Escolme, Bridget

Escolme, Bridget. "‘Give Me Excess of it’: Love, Virtue and Excessive Pleasure in All’s Well that Ends Well and Antony and Cleopatra." Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. 111–167. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781408179703.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 23:44 UTC. Copyright © Bridget Escolme 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER THREE ‘GIVE ME EXCESS OF IT’ : LOVE, VIRTUE AND EXCESSIVE PLEASURE IN ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL AND ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA ENOBARBUS […] Octavia is of a holy, cold and still conversation. MENAS Who would not have his wife so? ENOBARBUS Not he that himself is not so; which is Mark Antony. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (2.6.122–6) When Menas suggests that every man wants his wife holy, cold and still of conversation, Enobarbus demurs, figuring Antony, and by implication Cleopatra, as worldly, hot and shifting in comparison to Caesar’s obedient and self-sacrificing sister. The ideal of womanhood in a range of early modern writings is the one Menas attributes to Octavia – but Enobarbus knows that such an ideal would not suit Antony. In Antony and Cleopatra, and in All’s Well that Ends Well, love between sexual partners is framed as an excessive passion: one which is both socially problematic and theatrically pleasurable and which undoes gendered conventions of constancy, balance and restraint. As we will see, some critical accounts of love in Shakespeare have endeavoured to separate love from lust, framing lust as a violent and troublesome passion, love as a heightened spiritual state beyond the somatic. While there is no doubt that ‘mere’ lust often figures in early modern drama as violently excessive and excessively selfish, I am going to argue that love, too, has its anxiety- and pleasure-producing excesses. Love, in the plays under discussion here, is always in danger of undoing 9781408179666_txt_print.indd 111 06/08/2013 08:56 112 Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage a version of subjectivity in which virtuous reason controls the boundless excesses of the early modern mind/body. Superficially, Helena and Cleopatra are on opposite ends of the spectrum of early modern archetypes of love and of female virtue. Compare their effects on their respective beloveds: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is the ‘triple-turn’d whore’ of legend (4.12.13) and the partner in Antony’s double adultery; she is twice the cause of his defeat in battle and her play-death leads to his actual demise. Helena sleeps only with her rightful husband; her own false death, on a pretended holy pilgrimage, serves to bring Bertram to a right understanding of her value as a wife. Helena is good for Bertram, where Cleopatra is ultimately very bad for Antony. Cleopatra’s love, the more notoriously excessive, ends in death and is matched in excess and in death by Antony’s. Excessive love for Helena is something never clearly experienced by Bertram; indeed, by the end of the play, her own excessive and, some might argue, selfish passion, could be said to have cured him of youthful excesses, just as her medical knowledge cures the King of France’s fistula. However, Helena’s love is, as we will see, figured as excessive in a number of ways that make a comparison with Cleopatra’s productive. The plays offer the excesses of love as primary sources of theatrical pleasure, while hedging the passion about with moral provisos and punishments. They explore and celebrate the excesses of love in ways that trouble some of the categories of reason and passion that are at work in the early modern period – and bring them, so to speak, into play. Both of these women act according to a love which exceeds the boundaries of ideology and reason. Love AS A PASSION First, I want to turn to the question of whether love may usefully be considered as an emotion at all. David Schalkwyk suggests that it is a reductive mistake to describe it as one of the embodied, humoral passions of classical or early modern thought – or to categorize it as a set of neurological and endocrinological 9781408179666_txt_print.indd 112 06/08/2013 08:56 ‘Give me excess of it’ 113 phenomena and responses, as Schalkwyk suggests modern science has recently attempted to do. He argues that love is not an emotion per se but ‘a form of behaviour over time’, involving a range of emotions, and suggests that humoral concepts of love are figured as both anachronistic and excessive in Shakespeare. Of Orsino and his conception of a humoral Love, whose excesses must be purged and which women are typologically incapable of feeling (Twelfth Night 1.1.1–3, 