.

IMOGEN: Richard du Champ. [IV, ii, 374-377]

Shakespeare also used the names of dead people, too, though sometimes with annoying – and sometimes with excruciating – results. As to the former, there are the well-known problems suffered by Shakespeare resulting from initially christening the bibulous character in King Henry IV, Part 1 as John Oldcastle that resulted in threats of litigation and in opprobrium from Oldcastle’s descendants for defaming the dead. As is often noted, the renaming of the character as Falstaff did not completely obliterate the previous offending reference:

FALSTAFF:
By the Lord thou say’st true, lad; and is not
my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?

PRINCE:
As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle... [I, ii, 39-41]

As to the the excruciating use of names, we need only refer to the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, at the age of eleven in 1596, that was soon followed by the emergence of his literary cognate, the painfully enigmatic Hamlet.

But Shakespeare’s propensity to appropriate and embed names in his works has resulted in speculative sightings that may or may not actually have been intended. (Only the often inscrutable Shakespeare knew for sure.) A line in Sonnet 76, "That every word doth almost tell my name," according to the Oxfordian theorists, refers to Edward DeVere inasmuch as "every word" anagrammatically provides enough letters to phonetically sound such name. Then there is the line in Sonnet 145, "‘I hate’ from hate away she threw," where "hate away" is said to likely refer to the author’s spouse, (Anne) Hathaway. Still further, some scholars suggest that the name of Malvolio, the Puritan prude in Twelfth Night, does not derive from a notion of resentful animosity ("mal" [bad] + "volio" [will]), but instead is an oblique caricature of Sir William Knolleys, Controller of the Queen’s Household under Elizabeth, who publicly lusted after Elizabeth’s maid of honor, Mary ("Mall") Fitton. "Malvolio," it is said, satirically translates into "volio Mall" ("I want Mall"). And then there is this passage from Henry IV, Part 1 where the conspirator Worcester advises Hotspur:

Peace, cousin, say no more.
And now I will unclasp a secret book,
And to your quick-conceiving discontents
I’ll read you matter deep and dangerous,
As full of peril and adventurous spirit
As to o’er-walk a current roaring loud
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear. [I, iii, 185-191]

It is hard to imagine the author writing the last line, with its reference to an "unsteadfast footing of a spear," without realizing that he is describing a "shaky-spear."

Names, and the manner in which names can enrich our perspective of a drama's character, were important to Shakespeare. As evidence of Shakespeare's enduring interest in such, one need look no further than Juliet's famous lament in his Romeo and Juliet:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet... [II, ii, 43-44]

Clearly, despite Juliet's wishful thinking to the contrary, Romeo's name was everything in the internecine hatred roiling in Verona.

Moreover, so as to emphasize the often-important link between the word we use to identify a character on the one hand, and our mental conception of that character on the other, Shakespeare frequently assigned a name to fortify an individual's particular (and, sometimes, peculiar) traits. Again, Romeo and Juliet is a case in point: Mercutio shows a mercurial temper; Benvolio [ben[e] ("good") + volio ("will")] begins the play as a would-be peacemaker [I, i, 67]; and Tybalt derives from the Middle English "tib" or "tyb" for "cat" to account for his tomcat-like, street-wise ferocity, (see, [II, iv, 20; III, i, 76; and III, i, 74] where Mercutio refers to him as "Prince of Cats," "King of Cats," and "rat-catcher" and describes the lethal wound inflicted by Tybalt as "a scratch" [III, i, 94, 102]).

But Shakespeare was never content to utilize only one aspect of a literary device, and so it is with the use of names. Consistent with his genius, he also experimented with the converse of such device by tapping into the inherent power of anonymity. Throughout his career, he ventured into the deep and unlit reaches of realms where there were no names, and mined the enormous reservoir of pent-up energy stored there.

A ready example can be discerned in Henry V. In this play, Shakespeare foregrounds a crushing reference to anonymity when he has King Henry exhorting his outnumbered troops to fight by trumpeting the camaraderie of soldiers in the much-celebrated Saint Crispin speech:

From this day to the ending of the world
But we in it shall be remembered,
We, few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother, be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition. [IV, iii, 58-63]

We note that the last place we would expect anonymity is within a family setting -- i.e., among a "band of brothers." (After all, one aspect of a family -- as a tribe, race, or nation -- is the members' shared descent from, affiliation with, or assumption of, a common name, not to mention the expected familiarity of the members with one another.) Thus, victorious Henry reveals a great deal when he tallies the light losses in the immediate aftermath of the battle:

Where is the number of our English dead?
Edward the Duke of York; the Earl of Suffolk;
Sir Richard Keighley; Davy Gam, esquire;
None else of name... [IV, viii, 101-104]

So much for "gentl[ing the] condition" of those "ne'er so vile." The "band of brothers" has splintered into named nobility on one side, and the anonymous common soldiers on the other. The hypocrisy of Henry's pre-battle familiarity is measured by the grim poignancy of consequences for the nameless commoners who "'died at such a place,' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left." [IV, i, 135-139] Shakespeare devastatingly undermines the brassy, martial jingoism voiced by the notable minority in Henry V with the silenced reality of destitution suffered indiscriminately by and among the anonymous majority. In this ostensibly proudful, patriotic play, heroic imperialism -- Shakespeare tells us ever so subtly -- is shamelessly erected on the forgotten husks of souls unknown.

In similar fashion, Shakespeare exposes the perverse egoism of hyper-inflated heroism in Coriolanus. The play examines an aristocratic warrior's visceral inability to relate to, and cooperate with, those classes of people considered inferior. Early on, the protagonist, Caius Martius, is renamed for a conquered city, Corioles, by his commanding general (Cominius) as a tribute to his heroic exploits in the battle for the city:

COMINIUS:
...Therefore be it known,
As to us, to all the world, that Caius Martius
Wears this war's garland: in token of the which,
My noble steed, known to the camp, I give him,
With all his trim belonging; and from this time,
For what he did before Corioles, call him,
With all th' applause and clamour of the host,
Martius Caius Cololianus!
Bear th' addition nobly ever!

ALL: Martius Caius Coriolanus! [I, ix, 58-66]

Immediately thereafter, Shakespeare has the newly-named Coriolanus request a reprieve for one of the citizens, now a condemned prisoner, who has been forcibly taken:

CORIOLANUS:
I sometime lay here in Corioles,
At a poor man's house: he us'd me kindly.
He cried to me. I saw him prisoner.
But then Aufidius was within my view,
And wrath o'erwhelm'd my pity. I request you
To give my poor host freedom.

COMINIUS:
Oh well begg'd!
Were he the butcher of my son, he should
Be free as is the wind. Deliver him, Titus.

LARTIUS: Martius, his name?

