[In the following essay, Gajowski argues that in Shakespeare's love tragedies, Shakespeare emphasizes the humanity common among male and female characters, despite culturally enforced conceptions of gender roles. Gajowski focuses on the characteristics of the female protagonists in these plays and the nature of their love for the male protagonists.]

Only connect . . .

—E. M. Forster, Howards End

The love tragedies offer Shakespeare the opportunity to explore in gender relationships the paradox of men and women as distinct from one another in their masculinity and femininity, yet connected to one another in their common humanity. And he insists on the common humanity connecting the sexes despite the wedge driven between them by cultural constructions of gender. "The problem appears to be one of construction," as psychoanalyst Carol Gilligan puts it, "an issue of judgment rather than truth" (1982, 171). To be a full human being, Shakespeare intimates, is to be a relational, rather than an autonomous being; yet he gives unblinking attention to the excruciating vulnerability involved in doing so. When he narrows the focus in tragedy to the single, particular heterosexual relationship, rather than the multiple relationships or the general social milieu of comedy, he intensifies his scrutiny of cultural constructions of the masculine and the feminine. The love relationship is the crucible in which Shakespeare tests and examines constructions of masculinity and femininity and discloses the common humanity that eludes and defies those constructions. The emphasis in the tragedies is on the human uniqueness underlying the cultural constructions of gender and, consequently, the disparity—even conflict—between the two.¹

Shakespeare represents as honorable, heroic, and noble not martial but marital matters, not conventional adventure and conquest, but venturing and questing in matters of the heart. Love depends upon the ability and willingness to give of oneself to another despite the vulnerability of doing so, recalling the message on the lead casket in The Merchant of Venice: "Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath" (The Merchant of Venice, 2.7.9). This emphasis on active generosity in love characterizes the female protagonists of the comedies:

Rosalind. To you I give myself, for I am yours.

(As You Like It, 5.4.117)

Olivia. Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.

(Twelfth Night, 3.1.156)

Helena. I dare not say I take you, but I give
Me and my service, ever whilst I live,
Into your guiding power.

(All's Well That Ends Well, 2.3.102-4)

In the love tragedies, active generosity is made explicit in Juliet's quintessential expression of her love for Romeo (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.133-35). Juliet, Desdemona, and Cleopatra all generously commit themselves in love; they "give" freely of themselves without hesitation and without qualification. Generosity in love, if we agree with E. M. Forster, is held in a delicate balance with its opposite, expectation: "when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated [than other experiences]. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time," he says; "it is this emotional communion, this desire to give and to get, this mixture of generosity and expectation, that distinguishes love" ([1927] 1985, 50-51). Yet Juliet, Desdemona, and Cleopatra are remarkable in neither expecting nor demanding any "measure for measure" of emotional commitment from their lovers in return. Nor do they weigh and judge any defects or faults of character in the balance. Juliet refuses to blame her husband for killing her cousin, even as Cleopatra refuses to berate Antony for his repeated acts of disloyalty and mistrust. Desdemona's submission to Othello's mistreatment despite her awareness that she is undeserving of it makes the generosity of her forgiveness approach the absoluteness of charity.² All three female protagonists love the whole of the other person for that person's sake; they love for the intrinsic value of loving, rather than for any instrumental value.

If love depends upon the ability and willingness to give of oneself to another despite the vulnerability of doing so, Juliet, Desdemona, and Cleopatra "hazard" as well as "give" in love without hesitation and without qualification. The emphasis falls on their confidence in the choice of husband or lover, whether that choice occurs invisibly within the dramatic action, as is true of Juliet,³ or before the action of the play begins, as is true of Desdemona and Cleopatra. Human beings value and try to balance the competing claims of stability and risk. This balance is never a "tension-free harmony," as political and moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts it; it is, rather, "a tension-laden holding-in-focus" (1986, 372). Shakespeare's female protagonists sacrifice stability and balance and embody the willingness to hazard, wager, and risk all: "That I did love the Moor to live with him, / My downright violence, and storm of fortunes, / May trumpet to the world" (Othello, 1.3.248-50). The risk they take in love constitutes in part the value of that love.

The fragility of the love between two people lies in its peculiar vulnerability to happenings in the world. Because the odds against intimacy are so great, we wonder that it flourishes at all—in our world as well as in the dramatic worlds of Shakespeare's tragedies. The female protagonists in Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet share with the speaker in Shakespeare's sonnets the courage to love despite awareness of the vicissitudes of human existence. Desdemona's confidence in her love allows her to rejoice at the prospect of its deepening: "The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase, / Even as our days do grow!" (Othello, 2.1.195-97). Although she is free of the doubts that haunt Othello, she understands that his expressions of absoluteness of affection, are, perhaps, attempts to protect his love from the unknown that the passage of time brings:

If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy; for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

(Othello, 2.1.189-93)

Whereas Othello, like so many of Shakespeare's male protagonists—and like the speaker in John Donne's Songs and Sonnets—is capable of trusting only in the immutable and the stable, Desdemona, like so many of his female protagonists, is capable of the far more difficult thing, trusting in the mutable and the unstable. Her confidence in the face of mutability, as we have seen, is somewhat akin to that of the speaker in Shakespeare's sonnets.⁴ Juliet and Cleopatra share this confidence. Cleopatra, further, shares with the speaker in Shakespeare's sonnets the confidence that what she loves will stand against death. In Sonnet 18, for example, the speaker expresses confidence that his love will stand against the ravages of time, although with a deliberateness and self-consciousness about his poetic artistry that is absent in Cleopatra's tribute:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

It is not coincidental that Antony takes on mythological proportions—"His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear'd arm / Crested the world, his voice was propertied / As all the tuned spheres" (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.82-84)—when Cleopatra's poetic artistry immortalizes him. Nor is it coincidental that Shakespeare's dramatic artistry includes both death and the confidence in the human capacity for love that stands against death. Cleopatra's poetic imagination, like Shakespeare's dramatic artistry, creates art; art, in turn, shapes future imaginative and cultural impressions. In a very real way, our contemporary sense of who Antony is is the result of Cleopatra's making. In a very real way, our contemporary understanding of the ability to love in the face of human mutability and mortality is that of Shakespeare's making. Literature does more, of course, than mimetically "reflect a context outside itself," as Jean Howard observes; it also constitutes a means of production, or "one of the creative forces of history." Literature is accorded real power when we acknowledge that, rather than "passively reflecting an external reality," it actively participates in "constructing a culture's sense of itself" (1986, 26, 25).

In Othello, more so than in any other work, Shakespeare rigorously interrogates the unilateral standards of female chastity and male honor—and the dependency of the latter upon the former—and finds them wanting. The single sonnet which offers an image of ideal love assumes that it depends upon a constancy that is mutual. The opening lines of Sonnet 116 insist that the love that does not "admit impediments" is a "marriage" of "true" minds:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

The sexual relationships in the love tragedies suggest that love likewise depends for its existence upon a constancy that is mutual. As the dramatic action of the romantic comedies and the early action of the love tragedies discloses, two lovers must be able to establish trust in one another. They must be able to receive one another's love without suspicion, jealousy, or fear. The foundation of the love and the continuing trust in that foundation, as the dramatic action of Othello most painfully discloses, must remain constant or the love will be undermined. