SOURCE: "Male Bonding and the Myth of Women's Deception in Shakespeare's Plays," in Shakespeare's Personality, edited by Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan and Bernard J. Paris, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 135-50.

[In the following essay, originally presented in 1985, Garner examines the pattern of male suspicion of female infidelity in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, arguing that the fear of being deceived manifests itself in the physical or verbal abuse of women, followed by the reassertion of male bonds.]

The problem of trust recurs in Shakespeare's works, from his earliest to his latest. Nowhere does he present it more prominently or explicitly than in his plays that deal with the actual or supposed infidelity of women: Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. In only one of these plays, Troilus and Cressida, is the woman unfaithful. In the others she is innocent—appallingly virtuous, in fact. Nevertheless, her husband or lover, believing her guilty, may revile her, abuse her physically or psychologically, plot her death, or even murder her. Like a recurrent dream, this repeated drama follows certain patterns, which, I believe, define and satisfy male psychic needs—Shakespeare's, his male characters', or those of both.

The pattern in the four plays has a number of similar features. First, the husband's or fiancé's suspicion and jealousy are aroused very quickly by the merest suggestion, the slightest evidence, or—in the case of Leontes—no suggestion or evidence at all. Second, believing his beloved is unfaithful, the husband or fiancé expresses his pain only through anger. Third, he immediately envisions himself as a member of a community of cuckolds; he schemes to entrap his beloved, to take vengeance on her, or to do both. Fourth, he does not confront her directly until he is convinced of her infidelity; instead, he rages at her, and plots against or humiliates her. Fifth, the wife or betrothed is unquestionably innocent of infidelity; in fact, she is extraordinarily virtuous. Ironically, it is the man who begins to deceive in one form or another—to lie, plot, or spy. Sixth, the woman must die: Othello murders Desdemona; Hero and Hermione faint and are supposed dead; Posthumus believes Pisanio has murdered Imogen at his request. Seventh, after the innocent woman is mortally wounded or is thought dead, the man repents his mistake and professes his love for her; in short, he kills her, then loves her afterward. Eighth, the woman forgives him.

Some critics have found unconvincing the husband's or fiancé's sudden and extreme jealousy and his propensity to suspect or to believe slander of a woman he and others have known to be uncommonly virtuous. Others have accounted for these traits by arguing that to love completely means to become vulnerable to doubt, by acknowledging the male character's particular susceptibilities, or by contending that dramatic action must be telescoped since a play unfolds in a brief period of time. Shakespeare, however, portrayed all four men as rushing to suspect their beloveds. I think we should take their sudden and irrational suspicion and jealousy as an indication of character. It suggests that at some level of their being, all four figures need the women who love them to betray them.

As Shakespeare repeats this drama, he makes this need clearer and starker. In Much Ado About Nothing and Othello villains awaken Claudio's and Othello's inclination to distrust. Much Ado provides evidence for Claudio's suspicion; it is the one play of the four in which the infidelity is "witnessed." Others besides Claudio are persuaded of Hero's guilt. Don Pedro sees and believes, and Leonato, Hero's father, believes because men he honors testify against his daughter:

Would the two princes lie, and Claudio lie,
Who lov'd her so, that speaking of her foulness,
Wash'd it with tears?

(4.1.152-54)

In Othello Iago is always there to pique Othello's jealousy and suspicion when it begins to weaken, and he knows how to play on all of Othello's vulnerabilities. The handkerchief is flimsier proof than that presented to Claudio in Much Ado; nevertheless, to anyone inclined to doubt, it might serve. Since Desdemona lies in saying that she has not lost it, she strengthens the grounds for Othello's suspicion.

Though there is a villain in Cymbeline to provoke Posthumus, his boast of Imogen's virtue when he speaks of her to Jachimo seems deliberately framed to invite challenge. (We also learn that Posthumus has previously bragged about Imogen's virtue to other men as he competed with them in a boasting match, the ultimate aim of which seems to be to solidify men's bonds with each other [1.4.54-61].) He will not hear Philario's attempts to discourage the wager and even gives Jachimo a letter of introduction to Imogen. Failing to consider that a man with half of his estate to lose might be more likely to lie than to tell the truth, Posthumus immediately credits Jachimo's evidence despite Philario's cautions that it may not be credible.