CORIOLANUS: By Jupiter, forgot! [I, ix, 80-87]

The fate of the "poor man" -- like the memory of his name -- is relegated to oblivion, all due to the ever-bloating solipsism of the hero. Swallowed whole into the maw of anonymity, a kind man's acts go not only unrequited, but are shamelessly slighted by the person (saved by such kindness) whose name has become renown. Thus, Shakespeare again uses names -- and the lack of them -- to compel us to further ponder the lethal, over-looked wake left by martial ambition.

We see, then, Shakespeare’s recognition of the potency of anonymity. This recognition, however, was only the beginning. His appreciation for the contrasting effect of anonymity resulted in a masterful exploitation of his audience’s instinct to search for definitiveness in the face of undistinguished identity. The opacity of motives exhibited by, and oftentimes torturing, his dramatic characters in his mature works is evidence of his conscious effort to explore the outer reaches of such power. As an example, Hamlet immediately comes to mind, but we see it, too, in Macbeth where we again see Shakespeare use anonymity to bring out the latent chiaroscuro dimming the brightness of expanding power. Macbeth's murderous, ever-widening ambition, fatefully fuelled by the Weird Sisters, is checked by his realization that both its source and culmination are unidentifiable:

MACBETH:
How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!
What is't you do?

ALL: A deed without a name. [IV, i, 48-49]

The indescribable and ineffable evil conjured by the ever-anonymous Sisters conceptually plunges us into the same muddy, unmapped morass where the ingredients of the witches' brew are found. Their brew, unapologetically, includes a body part from an unnamed victim of society's fortuitous cruelty:

Finger of birth-strangled babe,
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab. [ IV, i, 30-32]

Anonymity in Shakespeare can also show the limits of power – even god-like power. In The Tempest, the deformed and brutish Caliban, (whose name is a kind of anagram of "cannibal"), remarks how the powerful magus Prospero tried to civilize him and taught him "how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night." [I, ii, 336-338] This teaching seems part of the uninvited and subsequently resented encroachment of Prospero and Miranda into Caliban’s primitive world, (e.g., Caliban protests "This island’s mine" [I, ii, 333]). The naming of the sun and moon seems, too, to diminish the primordial and unlimited mystery of those majestic planets. Such diminishment contrasts with the beautiful and magical aspects of the island that have not yet been named by the intruders but are hauntingly described in child-like fashion by Caliban:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after a long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d
I cried to dream again. [III, ii, 137-145]

Yet, the Sonnets represent Shakespeare’s most astonishing achievement in anonymity. Not only are the Sonnets unfathomably intricate, but they are also extraordinarily intimate. This intimacy leaves the reader compulsively searching for even a hint at the identity – or at least the outline of identity – of the persons described therein. Who was the Young Man, the Rival Poet, or the Dark Lady? Even the notion of whether the Narrator is to be identified with Shakespeare must be questioned. But Shakespeare – with virtuosic mastery – gives absolutely nothing away as to identity, while still giving everything up as to intimacy. The effect, then, is the purest distillation and preservation of the aesthetic as art can offer. Even an abbreviated glance at the most familiar of the 154 Sonnets, Sonnet 18, shows how Shakespeare stripped away the specificity of human identity to lay bare what remains:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
*****
*****
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The significance of "temperate" as "moderate " gives way to its etymological source from "temper" and "temp" to evoke the concept of Time. Thus, the Young Man who is as lovely as a summer’s day will – with season’s change – decay. The "eternal lines" evince the eventual creases of age that will appear on his youthful face, but foremost refer to the eternal written lines of the Sonnet. Thus, the striking, unforgettable beauty of the Young Man who is the subject of the poem, along with any hope to identify him, is lost (and forgotten) amidst the perpetual beauty of the Sonnet itself. Shakespeare mocks the significance of human identity with the last phrase "this gives life to thee" when "thee" is dead and unknown, while the Sonnet will be perpetually recited and read "so long as men can breath or eyes can see." It is as if Shakespeare realized that words can never truly capture the essence of a person, but -- still -- that words are the only lasting things that can approach such endeavor. Perhaps that is the sin a name is – derived from the profound essence of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden – where the first couple was promised by Satan to "be like God," who in Genesis 1:4-5 – like Prospero’s naming of "the bigger light and ...the less" – called "the light Day and the darkness Night." Again, naming those things that comprise the human experience – as with naming a human being – does not capture such, but if we take the time to search for identity throughout Shakespeare's works, we begin to understand that, indeed, every word almost says his name.

Shakespeare does not put asunder when he puts us under a magnifying glass.

Shakespeare’s preoccupation with all things marital leads us, inevitably, to ponder why he placed such emphasis on the hymeneal state. From a purely biographical perspective, we might be surprised that Shakespeare would return again and again to marriage themes, given the murkiness – by most accounts – of his own marital relationship, e.g., the significant age difference between Shakespeare (18) and his bride, Anne Hathaway (26); the truncated reading of the banns prior to his wedding; the arrival of baby Susanna a mere six months following the nuptials; the pursuit of a career (sans the presence of his spouse) in London, (a formidable distance from his "home" in Stratford); and – murkier still – the ambivalent bequest in his Last Will and Testament of the "second best bed" to Anne.

Shakespeare’s marital fidelity was certainly suspect. If Richard Burbage can be believed, as related in the contemporary diary entry of John Manningham, Shakespeare was not above enjoying the bodily treasures of courtesans during his protracted stays in London. Moreover, there is the unsubstantiated – but (barely) plausible – rumor that a minor poet/playwright, Sir William Davenant, was the Bard’s illegitimate son.

Perhaps it was an ever-lingering sting of conscience, or an evolving wistfulness to eventually retire into domesticity, or a concern for the future of the respective marriages of his surviving children, that drove him to repeat a marital theme. Whatever the impetus, Shakespeare’s works persistently demonstrate a concentrated focus on the institution of marriage and on its participants, its characteristics, its implications, and, above all, its importance.

For example, Shakespeare’s most celebrated play – Hamlet – is replete with references to marital relationships. From a broad view, we see Hamlet tormented by the "o’er hasty marriage" [III. ii. 57] of his mother and uncle, (with allusions to the biblical proscription against the perceived incestuousness of a union between a widow and her husband’s brother); the hollow protestations of constancy by the prospective widow in the prologue of the play-within-the play, contrasting with an unnamed actor’s earlier rendition of the aged Hecuba’s anguish when witnessing the slaughter of her husband, Priam, by the rage of Pyrrhus; the aborted pre-marital courtship between Hamlet and Ophelia (who, according to Gertrude, "shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife" [V. ii. 243]).

