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Postmodern Essays on
Love, Sex, and Marriage in Shakespeare
In a chapter titled Marriage or not in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, the protagonist Rupert Birkin tells his friend Gerald Crich: "You are like Lord Bacon ... you argue like a lawyer—or like Hamlet’s to-be-not-to-be. If I were you, I would not marry ... marriage is a pis aller ...." To Lawrence, love was a "damnably difficult" relationship. To Shakespeare, loved could be "as a fever longing still", and to Amrita Pritam: "The sweet fruit on the stalk/none has the luck to taste." The three eminent poets in their personal life knew the joy and agony of married love, and much of their work polemically articulates widely divergent thoughts on love and marriage. Postmodern Essays on Love, and Marriage in Shakespeare is an eminently readable and scholarly book, with a focused and longish introduction, and 13 illuminating essays on the variety of ways in which the plays of Shakespeare negotiate issues of love, sex and marriage; it offers fresh perspectives, as Bhim S. Dahiya aptly observes. Viewed against the backdrop of social conventions, marriage-manuals, and the laws in Shakespeare’s time, some young lovers, e.g., Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Katherina in Taming of the Shrew—whose "only fault, and that’s fault enough, is that she is intolerable curst and shrewd and forward"—stand out as daring rebels against patriarchy, whom a postmodern reader would profusely empathise. Juliet in Measure for Measure, for example, appears perfectly avant-garde, in a society in which "women were often forced to assume identities contrary to their natural desire," argues JoNette LaGamba. An incisive essay by R. W. Desai, The Negation of Marriage in Romeo and Juliet, shows how Juliet in her relationship with Romeo is gently sceptical of Romeo’s profession of love, and has a mature sense of her femininity. Analysing the "psychobiological under-current" permeating the play, Desai convincingly argues that the play is not simply a tragedy of "star-crossed lovers" but an astute study in male-female relations, as it seeks delicately to balance the claims of a "love marriage" with those of an "arranged marriage". Alongside a shrewd sense of realism tempered with an under-current of social radicalism, the celebration of various forms of marriage in Shakespeare’s plays also shows a marked Catholicism in their author in regard to traditional social institutions, such as home, family, or community. In no play is there prejudice against inter-racial, inter-continental or inter- communal marriage/love, as Dahiya illustrates in his objective, lucid and persuasive analysis of The Tempest. In a substantially well-documented essay, Lisa Hopkins shows how Shakespeare’s manifold representations of marriage reflect a keen concern for the community, viewing marriage as a meaningful "community affair". In this, she owns allegiance to the view of India’s famed Shakespeare scholar Sarup Singh whom she cites: "The distinguishing feature of Sarup Singh’s plays is that even when the daughter rejects the arranged marriage, she never gives us the impression of open rebellion against the father or of violating the sacred bond that exists between parents and children." The book offers a wide spectrum of closely textual as well as theoretical scholarship. There is an interesting and studious essay by Sujatha Vijayaraghavan on ‘Shakesperearen’ marriages, approached through ‘Queer Theory’. Elegantly produced, the book will no doubt be an engaging study for any Shakespeare enthusiast, or a student of cultural sociology/psychology, or even a common reader.
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THE four-letter word
love, and another close to it, marriage, both traditionally important
domains of personal life and literature, seem to have fallen from the
high pedestal. Literary expositions of love and marriage by authors of
eminence from Shakespeare to Amrita Pritam have often tended to be
quizzical.