By the time Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale, he apparently wished to portray Leontes's need to be betrayed even more nakedly than Posthumus's. The play has no villain; Leontes's suspicions arise purely out of his own dark imaginings. There is no staged act of infidelity as in Much Ado; no sign like the handkerchief in Othello, None share Leontes's vision. Camillo asserts himself strongly against it:

'Shrew my heart,
You never spoke what did become you less
Than this; which to reiterate were sin
As deep as that, though true.

(1.2.281-84)

Hermione argues eloquently on her own behalf, and even the Delphic Oracle exonerates the queen.

The determination of Shakespeare's male characters to believe that women betray them further affirms their need for betrayal. When a moment comes that the men might realize that the contrary is true and the women they suspect are faithful, they insist on their falseness. After Othello at last tells Desdemona that he suspects her of committing adultery, she assures her husband that she "never lov'd Cassio/But with such general warranty of heaven" as she might love and that she did not give him the handkerchief (5.2.59-61). Responding to Othello's angry insistence that he saw his handkerchief in Cassio's hand, Desdemona asks him to call Cassio, who she knows will deny Othello's charge. At that point Othello lies: "He hath confess'd. . . . / That he hath us'd thee" (5.2.68-70).

As determined to believe in his own betrayal as Othello, Posthumus threatens Jachimo:

If you will swear you have not done't, you lie,
And I will kill thee if thou dost deny
Thou'st made me cuckold.

(Cymbeline, 2.4.144-46)

When Leontes hears that the Delphic Oracle, whose opinion he himself has sought, finds Hermione innocent, he coldly proclaims:

There is no truth at all i' th' oracle.
The sessions shall proceed; this is mere falsehood.

(The Winter's Tale, 3.2.140-41)

All of these male characters find it more threatening to accept the possibility of the faithfulness of their beloveds than the possibility of their unfaithfulness.

The male characters' certainty of betrayal allows them to unleash their pent-up misogyny and fear of women as they plot vengeance, revile their beloveds and women in general, and persecute and even murder or attempt to murder the innocent women who love them. Their distrust also allows them to break their bonds with those women and return either imaginatively or actually to an exclusively male community.

From the beginning Shakespeare makes the male characters' responses to their beloveds' supposed unfaithfulness extremely cruel. In Much Ado even before Claudio has seen anything to make him distrust Hero, he plans her humiliation: "If I see any thing to-night why I should not marry her, to-morrow in the congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her" (3.2.123-25). Beatrice defines the meanness of Claudio's actions: "What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then with public accusation, uncover'd slander, unmitigated rancor—"; she is too outraged to complete the sentence and can only imagine a fantastic punishment sufficient to repay his treachery: "O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace" (4.1.303-7).

Almost as soon as Othello suspects Desdemona of infidelity, he begins to imagine murdering her:

If there be cords, or knives,
Poison, or fire, or suffocating streams,
I'll not endure it.

(Othello, 3.3.388-90)

He later imagines chopping her "into messes" (4.1.200). He humiliates her and abuses her physically and psychologically as he strikes her in public (4.1.240) and plays out the brothel scene (4.2.24-94) to confirm the fantasy he has come to believe. His murder of her is actually quieter than we have been led to expect.

Convinced of Imogen's supposed infidelity, Posthumus delivers his well-known diatribe against women:

Could I find out
The woman's part in me—for there's no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part: be it lying, note it,
The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
All faults that name, nay, that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all.

(Cymbeline, 2.5.19-28)

He then begins to plot Imogen's murder.

Suspecting Hermione, Leontes begins to denigrate women in general:

There have been
(Or I am much deceiv'd) cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th' arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic'd in's absence,
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbor—by
Sir Smile, his neighbor.

(The Winter's Tale, 1.2.190-96)

He accuses her of adultery suddenly and publicly when his accusations might most surprise and humiliate her. He takes her son from her, forces her to bear her child in prison, and sends her newborn daughter out to die. Finally, he forces her to stand trial in public before she has recovered from childbirth.