And from a closer view, we glimpse oblique references to the marriage ceremony. In the midst of the salacious repartee between Hamlet and Ophelia during the Mousetrap scene, we hear multifaceted allusions to wedding vows:

OPHELIA: You are keen, my lord, you are keen.
HAMLET: It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.
OPHELIA: Still better, and worse.
HAMLET: So you mis-take your husbands. [III, ii, 250-253]

Hamlet’s punning reference here to the wedding ceremony’s "taking" of a spouse, for better or worse, as a "mis-take" should make us wince when remembering again that marital murkiness of Shakespeare's biographical background.

Perhaps, too, there is some punning allusion to marriage in the infamous "Get thee to a nunnery" line in Hamlet. [III, i, 121] Frequently noted by exegetes is the Elizabethan ambivalence of the term "nunnery," referring to a cloistered sanctuary for religious sisters of the church on the one hand, and to a brothel on the other. But the possible allusion to marriage in the term has been overlooked. A clue to this allusion might be discerned in the later exchange between the supposedly delusional Hamlet and his throne-usurping uncle, King Claudius, where Hamlet seems to mistake his step-father for his mother following the murder of Polonius by Hamlet:

KING: Hamlet, this deed, for thine especial safety –
Which we do tender, as we dearly grieve
For that which thou hast done – must send thee hence
With fiery quickness. Therefore prepare thyself.
The bark is ready, and the wind at help,
Th’ associates tend, and everything is bent
For England.
HAMLET: For England?
KING: Ay, Hamlet.
HAMLET: Good.
KING: So is it, if thou knew’st our purposes.
HAMLET: I see a cherub that sees them. But come, for England. Farewell, dear mother.
KING: Thy loving father, Hamlet.
HAMLET: My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; so my mother. Come for England. [IV, iii, 40-55]

The "oneness" of the flesh of man and wife in marriage alluded to by Hamlet here expressly harkens to the biblical account in Genesis 2:21-24. And when Hamlet refers to "oneness" in marriage, then we can faintly hear the full significance of the contrasting "none-ery" in his earlier break with Ophelia in the nunnery scene, where their anticipated "oneness" is reduced to "none" by the rupture of their relationship. Indeed, to buttress this allusion, Hamlet shortly follows the nunnery line with the conditional, "If thou dost marry..." [III, ii, 136] (This allusion, too, to "none" in "nunnery" dovetails neatly into the obscene "nothing" in Hamlet’s banter with Ophelia immediately prior to the play-within-the-play.)

We see this theme of "oneness" in marriage, also, in King Lear in Cordelia’s criticisms of her sisters’ vacuous declarations of adoration for their father, when marital "oneness" is divided into two:

CORDELIA:

...Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters
To love my father all. [I, i, 99-104]

Shakespeare sublimely has Cordelia suggesting that she will halve her affections between her father and her husband, while she inquires why her sisters have husbands, all attenuating the oneness that anticipates a stable marriage relationship.

We see this oneness confounded, too, in Sonnet 42 when Shakespeare (or, at least, the narrator of the Sonnets) must deal with the triad created with the Young Man, the Dark Lady, and the Narrator:

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
****
****
But here’s the joy: my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone.

The "alone" in the last line can mean not only "singularly," but can also be read "all one" on the one hand, or refer to that other "oneness"– utter loneliness. The concept resounds in Sonnet 144 in the famous "Two loves I have," when we can again hear the pun of "Two loves I halve."

Shakespeare’s earlier metaphysical forays into the unitary relationships between lovers (whether spousal or not) give way to sociological observations of such in his As You Like It. The play is riddled with coupling and decoupling and then coupling anew, culminating in an exquisite encomium of marriage as the ultimate societal union. The importance of marriage – essential to orderly mating – is underscored by a reference to Noah’s ark when Touchstone and Audrey come traipsing into the congregational final scene of the play. Jaques says of them:

There is sure another flood toward, and these
couples are coming to the ark. Here comes a pair of very
strange beasts, which in all tongues are called fools. [V. iv. 35-37]

The ever-earthy Touchstone informs everyone the purpose of his arrival:

...I press in here, sir, amongst the rest of the country copulatives, to swear and to forswear, according as marriage binds and blood breaks. [V. iv. 54-56]

We cannot read As You Like It without appreciating Touchstone’s uncanny wisdom. But perhaps it is easy to miss his distillation of the play’s theme here when he refers to the manner that "marriage binds and blood breaks." The Elizabethan idiom "blood breaks" refers to the outbreak of lust. Touchstone’s lines here seem ostensibly in character, given his horny disposition and his persistent references to the ardor of sexual desire. But the phrase can hold a deeper sense in the context of the matchmaking of the drama.

As You Like It opens with a fraternal fracture -- another kind of blood breaking -- as the brothers Orlando and Oliver resort to physical aggression toward one another, and the violent divisions don’t stop there. We quickly learn that other brothers, Duke Senior and Duke Frederick, have crossed swords – with Duke Frederick usurping the elder Duke’s authority and banishing him from courtly dominions to the wildness of the Forest of Arden. Other seemingly unnatural breaks are also on display at the beginning of the play: youthful Oliver shows disdain and repudiates elderly Adam; the Wrestler Charles breaks the ribs of an old man’s son; Duke Frederick breaks from propriety in scorning Orlando as the wrestling victor over Charles (because he disliked Orlando’s deceased father); Rosalind is suddenly, along with a flimsy justification, banished by her uncle Duke Frederick.

The uncomfortable unnaturalness of these breaks is clearly intended to contrast with other unusual unions that deepen as a consequence. With respect to Rosalind and Celia, it is said that "never two ladies loved as they do." [I. i. 108-109] Celia describes their relationship in terms that hint at something more than mere adolescent friendship:

...We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together,
And whereso’er we went, like Juno’s swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable. [I. iii. 70-73]

More discomfiting is Celia’s admonishment of Rosalind, invoking St. Mark’s biblical description of the oneness and inseparability reserved to marriage:

...Rosalind lacks then the love
Which teacheth thee that thou and I am one.
Shall we be sunder’d? [I. iii. 93-95]

Arden Forest is not the only unknown wilderness into which Rosalind ventures. Shakespeare underscores – nay, trumpets – Rosalind’s sojourn into the realm of homo-erotica. Her assumption of the pseudonym "Gannymede," along with her disguise as a man, facilitates her escape to Arden and her excursion into a realm where she is free to express her views and her psychical independence, so as to eventually come to grips with her sociological and sexual dependence upon her selected male partner. In classical myth, Gannymede was the name of a fair youth who was so becoming that Jove, the king of the gods, conscripted him as his cupbearer. The name was also slang for a young male who sold his body to an older man. The profound irony with which Rosalind assumes the name, the gender, and the valence that such an identity embodies, presents an ever-widening chasm of instability that her coupling with Orlando neatly fills with the institutional cement of marriage and its foundational consummation. As a disguised man named Gannymede, then, Rosalind plays at (though never commits to) both sides of same-sex experimentation. The intercession of Hymen, the god of marriage, at the conclusion of the play keys the overarching message of the play: that, despite the centrifugal force of other relationships or influences, the centripetal relationship and influence of heterosexual marriage is imperative and paramount.

