It is from these characters that Shakespeare’s plays take their form and come to life. … Shakespeare’s creations have a spontaneity and a mutability that may seem puzzling on the printed page but that assume a vividness on the stage. And Shakespeare knew that well, as Matus in The Atlantic observes:Īfter all, Shakespeare’s theater, unlike that of his contemporaries, is a theater of characters, a world on the stage, richly populated with humanity in all its variety. To present them as otherwise would be a failure of art. But once we bury Hero the pure, we get the true Hero back. Similarly, Othello’s obsession with his ideal of a completely pure and devoted Desdemona ends up literally suffocating her-and destroying him as well. Sweet Hero, as everyone calls her, “dies” when Claudio’s accusations and an inflexible moral code destroy her reputation of purity. The scene also hints at another truth of Shakespeare’s work: that people cannot be a single story. And it’s true for Shakespeare, the actor-turned-author whose impact upon literature is so large that people speculate endlessly about who he was and what shaped him. That’s true for Viola, who builds herself a new identity as Cesario. But it comes down to the power of story-the fact that the myths around someone’s life become as vivid and real as the true events, the fact that one’s identity is as much created as it is lived. ![]() There’s a lot that’s admittedly weird about this resolution, not least the fact that Hero is willing to take that credulous jerk Claudio back. Leonato: She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived. …ĭon Pedro: The former Hero! Hero that is dead! When the time comes, the “cousin” takes off her mask and reveals that she is Hero after all, telling Claudio:Īnd when you loved, you were my other husband. Eventually, Claudio realizes his mistake, performs a funeral rite for Hero, and guiltily agrees to marry her cousin. Hero’s family puts out the news that she has died of shame. Hero and Claudio are about to be married, but Claudio calls off the wedding when he thinks he’s seen her with another man. Pretty straightforward, right? If you’re dizzy, that’s the point: What the play drives home is that identity can shift and transform, even from moment to moment. Beneath her disguise, she loves a duke, who loves a woman, who loves Cesario, who gets confused with Sebastian, whose reappearance seemingly brings both twins back from the dead. They end up on an island, where Viola for safety disguises herself as a man, Cesario. Shipwrecked twins Viola and Sebastian are separated, each believing the other has drowned. ![]() ![]() Or take Twelfth Night, a play whose gender-bending love triangles fascinate scholars of gender and sexuality today. When we watch the mixed-up lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream trade desires for a night, we discover how our own desires shape who we are. The effects are often tragic: Hamlet mistakenly stabs Polonius from behind a curtain two-faced Iago goads Othello to murder Desdemona Romeo dies because to all appearances, Juliet looks dead.īut there are comic confusions too, and those are sometimes the most illuminating. What’s more, his plays are filled with masks and mix-ups, double agents and disguises, lookalikes and false appearances. Whoever he was, it’s safe to say that no one loved a good case of mistaken identity more than he did.Īs Megan recently wrote, Shakespeare was “an inveterate punster,” piling meaning on meaning in every phrase so that even his words have double identities. As Twelfth Night puts it, “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons! … How have you made division of yourself?”īut, well, what’s in a name? The thing is, I don’t think Shakespeare himself would have minded all this controversy. Both scholars build meticulous cases for their candidates, and both read convincingly enough to make for a puzzling problem indeed. ![]() That October issue featured a heated debate on the subject, between Matus, taking the side of Shakespeare the actor from Stratford, and Tom Bethell, taking the side of the better-read, better-traveled Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford. The best-loved and most-mythologized author in the English language is also one of the most mysterious and controversial as Irvin Matus noted in our October 1991 issue, “No fewer than fifty-eight claimants to that title have been put forward.” Today marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare-or at least, the man we think of as Shakespeare.
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