Their bonds with women must be frail indeed if all of these men distrust women so quickly, seem so determined to believe that they have been betrayed, and react with such extreme harshness. It is no accident that for most of them (all but Leontes) the moment of doubt occurs just before or just after their marriages. The woman's supposed fallenness allows them to reject her because there is something wrong with her. If they see her as good, they may have to consider that they simply do not love her or that they are afraid to love her. Madelon Sprengnether has observed that in Shakespeare's tragedies "the structures of male dominance . . . conceal deeper structures of fear, in which women are perceived as powerful and the heterosexual relation is seen as either mutually violent or at least deeply threatening to the man." She argues that throughout Shakespeare's plays "a woman's power . . . is less social or political . . . than emotional, expressed in her capacity to give or to withhold love" (Gohlke 1980b, 172-74).

Claudio, Othello, Cymbeline, and Leontes all have strong bonds with men before their marriages—or in Claudio's case, proposed marriage—and their beloveds' supposed infidelities allow them to reassert those bonds. The first we hear of Claudio is that Don Pedro has honored him for his brave deeds in battle (Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.9-17) and that he is most often in the company of Benedick, an avowed woman-hater. As Benedick says, Claudio's music has always been "the drum and fife"; yet now it quite uncharacteristically becomes "the tabor and the pipe" (2.3.12-15). He allows Don Pedro to woo Hero for him and even proposes accompanying Don Pedro to Aragon immediately after his marriage (3.2.1-4). Hero's supposed betrayal would make it unnecessary for him to disrupt his bonds with men in the slightest way. In fact, her "betrayal" draws him closer to them as they conspire to catch Hero in the act of betrayal and to punish her for it. In her essay on Much Ado and the distrust of women, Janice Hays has suggested that "Claudio's allegiance is still invested in the sphere of male bonding and male achievement, perhaps as a defense against the anxieties occasioned by heterosexuality" (Hays 1980, 85).

In Othello's world men are even more exclusively and intensely bonded together as warriors. Desdemona is evidently the first woman Othello has ever considered marrying, for he tells Iago:

But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth.

(Othello, 1.2.25-28)

Almost as soon as he is married, he begins to suspect Desdemona and is cast into an intense relationship with Iago, a relationship that seems as passionate as, and more solemn than, the one he has with Desdemona (3.3.453-80).

Posthumus's public exploitation of Imogen's chastity, as I have already said, invites challenge. It reminds me of Hector's challenge to the Greeks in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, which is spoken in terms of Hector's promise to "make it good" that he has "a lady, wiser, fairer, truer, / Than ever Greek did couple in his arms" (1.3.274-76). Just as a woman's body is metaphorically the ground over which the Greeks and Trojans fight, it becomes the means through which Posthumus and Jachimo compete with and relate to each other.

Though Leontes's suspicion of Hermione is not aroused shortly before or after their marriage, it does awaken as Hermione appears to threaten the bond between him and Polixenes. When Hermione announces that she has persuaded Polixenes to remain in Sicilia, Leontes comments, "At my request he would not" (The Winter's Tale, 1.2.87). His jealousy is immediately aroused by Hermione's success in persuading Polixenes when he could not. Though he plots Polixenes's death and does not ally himself with other men in his punishment of Hermione, as Claudio and Othello do in their persecution of Hero and Desdemona, he immediately imagines himself horned (1.2.119, 146) and in his cuckoldry a sharer of the fate of a large community of men. He voices what Coppélia Kahn has described as one of the most prominent motifs of cuckoldry, "the brotherhood of all married men as potential if not actual cuckolds" (1981, 124), when he laments:

Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves.

Many thousand on's
Have the disease, and feel't not.

(1.2.198-200, 206-7)

Speaking these things to Mamillius, he seems to be making an effort to bond himself with the boy, as he gives his criticism of women the sound of worldly wisdom that the father traditionally passes down to the son.

Though there are marriages between women and men in all four plays, these marriages take place, on the one hand, offstage or before the present action or are, on the other, abbreviated ceremonies without celebration. The most vividly realized "marriages" are between men. In Much Ado the climactic moment is the broken nuptial, in which Claudio, Don Pedro, Don John, and even Leonato join to shame Hero. The wedding in the last act is low-key by comparison. Although the marriage of Othello and Desdemona is not dramatized, Othello's story of their courtship is powerfully rendered. The dramatized marriage between Othello and Iago in act 3 eclipses that earlier story as the two kneel and make sacred vows; it concludes with Othello's proclaiming Iago his lieutenant and Iago's promising Othello, "I am your own forever" (3.3.460-80).