But note, too, that in Shakespeare's day the word hymen was also associated with the vaginal membrane (as it more commonly is today than as a reference to the god of marriage). Thus, Touchstone's "according as marriage binds and blood breaks" takes on additional significance. "Blood breaks" becomes not only a reference to the wanton lustfulness that can rupture a marital relationship, but alternately can allude to the Old Testament rite of proving a bride's virginity by displaying the blood from her ruptured hymen to the elders of a city. Deuteronomy 22:13-19. Uncannily, Shakespeare evokes such a ritual, but in reverse (just as Rosalind, disguised as a man, reverses the ordinary heterosexual relationships that beg for development in Arden Forest). Oliver -- Orlando's elder brother -- delivers a bloody napkin to Rosalind/Gannymede, as an emblem of Orlando's loyalty: but for his injurious encounter with a "lioness, with udders all drawn dry" [IV, iii, 114], Orlando would have made the pre-arranged liaison with Rosalind/Gannymede. Tellingly, the bloody handkerchief demonstrates not only his fealty, but also exposes, exquisitely, Rosalind's feminine essence (inasmuch as she is unable to control her faintheartedness at the sight of her lover's blood). This off-stage scenario ritualistically and archetypically provides the catalyst to bring the lovers together, and -- in their wake -- to compel the other couples into matrimonial union. And thus, as Touchstone intones the notion that "according as marriage binds and blood breaks," the blood breaking becomes less about indiscreet lustfulness, and more about the ceremonious coupling of "copulatives" that becomes necessary so as to underscore that -- as the Song at the end of this play declares -- "'Tis Hymen peoples every town." [V, iv, 141].

The Day the Muses Eyed. (“...and they were singing: Bye, bye, men at Philippi...”)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – clinical in presenting the art of persuasion – is renown for its straightforward, heavily monosyllabic rhetoric, and thus, the sublimity of the play is often overlooked. For example, this sublimity can be discerned in Shakespeare’s reference to the shocking cultural practice at the Lupercal race that opens the play. In preparation to begin the race, Marc Antony, standing nude before Caesar and Caesar’s wife, Calphurnia, is reminded by Caesar:

To touch Calphurnia, for our elders say,
The barren, touched in this holy chase,
Shake off their sterile curse. [I. ii. 7-9]

This early allusion to superstition is one of many references that thematically pit the role of uncontrollable fortune against the notion of willfully "fashioning" one’s fate. And much later, immediately after the conspirators have assassinated Caesar, Marc Antony (after fleeing home in the aftermath of the murder) sends a servant back to seek a promise of safe passage in order to conduct a conference with the perpetrators at the Capitol.
Brutus replies:

Tell him, so please him come unto this place,
He shall be satisfied; and, by my honour,
Depart untouch’d. [III. i. 140-142]

Thus, ironically, the superstitions of the elders alluded to by Caesar before the Lupercal race prove true: the rebirth of the republic that was to be precipitated by snuffing out Caesar turns out stillborn, all because Antony is "untouch’d." (Still more subtlety can be seen here in the earlier reference to the "holy chase" and the subsequent holey result, ("Witness the hole you made in Caesar’s heart" [IV. iii. 31], all occurring on a day that is arguably a holiday, that – to keep with parturition, too - should be a "labouring day." [I. i. 2, 4].)

Shakespeare carries this verbal sublimity to a philosophical domain by letting us peer into the workings of Brutus’ mind. Cassius, laying the seed of conspiracy, inquires:

CASSIUS: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
BRUTUS: No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things. [I. ii. 50-52]

Thus, on the eve of the Ides of March we overhear an analysis of how one’s Self is eyed. The profundity of introspection is mocked by a Shakespearean pun:

BRUTUS: ....I turn trouble of my countenance
Merely upon myself. [I. ii. 37-38]

Shortly thereafter, Cassius responds:

CASSIUS: And it is much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
That you might see your shadow. [I. ii. 56-58]

Cassius says even more here, too, than we might first observe: "eye" for "I" while "shadow" can signify an image casting a deepening immanence, or "actor," or "ghost" – all of which figures profoundly into the philosophical substance of the play. (For example, "shadow" signifying "ghost" in the line "That you might see your shadow" later manifests itself when Brutus does in fact see a ghost that identifies itself as "Thy evil side, Brutus" [IV. iii. 281].) Moreover, the whole notion of "shadow" as "actor" in the same line, "That you might see your shadow," is replayed in back-to-the-future format, as it were, in prophetic self-reflection as Cassius predicts that the present occurrences will be re-staged countless times in different tongues in centuries to come:

CASSIUS: ...How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn, and accents yet unknown! [III. i. 111-113]

Note, too, that in a play that plays on the concept of being "eyed," Shakespeare toys with whirling contrasts in perspective: e.g., Cassius here – along with the soothsayer – is able to "look" into the future, while Brutus is compelled to see the past, as the image of his murdered mentor, Caesar’s ghost, haunts him; elsewhere Flavius describes the need to clip Caesar’s metaphorical feathers to prevent a threatening bird’s-eye view over his minions, ("Who else would soar above the view/and keep us all in servile fearfulness" [I. i. 75-76]), while Brutus’ vantage – in the end – is driven lower than dirt: ("Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes:/Our enemies have beat us to the pit" [V. v. 21-22]). As another example, to underscore the vagaries of perspective, Shakespeare at the end of the play depicts Cassius standing at a foot of a hill and fatally relying on the eyes of Pindarus to assess the success of battle by relating the mistaken notion that their comrade Titinius is surrounded and taken. Cassius commits suicide before it is disclosed that Titinius was being congratulated by compatriots, rather than captured by enemy troops.

But it is with Brutus that the philosophical import of perspective becomes most pronounced, again linked inextricably to references to "eyes." Cassius lobbies Brutus by telling him:

CASSIUS: ...I have heard
Where many of the best respect in Rome
(Except immortal Caesar), speaking of Brutus,
And groaning underneath this age’s yoke,
Have wish’d the noble Brutus had his eyes. [I. ii. 57-61]

Here, "his eyes" does double duty, since the phrase could refer to Brutus’ eyes and a wish that he might cure himself from the blindness that does not permit him to "see" the threatening tyranny of Caesar. But "his eyes" here can also refer to Caesar’s eyes and a wish that Brutus assume the ruling mantle (and perspective) of Caesar. This allusion to transplantation of Caesar’s organs culminates in the symbolic melding of Caesar into Brutus, exemplified again when plebeians shout their early support for Brutus at the funeral of Caesar:

3 PLEBEIAN: Let him be Caesar.
4 PLEBEIAN: Caesar’s better parts
Shall be crown’d in Brutus. [III. ii. 51-52]

Little wonder, what with the predictable infusion of "Caesar’s better parts," that Brutus suffers from psychomachia – a battle within his soul. (This infusion is furthered by Plutarchean gossip – undoubtedly known by Shakespeare – that Brutus was the bastard son [and now the bloody heir] of Caesar.) Again it is the eyes that key the self-struggle of Brutus, since he declares in words that describe the source of not only Caesar’s ghost, but of his own bloated and vulnerable position as Caesar’s doppelganger:

BRUTUS: I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition. [IV. iii. 275-276]

The monstrous apparition of Brutus’ soul is thoroughly inspected through Brutus’ habitual self-doubting, a characteristic that endears him – as a kind of precursor to Hamlet – to modern audiences used to the notion that the concept of Certainty in matters of motives is always teetering on a sandy foundation. But we modern readers lose the sublimity of Shakespeare’s treatment of perspectives in this play when we buy into the begrudging declamation of Antony at the end of Julius Caesar:

ANTONY: This was the noblest Roman of them all. [V. v. 68]

We can discern from earlier passages that Antony, ever the slick rhetorician, merely seeks to sound the bell of high drama, rather than speak with sincerity. After all, he had previously declared Caesar the noblest in all of Rome, noting that the conspirators had shed "the most noble blood of all this world" [III. i. 156]. He addresses Caesar’s corpse by referring to it as "the ruins of the noblest man/That ever lived in the tide of times" [III. i. 256-257] Shakespeare gives a knowing nod to differing perspectives and the fickleness of the masses when they declare neither Caesar nor Brutus the noblest. Instead they declare that "There’s not a nobler man in Rome than Antony" [III. ii. 117].

And Shakespeare was probably ingeniously playing his inevitable word games again when he had Antony designate Brutus as the noblest Roman of them all. We must remember that earlier one of the plebeians, momentarily manipulated by the speech of Brutus, says of Caesar: "We are blest that Rome is rid of him" [III. ii. 71] Thus, given Antony’s suspect sincerity in anything, he may well have been saying – ever so subtly – that Brutus was the "no blest Roman of them all."

Mamma Mia! Keeping abreast with Shakespeare

Mamillius, the little boy of Leontes and Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, abruptly and prematurely dies. His death is a seeming result of his father’s hubristic defiance of the Oracle’s exculpation of Hermione, the loyal wife whom the jealousy-maddened Leontes accused of adultery. The servant who delivers the news says:

SERVANT: O sir, I shall be hated to report it!
The prince your son, with mere conceit and fear
Of the queen’s speed, is gone. [III. ii. 41-43]

Poetically, we can readily discern the rhymes "son/gone," "mere/fear," and "conceit/ speed," as well as the long "e" assonance in "mere/conceit/fear/queen/speed." But there is something more at work here than the homophonic sounds and words (and even more than the ever-plurisignificant immanence) characterizing Shakespeare’s workings. The very concept of "Mamillius" is at play – not only in the drama of The Winter’s Tale – but as an elemental symbol throughout Shakespeare’s works. Little "Mamillius," derived from the Latin, mamillia, for "nipple," – vulnerable in his pre-pubescence – cannot sustain the moral and familial desiccation brought on by the jealousy of his father, Leontes. The boy’s demise was adumbrated by Leontes’ vicious snipe at Hermione: "I am glad you did not nurse him" [II. i. 56]. Deprived of an emotionally nurturing affection between and from his parents, Mamillius, like a sagging teat, "straight declin’d, droop’d" and simply withered away. [II. iii. 14]

Female breasts provide a wide range of symbols in Shakespeare’s works. The Duchess of York in King Richard III disowns her nefarious son, Richard, and disclaims that he is the product of her milk: "Yet from my dugs he drew not this deceit," [II. ii. 30] lending credence to the notion of Richard’s bestiality – seemingly a creature of canine origin ("carnal cur"[IV. iv. 56]) that – like an alpha-male – "Preys on the issue of his mother’s body" [IV. iv. 57]: a veritable "hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death." [IV. iv. 48]

In King Henry VI, Part 2, the banished Suffolk invokes a nipple to extend and explicate his sexual passion and angst for Queen Margaret:

SUFFOLK: If I depart from thee, I cannot live;
And in thy sight to die, what were it else
But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?
Here could I breathe my soul into the air,
As mild and gentle as the cradle babe
Dying with mother’s dug between his lips... [III. ii. 387-392]

The imagery here, "to die...in thy lap," in Elizabethan terms, strongly suggests orgasm. When coupled with an allusion to a nipple between the lips of a moribund baby, the orgasmic reference hurls shards of a psycho-sexual prism: the dug in the mouth evokes a penis in a vagina; the nursing allusion signals a reversion by Suffolk to the dependent helplessness of infancy (and sexual infantilism); the expiring child evinces lingering post-coital detumescence; the unnatural coupling of a dying baby and its mother mirrors the illicit coupling of Suffolk and the Queen; the "mild and gentle" ambience of a mother/child death tableaux reflects the agonizing resignation of the Queen in the face of a lover’s perpetual banishment. As in Romeo and Juliet, the eroticism of the lines draws its essence from thoughts and images of premature death and forced separation.

In contrast, Shakespeare in Cymbeline has Giacomo ingeniously employ his observation of a mole as a mini-nipple to disingenuously satisfy Posthumus that, upon a wager, Giacomo satisfied himself with the bodily treasures of Postumus’ wife:

GIACOMO: If you seek
For further satisfying, under her breast –
Worthy the pressing – lies a mole, right proud
Of that most delicate lodging. By my life,
I kissed it, and it gave me present hunger
To feed again, though full. You do remember
This stain upon her? [II. v. 133-139]

Immediately preceding these lines, Giacomo has described for Postumus the bedchamber of Immogen, Postumus’ wife. Thus, the exquisite reference to Immogen’s body/breast as the mole’s "most delicate lodging" persuasively signifies that – as with her bedroom – Giacomo has been invited into, and entered, such "lodging." The mole, protruding "right proud" as a nipple, is claimed to have been kissed by Giacomo and leads to a reference ("hunger/To feed again, though full") of sating one’s appetite and to a breast’s dual role as both sexual object and source of nurture.