2.4.94–104), Schalkwyk writes: Embodiment of and spokesman for humoral theory, Illyria’s duke is the sign of the excessive, the anachronistic, at a remove from reality. Almost every critic of the play has observed that Orsino’s love is a fantasy. Humoral theory helps us to give a greater degree of precision to the endlessly repeated undergraduate cliché that Orsino is not in love, but rather in love with love itself. He is in love with himself as the paradigmatic embodiment of humoral psychology, and the dialogic nature of the play presents other characters who embody and enact a different concept of love.1 According to Schalkwyk’s nuanced and convincing argument, love as a gendered, somatic passion, with all the problems of excess the passions generate, is an anachronistic notion which Twelfth Night supersedes. He cites early modern treatises on the passions, pointing particularly to way in which Thomas Wright’s ‘whole register and style’ in The Passions of the Mind ‘changes abruptly’ when he turns to the subject of love.2 ‘These dry discourses of affections, without any cordial affection, have long detained & not a little distasted me’, writes Wright of the other passions he has been exploring: cordial affection seems to be of a different order. Nevertheless, Wright’s appeal to God, ‘the soul, and life of all true love’,3 at the opening of his chapter on the subject suggests that love makes him just as nervous as the other passions. ‘Now that I come out towards the borders of love’, writes Wright, in a passage cited by Schalkwyk, 9781408179666_txt_print.indd 113 06/08/2013 08:56 114 Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage give me leave, O loving God, to vent out and evaporate the effects of the heart, and see if I can incense my soul to love thee entirely…and that all those motives which stir up mine affections to love thee, may be means to inflame all their hearts, which read this treatise penned by me.4 When Wright ‘come[s] to the borders of love’, that most all-consuming of passions, he must ask God to help him turn all of it on to God himself. For Wright is not about to discourse primarily on the love of God but on human love. The very inflam- matory madness that Schalkwyk argues is ‘divine’5 is one of Nicholas Coeffeteau’s list of passions – ‘pity, fear, bashfulness, or shame, love, hatred, desires, Choler and the rest’, and Coeffeteau defines all of them as phenomena ‘which are accompanied with some notable defect’.6 Their disease-like, troublesome, excessive quality is what make passions passions – and love is one of them. Human love can be benevolent, a selfless compulsion to ‘will good to some one, not for our own private interest’,7 and Coeffeteau defines it separately from desire – which is always for that which is absent. He writes of love as selfless friendship, in the beautiful passage I have used in the dedication to this book. However, he still clearly feels that human love needs policing by reason, just as do the other passions: Human Love is a Passion which should follow the motions of reason, and which being guided by the light of the soul should only embrace the true good, to make it perfect: for containing himself within these bounds, it should no more be a violent & furious passion, which fills the world daily with so many miseries by her exorbitant and strange disorders.8 Love should follow the motions of reason…it should not be a violent and furious passion. But Coeffeteau’s very statement of what love should not be in this passage suggests that love does often stray into the realms of the exorbitant, strange and 9781408179666_txt_print.indd 114 06/08/2013 08:56 ‘Give me excess of it’ 115 disordered. The construction of love as passion and disease emerges even more clearly in Ferrand’s Erotomania, a treatise on love melancholy, which, having asserted that their are two broad kinds of love, ‘the one divine, the other common and vulgar’,9 calls upon the ancients to support his argument that love is yet another of the unreasonable passions: love being a mixt disease, both of the body and the mind; I shall furnish my self with precepts out of Plato, and with medicines from Aesculapius, in the cure of Love Melancholy, being such as I have gathered out of Hippocrates, the Prince of Physitians: Intending to handle Love no otherwise, then as it is a passion, or violent perturbation of the Mind, Dishonest, and Refractory to Reason.10 Love, for Coeffeteau, contains something substantially different from the other passions, something divine: but human love can still be listed as a passion or affection, as it clearly is for Ferrand – and thereby may be figured, in its excessiveness, as a disease.11 SHAKESPEARE AND Love, SHAKESPEARE AND SEX As Paul A.

Load more