Posthumus and Imogen are together only briefly, at the beginning and the end of Cymbeline. We hear nothing of their courtship or marriage, only that they are married. Their relationship is undermined because Imogen mistakes the beheaded Cloten in Posthumus's clothes for Posthumus and because Posthumus, failing to recognize Imogen in disguise, prefaces their reconciliation by striking her. The interchanges between Posthumus and Jachimo are far more charged than any moment between Imogen and Posthumus.

From the beginning of The Winter's Tale Shakespeare emphasizes the bond between Polixenes and Leontes. Camillo tells Archidamus that affection so "rooted" between the two kings in childhood could not "choose but branch." Their exchanges while apart had been so lavish that they had "embrac'd as it were from the ends of oppos'd winds" (1.1.21-31). Polixenes tells Hermione:

We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun,
And bleat the one at th' other.

(1.2.67-68)

In the same scene, Leontes remembers his courtship of Hermione less happily:

Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand,
[And] clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter,
"I am yours for ever."

(1.2.102-5)

Although the reuniting of Hermione and Leontes at the end of the play surpasses everything else in wonder and Hermione embraces Leontes, she does not speak to him but addresses her daughter instead:

Tell me, mine own,
Where hast thou been preserv'd? where liv'd? how found
Thy father's court? for thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv'd
Myself to see the issue.

(5.3.123-28)

Hermione's daughter, not her husband, gave her cause to survive (McNaron, unpublished paper).

As Claudio, Othello, Posthumus, and Leontes affirm their bonds with men and break their bonds with women who love them, they all engage in voyeuristic and degraded fantasies in which they imagine their beloveds in bestial sexual acts. These fantasies—usually shared with other men—are as much a feature of the male characters' bonding with each other as of their breaking bonds with women. Claudio and his comrades see Borachio leaving Hero's house at midnight while Margaret, appearing to be Hero, bids him "a thousand times good night" (Much Ado About Nothing, 3.3.147-48). Claudio's debased fantasies elaborate on that scene as he publicly accuses Hero:

You are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pamp'red animals
That rage in savage sensuality.

(4.1.59-61)

Don Pedro depicts her as "a common stale" (4.1.65). In Othello it is Iago who supplies the images of Desdemona "topp'd" (3.3.396) and of her and Cassio

as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,
As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross
As ignorance made drunk.

(3.3.403-5)

Othello is so obsessed with these images that he cannot get goats and monkeys off his mind (4.1.263), and Desdemona becomes to him the "cunning whore of Venice" (4.2.89). After Jachimo draws for Posthumus his erotic fantasy of kissing the mole on Imogen's breast, Posthumus, in soliloquy, imagines a degraded sexual encounter between Jachimo and Imogen:

This yellow Jachimo, in an hour—was't not?—
Or less?—at first? Perchance he spoke not, but
Like a full-acorn'd boar, a German [one],
Cried "O!" and mounted; found no opposition
But what he look'd for should oppose and she
Should from encounter guard.

(Cymbeline, 2.5.14-19)

In The Winter's Tale Leontes transforms the courtesies between Polixenes and Hermione into "paddling palms and pinching Fingers" (1.2.115), tells Camillo his wife is "a [hobby]-horse" (1.2.276), and imagines to Mamillius the experience of cuckolds, telling him that there is "no barricado for a belly": "It will let in and out the enemy, / With bag and baggage" (1.2.204-6). On the surface all of these fantasies express disgust with women, which is provoked by fear and hate; beneath it they may manifest suppressed homosexual feelings of the men who experience and share the fantasies.

All of these plays move toward a heterosexual solution, however. In exploring the possibilities of women's and men's loving each other, Shakespeare suggests that a man's idealization of his beloved dooms their relationship to failure. The woman who must be, or is, killed is the woman on a pedestal. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's final treatment of this theme, Hermione's return as a statue that comes to life symbolizes that meaning. Paulina's direction to Hermione to "descend; be stone no more" (5.3.99) mainly describes not her action but rather a movement in Leontes, a change in the male psyche. The new and hopeful marriages or reconciliations of Claudio, Posthumus, and Leontes are made possible only after each of them has had to face the possibility of his beloved's infidelity, in other words, to accept her as a human woman, who may, like everyone else, fall.