But it is not only human female nipples that provide Shakespeare fodder for sensual fantasy. In As You Like It, Touchstone traipses into a thicket of nonsensical sexual metaphors when he weighs in on the subject (and objects) of love:

TOUCHSTONE: ...I remember when I was in
love I broke my sword upon a stone, and bid him take
that for coming a-night to Jane Smile, and I remember
the kissing of her batler, and the cow’s dugs that her
pretty chapped hands had milked; and I remember the
wooing of a peascod instead of her, from whom I took
two cods, and giving her them again, said with
weeping tears, "Wear these for my sake." We that are
true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal
in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly. [II. iv. 44-53]

Slang references to male genitalia abound in the passage ("sword," "stone," "peascod," "cods"), all directed toward the prostitute commonly (and descriptively) named "Jane Smile." Thus, the "pretty chapped hands" kneading a cow’s udders plainly evoke phallic implications. It is the brilliance of Shakespeare to throw this blotch of obfuscatory, obscene prose onto the canvas of As You Like It so as to brighten and deepen by contrast the evolving romantic relationship between Rosalind and Orlando. But it is not the only reference to animal teats in the play. Orlando rescues his brother from a crouching "lioness, with udders all drawn dry" [IV. iii. 114] – imagery that underscores the danger of a hungry, unsatisfied female (that plays on the supposed sexual vulnerability of men addressed thematically in the work).

In Macbeth, we see, too, the concept of breastfeeding employed by Shakespeare to portray the unnatural lust for power of Lady Macbeth:

LADY MACBETH: ...I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. [I. vii. 54-59]

The shocking brutishness of her declaration is enhanced by the ambiguity of the phrase "milks me," suggesting dairy husbandry as well as the act of nursing. (In a kind of parallel attribution, Shakespeare has Macbeth declare at the end of the play that he has become "cowed" by the revelations of MacDuff [V. viii. 18].) Lady Macbeth’s maternal perversity is furthered by her motherly dominance over her husband and by her symbolic allusions to lactation to criticize him: Macbeth, she says, "is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness" [I. v. 16].

As can be discerned from these examples (among many references throughout the plays), the extraordinary richness that Shakespeare derives from the female breast aids his artistic endeavor to flesh out our consciousness of human drama, while simultaneously fleshing out the drama of our human consciousness.

Much Ado About Nihilo: The poet’s roll in the hay becomes the poet’s role in the haze.

Shakespeare’s reflective observations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on those who practice the art and craft of poetry is oft-quoted, but – as with much of Shakespeare – deserves to be quoted again:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. [V. i. 12-17]

The initial imagery – an "eye, in a fine frenzy rolling" – evokes insanity and stupor. The twitching of the eye from earth to heaven and back again buttresses a notion of catatonia, but with just a hint that something more may be involved. Why "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven"? The prepositional phrases evince a kind of intermediary link between the gods and mortals, as if Mercury – both the messenger of the gods, and the god of thievery – was at work, stealing a bit of heaven and bestowing it upon the spirit-starved denizens of earth. But from there, the lines give way to a kind of excrescence – "forms of things unknown" are "bodie[d] forth" in a way that is reminiscent of a birth. The product – like a babe – is clothed and christened, i.e., given a "local habitation and a name." (We note, too, the coupling of the poet’s "eye" [Elizabethan slang for "vagina"] with the poet’s phallic "pen" results in the conception of the "forms of things," and does nothing to dispel this birthing imagery.)

And at first glance – given the referenced embassy between heaven and earth – the lines appear to bear witness to the metaphorical magic of poetry: a demiurgic creation – the work of a kind of intellectual demigod, conjured from a mix of celestial and terrestrial matter. Anyone but Shakespeare would have reveled in the complete and powerfully apt description of the poet and his art that this first impression imparts. But Shakespeare refused to relegate the lines (or the import and importance of poetry) to such a hybrid realm.

He knew the exposed vulnerability of the Demiurge – a subordinate deity whose creative force derives from, and influences, the material (corruptible) world. Macbeth obliquely invokes the concept early in the "floating dagger" scene in Macbeth when he inquires:

...art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? [II. i. 27-29]

A "false creation" – a product of an imperfect "god" (Man’s venal ambition) – leads inexorably to self-inflicted torture and death.

Prospero in The Tempest dabbles in a kind of enervating, demiurgic, "rough magic" [V. i. 50] that can even open graves and wake their "sleepers" [V. i. 48-49]. It is a kind of power that impels him in the end, with sad bravado, to resort to resigned renunciation (before, one suspects, his powers in the end overpower him):

...I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book. [V. i. 54-57]

In contrast, Shakespeare has Theseus in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream describe the poet’s ability to give "to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name." This is well-beyond the power of the Demiurge. Indeed, it evokes the power of an omnipotent deity to create from nothing. It is the biblical God who created the world out of nothing, in contravention of Aristotle’s declaration "Ex nihilo nihil fit," (i.e., "nothing comes from nothing"). This apothegm, figuring so prominently in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is at the heart of Shakespeare’s description of the poet’s role. Lear’s Cordelia – a name that means "heart" – embraced the essence of nothingness to expose the corruptibility (in all its senses) of the material world. (Indeed, her spiritual protege, the Fool, like an "airy nothing," simply vanishes midway into the play.) Both Cordelia and the Fool represent love without redemption, a facet to which even Christian Love cannot ascribe, and leads the play (and the audience) to the brink of nihilism. The vast difference between King Lear and Macbeth does not restrain Shakespeare from leading us to the same eschatological terminus, as Macbeth declares with shattering resignation that Life:

...is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. [V. v26-28].

Apart from its philosophical import, the word "nothing" was a loaded term to the Elizabethans. The word was brimming with sexual significance (e.g., Hamlet obscenely tells Ophelia that "nothing" ["no-thing"] lies "between maid’s legs" [III, ii. 119-121]). The numerical symbol for zero played into the word as well, with "nothing" signifying "an-0-thing" ["n-o-thing"]. Moreover, after the Globe theater opened, Shakespeare referred to his playhouse as "this wooden O" (for Globe) in the Prologue of King Henry V and begged his audience to pretend that the stage was a vast kingdom by referring to a "crooked figure" and to "ciphers," (terms that meant "zero(s)" to the Elizabethans):

O pardon, since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work. [Prologue. Chorus. 15-18]

So, when the world’s greatest Poet speaks of the role of a poet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – with Puck reminding us in the Epilogue that the play was not real, but only "a dream" – we might just be able to translate the description of poetry into a prismatic declaration: O, it’s really nothing after all.

You’ve got male! Shakespeare’s Sermon on the Mount.

Fragility of male sexuality is an overlooked theme in Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, overshadowed, as it is, behind the profoundly profane harassment of Isabella by Angelo, behind the meddling manipulation of all the personae of the play by the Duke, and behind the uncomfortably self-conscious chastity of Isabella. But make no mistake about it, the peculiar vulnerability of masculine sexual impulses are in full display in this drama, and it is clear that Shakespeare wanted us to ponder its implications.

As a ready example, consider Angelo’s imperative proposition to Isabella – conditioned on sparing her brother’s life – to "Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite" [II. iv. 160]. If this does not readily appear to uncover a masculine fault line, then we must remember that, at the time of uttering the proposition, nothing stood in the way of Angelo simply sexually accosting Isabella on the spot. She was left alone with Angelo, and his defense – in response to her protestation that she will proclaim to the world his licentiousness – would have been as effective against an accusation of assault as it would have been against her public disclosure of his illicit proposition: "Who will believe thee, Isabel?" [II. iv. 153]

But Angelo does not assault Isabella. He desperately needs first her "consent," no matter how coerced – no matter how contrived. Certainly her "consent," under the circumstances, promises to provide a romantic setting that is indued with all the warmth and affection as one would expect from one of those inflatable latex sex dolls. So why does he insist upon it? Clearly there is a sadistic power play involved, but there is also a kind of pathetic world of pretending desperately needed by Angelo. (We should not put it past the poly-liminal Shakespeare to be laughing in his hat at the notion of presenting the seeming perversity of Angelo – a character who is strangely compelled to create a pretend-world of consensual sex – while engaging us, the audience, in the pretend-world of acting and drama so as to provide such presentation.) We recognize – when we closely read – something oddly ironic about Angelo’s thought processes when he declares to Escalus that:

We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape till custom make it
Their perch, and not their terror. [II. i. 1-4]

This, from a character who has no qualms in making Isabella – by means of a counterfeit consent – an effigy upon which he may perch.

And when all is said and done, a kind of effigy is all he gets, inasmuch as Mariana, disguised by the darkened, "circummur’d" garden, acts as the surrogate for Isabella at the critical point of liaison. The "bed trick" provides an opportunity for Shakespeare to disclose still another (in)delicate facet of male concupiscence. After all, to borrow a line from Lucio, it is the rejected fiancée Mariana to whom the unwitting Angelo sightlessly and hurriedly "expresseth his full tilth and husbandry" within that garden. He only imagines that he has ravished the hyper-virginal Isabella. (It is not with a little irony that Mariana, utilizing the biblical verbiage of "knowing" for "having had sex with," declares at the trial scene that Angelo "knew me as a wife" [V. i. 229] in that darkened garden, even though he did not know with whom he was having sex.)

But how far did Shakespeare want us to go with that concept? How dark was the "circummur’d" garden? Instead of failing not only to distinguish the substituted Mariana for Isabella, could Angelo also have been fooled – if we unleash our imaginations and carry the notion to its logical extreme – by, say, a substituted and strategically-placed mince pie to receive the thrusts of "the rebellion of [his] codpiece" at the operative moment? And is the "comedy" elicited here the implicit fact that, under our imagined scenario, Angelo would not have known the difference between desideratum and dessert in sating his sexual drive? The idealized, but indiscriminate and (in reality) anonymous sex that excites the highly-placed Angelo is clearly meant by Shakespeare to be only a stone’s toss from the same kind of brief, fantasy-laden transactions that one would expect by the low-born customers in the brothels of Vienna. It’s as if Shakespeare was noting that, in many instances, male sexual drive in its most spontaneous sense is less about character and class, than about perceived opportunity.

Along with indiscriminate proclivities and self-delusional fantasies of consent, masculine sexuality in Measure For Measure also touches upon irresponsible parentage by sexually active men. Claudio, condemned for impregnating his fiancée, at no time laments the fatherless future that his "mutual entertainment"with Julietta will mean for his child. In fact, when his randy friend Lucio inquires whether Julietta is "With child, perhaps?" Claudio immediately replies, "Unhappily, even so." [I. iii.151, 153] Lucio shows himself no better in assuming a paternal role when he confides to the Duke that he, too, has fathered a child – with the prostitute, Kate Keep-down.– and adds, "but I was fain to forswear it; they would else have married me to the rotten medlar." [IV. iii.170-171], referring to the medlar fruit that was familiarly known by the Elizabethans to uncannily resemble female genitals. The degree to which Lucio has abandoned his duties as a father is tellingly and poignantly illustrated by the whorehouse madame, Mistress Overdone, who seeks to avoid a whipping by impugning her lubricious accuser and showing that she acted as a surrogate parent in his stead:

My lord, this is one Lucio’s
Information against me, Mistress Kate Keep-down
was with child by him in the Duke’s Time, he promised
Her marriage. His child is a year and a quarter old
come Philip and Jacob. I have kept it myself; and see
how he goes about to abuse me. [III. ii.192-197]

It should be noted here, parenthetically, that Lucio’s paternal shortcomings may give glimpse to an obscure and indirect pun by Shakespeare when he has the Duke and Provost discuss the proof of guilt against the accused (but hilariously alcoholic) murderer, Barnardine:

DUKE: It is now apparent?
PROVOST: Most manifest, and not denied by himself. [IV. ii. 138-139]

Thus, Barnardine does not deny his guilt is apparent, while Lucio denies his guilt as a parent.

In any event, other quirks of male sexual perception stand out in Measure For Measure. The compulsion by men to value female sexuality as a commodity runs steadily though the play. Prostitutes freely sell their corporeal wares, despite the rampant spread of venereal diseases that give rein to nervous jokes among the men of Vienna. And on another social plane, female sexuality (by way of marriageability) is tied inextricably to the value of a dowry – so much so, that the absence of a dowry results in the death sentence for Claudio for fornicating with Julietta prior to formal marriage rites. He was waiting, he says as his excuse, "for propagation of a dower/Remaining in the coffer of her friends" [I. ii. 147-148]. Additionally, we learn that Angelo earlier had rejected Mariana – according to the Duke – solely for the reason that her dowry had been lost at sea along with Mariana’s brother. [III. i. 212-222] Thus, Isabella speaks more generally than she intends when she admonishes her brother that when it comes to sex, the "sin’s not accidental, but a trade" [III. i. 147] – that is, a kind of commodity exchange, (or as can be said, a kind of "measure for measure" barter), in the eyes of men.

We see, too, that sex is discerned ambivalently by the conflicted males in Measure For Measure: on the one hand Claudio refers to it as a poison which "Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,/A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die" [I. iii. 129-130]; while the pimp Pompey admits that "Indeed it does stink in some sort" [III. ii. 27], but unless the government "mean to geld and spay all the youth" [II. i. 226-227], "they will to’t then" [II. ii. 229-230], because – as Lucio observes – "it is impossible to extirp it quite...till eating and drinking be put down" [III. ii. 98-99].