Othello never loses the need to idealize Desdemona. In killing her, he wants to be assured that there is "no more moving" (5.2.93); and after she is dead and he is grieving, he views her as a pearl—an image of the Virgin Mary, beautiful, perfect, and pure. Calling up this image, Othello echoes Cassio, whose greeting of Desdemona when she arrives on Cyprus suggests a "prayer to the Virgin" (Harbage 1970, 351). For Othello, Desdemona is either virgin or whore; Cassio too "idealizes women of his own social class and spends his time with prostitutes" (Garner 1976, 243). In both Othello and Cassio, then, Shakespeare portrays a common male psychic split (Freud 1953, 12:182-84), and a central element in Othello's tragedy is his failure to heal that split.

As Shakespeare repeats these dramas involving the myth of women's deception, he gives his male characters more self-awareness and suggests that if they are to give up their deeply ingrained misogyny to love the women to whom they are engaged or married, their change will have to be drastic. Claudio and Othello, though repentant, give no evidence of having learned anything about themselves from their mistakes: they learn merely that they believed absurd lies about the women who loved them. Posthumus, on the other hand, gains a new perspective. He finally sees the roles of women and men in marriage in more just proportion than he did earlier. Most remarkably, he forgives his wife before he learns that she is innocent:

You married ones,
If each of you should take this course, how many
Must murther wives much better than themselves
For wrying but a little!

(Cymbeline, 5.1.2-5)

Although he does not understand his culpability fully, seeing only his responsibility in Imogen's "murder," his forgiveness of her "adultery" is extraordinary. Further, he breaks his bond with Jachimo. He forgives him, but seems to make it clear that they will have no more dealings with each other. When Jachimo asks him to take his life, Posthumus replies:

Kneel not to me.
The pow'r that I have on you is to spare you;
The malice towards you, to forgive you. Live,
And deal with others better.

(5.5.417-20)

Though Leontes does not articulate the wrong he did Hermione so clearly as Posthumus articulates the wrong he did Imogen, he presumably comes to see himself as Paulina sees him. She becomes the voice of his consciousness and his conscience. To win Hermione back and to learn to love her, Leontes must spend sixteen years in mourning, this period suggesting that he must grow up again. We may also assume that time blunts his sexual fears since Hermione returns only when she is past childbearing age.

Although the marriage in Much Ado and reconciliations in the later plays may seem hopeful, they remain tenuous because so much of the male characters' burden has been to express and act out fear and hate of women and to affirm the strength of male bonding, which is based partially on that fear and hate. Further, the outcomes depend on the women's forgiveness. While I do not expect formal realism from these plays, I do expect psychological credibility. The kind of forgiveness that Shakespeare requires on the woman's part is possible only for a woman who is a saint or martyr or who has a perilously divided self.

Examining the women characters in these plays, I find that Shakespeare portrays them as increasingly whole emotionally, and consequently their responses to their husband's or fiancé's accusations and abuses are more direct and full. Nevertheless, their generosity in the face of such enormous wrongs as they suffer follows from Shakespeare's "splitting," or dividing, their characters in one way or another. Marilyn Williamson has pointed out that the splitting of women characters, which she describes as a form of doubling, "allows the expression of women's anger and hostility, emotions particularly threatening to a patriarchy, while containing them psychologically and controlling them socially" (1982, 117-18). Such splitting makes forgiveness possible as well. Among Hero, Desdemona, Imogen, and Hermione, only Imogen is allowed to experience the range of human emotions and forgive her beloved. Yet she forgives Posthumus when she is in disguise, a form of splitting that differs from the other women's.

Hero is the most thinly drawn of the four, and she must surely be the most silent of Shakespeare's female figures. Her single line among the 154 lines immediately before her exit in act 2, scene 1, of Much Ado and her utter silence while Don Pedro, Leonato, and Claudio arrange her marriage are striking (2.1.262-361). Just as she is without speech, so she is without defenses. Far from asserting herself against her accusers, she can only call on God to defend her (4.1.77) and faint. Shakespeare splits off the angry, aggressive response that Claudio's actions might warrant and gives it to Beatrice (4.1.289-330).

More assertive than Hero, Desdemona has a voice of her own, and as long as Othello is at her side, she can stand up to her father and the Venetian senators. Alone, with Othello set against her, she is powerless. She will not hear Emilia, who, like Beatrice, speaks with anger and good sense, condemning Othello's abuse of her mistress. Desdemona can respond to Othello's increasing rage only with various forms of denial, such as insisting that she approves of his behavior or creating fantasies of escape (Garner 1976, 247-50). In the end, she is scarcely better able to defend herself than Hero.

In Cymbeline Shakespeare allows Imogen to have the angry voice, for she has no vocal attendant. Although she does not express her anger to Posthumus, she directs it against him as she rails at Pisanio, whom Posthumus has ordered to murder her (3.4.4off). Shakespeare evidently sees her differently from the other women in these plays, for he portrays her as capable of assuming the disguise of a man. Just as she can incorporate anger within her character, so she can cast aside her femininity, as it is traditionally defined. Despite Imogen's wholeness of character and Posthumus's reformation, Shakespeare expresses his ambivalence about the heterosexual recoupling by leaving Imogen in disguise at the end of the play. If we consider that Imogen is a boy actor playing a woman disguised as a man, then the restored couple would appear more as a homosexual than a heterosexual one. Imogen's disguise serves the same function that the splitting of a character does in the other plays: she becomes either more or less than woman.

In The Winter's Tale Shakespeare returns to the pattern of portraying women that he followed in Much Ado and Othello. The outrage at Leontes that Hermione might be expected to feel is split off and given to Paulina. Remaining wholly feminine, Hermione does not express rage. At the same time, she is firm in her dignity and argues her own case eloquently and without fear. Powerful in her own defense, she does not merely plead her innocence but is sufficiently in command of her reason to understand and make evident the impossibility of clearing herself against Leontes's charge. She argues rightly that since Leontes accuses her, there is no way she can prove her innocence, her "integrity, / Being counted falsehood" (3.2.26-27).

Behind the women's forgiveness in these plays is the working out of a male fantasy. Quite simply put, the fantasy is that a woman will always forgive a man no matter how terribly he wrongs her. Shakespeare's resolution is always a variation on the story of patient Griselda. When that resolution strains credulity, many read it as illustrating Christian forgiveness, an example to which we might all aspire. This is particularly true of The Winter's Tale. Such a reading—or a mythic reading, which Shakespeare invites as well—is probably the happiest construction we can give to the play. Otherwise, how are we to respond when we see a woman embrace a man who is responsible for the death of her son, has tried to kill her daughter, and has deprived her of her motherhood as well as her mature womanhood?

Even if we are comfortable with a reading that makes the psychological credibility of such an ending irrelevant, we must still see the demands of a male fantasy in control when we consider how different forgiveness is for women and men in Shakespeare. When Posthumus forgives Jachimo, there is no expectation that the two of them can make things up. Posthumus tells him to "deal with others better" (5.5.419; emphasis mine). Like Hermione, Prospero is often seen as. a model of forgiveness; indeed, The Tempest focuses on his decision to forgive Antonio rather than to exact vengeance. Yet Prospero has no reconciliation with Antonio. The play does not suggest that Prospero will ever trust or love his brother again, and yet there is no blot on the quality of his forgiveness. His generosity is more in the realm of ordinary human possibility than the magnanimity demanded of Hero, Desdemona, Imogen, and Hermione.

Thinking about the whole of Shakespeare's work, I recall numerous lines that suggest how deeply charged the general issue of trust was for him as artist. The poet tells the young man in Sonnet 93:

How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!

As Duncan confronts his betrayal by Macdonwald, on whom, the king says, he "built / An absolute trust," he laments that "there's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face" (Macbeth, 1.4.11-14). We hear Lady Macbeth advise Macbeth, "Look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't" (1.5.65-66). Lear faces his mistaken sense of self: "They are not men o' their words: they told me I was every thing. 'Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof (King Lear, 4.6.104-5). Shakespeare portrays again and again the risk of human relationship and the vulnerability of his characters to deception or betrayal. The hard truth that engages him is that trust must be an act of faith. You cannot know the heart of another.

Presumably both women and men suffer from this vulnerability. Yet as a male writer, Shakespeare, as we might expect, treated this theme mainly from the point of view of his male characters. They seem to feel women's betrayal more strongly than men's. Women's deceptiveness is often at the core of tragedy, and Shakespeare's tragic heroes go mad or nearly so in the face of it. The felt betrayal of a mother and of daughters accounts largely for the dramatic intensity of Hamlet and King Lear. When Antony thinks that Cleopatra has deserted him for Caesar, he is consumed with rage. The single time in his dramatic career that Shakespeare depicts a sexually unfaithful woman as a central figure, in Troilus and Cressida, the play is bleak and despairing. It is as though Cressida's spoiling ruins everything around her. The world of Troilus and Cressida becomes as rotten as the one Hamlet imagines.