We must note also, as has often been observed, that the title to this play – a play undoubtedly focused on a myriad of uncomfortable questions of social and moral equivalence, commensurability, and justice – finds an easy fit with its source: Matthew 7:1-2. The title’s reference is, of course, to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again," i.e., measure for measure. And yet, we cannot put it past Shakespeare to be winking at us again. We must recall that in an earlier play, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare gave us our first glimpse of Romeo "underneath the grove of sycamore/That westward rooteth from this city side" [I. i.121-122]. The reference to the sycamore ["sick" + "amour"] was clearly to underscore the love-sickness plaguing Romeo (who, at that part in the play, was deeply pining for Rosaline, not Juliet). It has been suggested elsewhere, in the same vein, that Shakespeare – keeping in mind the significance of the term "mounting" (in its sexual sense), and the term "ague" meaning "illness" or "fever" – specifically coined the surname "Montague" for Romeo to again emphasize Romeo’s seemingly incurable love pangs: ["Montague" = "mo[u]nt" + "ague"]. Thus, given the recurrent observations regarding male sexuality by Shakespeare in Measure For Measure, we are compelled to speculate that the title was a way for Shakespeare to whisper laughingly to us that this play was, indeed, his "sermon on the mount."

Gilt Guilt in a Scottish Lilt and Kilt

Many a commentator has noted the ruthless iciness of Lady Macbeth's indirect pun when she proposes to rearrange the crime scene after Duncan's murder by wiping blood on the faces of the sotted, sleeping grooms in Duncan's chamber:

LADY MACBETH:

I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt. [II. ii. 55-56]

The "gilt/guilt" aspects of the line (used to much lesser effect years earlier in King Henry IV, Part 2, [IV. v. 128] and Kind Henry V, [II. Chorus. 26]) lend an ingenious immediacy to the brazen arrogance and amorality of Lady Macbeth's character. Her gambit here was hinted at earlier when she lobbied her husband with perverse rhetorical inquiries:

LADY MACBETH:

What cannot you and I perform upon
Th' unguarded Duncan? what not put upon
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt
Of our great quell? [I. vii. 70-73]

And while these lines represent the only two instances in the play where the word "guilt" is used, the concept of guilt permeates the work. The structure of the play is a kind of diptych, representing the commission and then the aftermath of dark, unspeakable crimes, (hinged, of course, by the incomparable "Porter scene"). The aftermath is not more esoterically described than by Macbeth himself:

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' th' olden time,
Ere humane statute purg'd the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murthers have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the time has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now, they rise again,
With twenty mortal murthers on their crowns,
And push us from our stools. This is more strange
Than such a murther is. [III. iv. 74-82]

"...i' th' olden time"? Is this a reference to some primordial era when men could murder with impunity and without remorse? The lines seem to describe a cusp between a time of conscience-less ("Ere humane statute purg'd the gentle weal") and conscience (where the consequence of violence rebounds to haunt the perpetrator). The "olden time" invokes some half-forgotten wasteland of time where the survival of the misfit-est reigned. By repetition of both the word "ere" (meaning "before") and homophones thereof, Shakespeare emphasizes, ever so subtly, in the first five-and-a-half lines, that the reference is to an ineluctably by-gone era --terminating decidedly in "an end":

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' th' olden time,
Ere humane statute purg'd the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murthers have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the time has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end;

This, hard followed by "but now...," relegates Macbeth's thinking to a savage nostalgia of some dusty, half-remembered past. Macbeth earlier shows an impulse to somehow parlay the concept of Time, to "jump the life to come" [I. vii. 7], that imbues his on-going unsuccessful attempt to obviate the onset of conscience, culminating in his lament that "Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits" [IV. i. 144]. He vows that "The very firstlings of my heart shall be/The firstlings of my hand." [IV. i. 147-148], so as to try to excise the interim between intent and deed, but to no avail. While Shakespeare allows Macbeth to progressively compress the space between the intent and the deed of each new crime, the interim of each -- in the form of guilt -- seeps back and looms as an ever-present haunting in his consciousness. Shakespeare ingeniously gives word-play to the present tense of "do" and the past tense of "done" to underscore the two-sided aspects of sin. In the first half of the play we find this passage:

DUNCAN:

...More is thy due than more than all can pay.

MACBETH:

The service and the loyalty I owe,
In doing it, pays itself. Your Highness' part,
Is to receive our duties: and our duties
Are to your throne and state children and servants,
Which do but what they should, by doing everything
Safe toward your love and honour. [I. iv. 21-27]

In the second half, Lady Macbeth says to devastating and irreversible effect: "what's done is done." [III. ii. 12]

But it's never "done, when 'tis done" even if "[i]t were done quickly." [I. vii. 1, 2] Horrific manifestations of his deeds bubble up to the surface of his consciousness. He tells his wife that his mind is "full of scorpions." [III. ii. 36] He earlier wondered "if the assassination/Could trammel up the consequences" and he discovers the answer is a resounding -- literally, a re-sounding -- No! Anticipation of echoed sounds gives birth to auditory hallucinations. Prior to murdering Duncan, Macbeth prays:

...Thou sure and firm set earth,
Hear not my steps , which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my where-about... [II. i. 56-58]

In whispered stichomythic panic, he and his wife begin to doubt their hearing immediately after the murder of Duncan:

MACBETH:

I have done the deed. -- Didst thou not hear a noise?

LADY MACBETH:

I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?

MACBETH:

When?

LADY MACBETH:

Now.

MACBETH:

As I descended?

LADY MACBETH:

Ay. [II. ii. 14-18]

Then equivocal silence gives way to a bodiless voice with an unequivocal message:

MACBETH:

Methought, I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther Sleep'... [II. ii. 34-35]...
Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murther'd Sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more!' [II. ii. 40-42]

But Macbeth's conscience is not limited to merely auditory phantoms. His eyes -- which no doubt "are made the fools o' th' other senses" [II. i. 44] by the parturition of guilt -- see a floating dagger when, of course, "There's no such thing." [II. i. 47] Banquo's ghost, too, taunts him -- in Lady Macbeth's apt words -- as "the very painting of [his] fear" [III. iv. 60]. A bloody representative of MacDuff's murdered children emerges as the Second Apparition in the first Scene of Act Four to torture him with the puzzling equivocation of his fate: "none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth." [IV. i. 80-81]

Macbeth is condemned to replay the sounds and images of his crimes. Conscience has reified his fear -- like the stigma on his wife's homicidal hands -- as an indelible stamp on his wracked soul. It is an experience that is new -- not of the "olden time" -- and is "stranger than such a murther is" because Macbeth seems to lack the will -- or the understanding -- to shun it. Like the Ophite Gnostic who canonizes Judas for bearing the proleptic burden of betraying the Nazarene in order to consummate the New Covenant, we sympathize with Macbeth, despite his murderous path, because his fate is not one of choice but of compulsion. The Sisters of fate have taken him on a ride when it is clear that he would have preferred to stay at home. It is this quality that lends Macbeth its pathos; it is why we care. It is the essence of tragedy.