That Shakespeare insistently replayed the same story in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, that he treated it in different genres—tragedy, comedy, and romance—and that it held his interest from the beginning to the end of his career all confirm how important it must have been to him as a dramatist. It has occurred to me that these plays offer a counterfantasy to the Sonnets. While the poet of the Sonnets unhappily suffers the betrayals of his mistress and the young friend to whom he is attracted, in the plays as men join with each other against a woman, a different alliance forms. I have wondered whether Shakespeare needed to repeat in reverse the experience of the Sonnets in order to come to terms with it.

Whatever the psychological insistence that provoked Shakespeare to repeat the story of these plays, they record how deeply threatening for their central male figures is the prospect of union with a woman. We may locate that fear, as Coppélia Kahn does, in the establishment of masculine identity, in a man's need to separate himself from his mother and the feminine, his dread of engulfment by her as he tries to establish his manhood (1981, 1-17). We may find another source for it, as Peter Erickson has argued, in patriarchal politics, which makes necessary male control of women and the feminine—that is, the emotional and nurturing—side of the masculine self (1985a, 1-9). This exorbitant need for control brings into play for Shakespeare's male figures a heightened fear of losing that control when they love a woman. However Shakespeare may have understood the causes of male fear of heterosexual union, the plays make clear that he recognized it and saw it as significant enough to depict, as a story worth telling.

Shakespeare presents the idea of the deceptive or unfaithful woman as so terrible in the imagination of his male characters that the heterosexual bond becomes particularly precarious. Men's vulnerability makes them cling to their male friends, hesitant to bond with women, and restive once they enter into a close or intimate relationship with a woman. As Shakespeare retells this story, the male lover's suspicion of his beloved comes more and more completely out of his diseased imagination, unsupported by circumstance or a villain's intervention. The movement of the plays suggests that Shakespeare came to understand that the fear he wanted to portray resided in the individual male psyche. It was internal; he did not have to provoke it from without. By the time he wrote The Winter's Tale, his plays had moved relentlessly toward a world where men need women to betray them. That need would seem to arise from their excessive vulnerability in their relationships with women and their greater security in bonds with men.

By the time he wrote Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare seemed to want to make it more explicit that male characters who were subject to heterosexual dread also tended to idealize women. Only by idealizing a woman, by seeing her as unlike others of her sex, could a man risk union with her. This tendency to overestimate women seems to make Shakespeare's male characters more vulnerable to disillusionment, quicker to doubt, more subject to disappointment.

To an extent Shakespeare stands apart from the story that he tells. The male fear that he depicts is probably something that he knew, or else he could not have portrayed it so powerfully. At the same time, as dramatist he sees this fear for what it is, and he is not caught up in it as are the characters in his plays. He is not free as playwright, however, from a tendency to idealize women. Since he makes the outcomes of the plays depend on women's goodness and on their extraordinary capacity for forgiveness, he reveals as artist a cast of mind that resembles that of his male characters and puts too great a burden on the women he portrays.

The changes in Shakespeare's treatment of this theme occur as a consequence of his artistic and personal development. In his later career he was able to understand men's psychic needs more clearly, to portray women characters as more whole, and to imagine love between women and men as more rich and complex than he was able to imagine earlier. At the same time, he always retained a sense of the fragility of bonds between women and men as well as of the strength of men's bonds with each other, which he saw as founded largely on the exclusion of women and on homosexual attraction. No matter in what dramatic form he wrote, he expressed his deep ambivalence about the possibilities of heterosexual love. When he presents love between a woman and a man as compelling and joyful, as he does in Othello, the play becomes a tragedy. When the play is a comedy or a romance and works toward a hopeful ending, that ending is undercut. As I have suggested, so much of the burden of these plays is the revelation of the male characters' deeply hostile feelings toward women that it is hard to imagine the men undergoing the radical change that a harmonious marriage would require. The final scene of Cymbeline, in which the reunited couple appears to be two men, Imogen remaining in disguise, is emblematic of Shakespeare's lasting ambivalence.

Bibliography

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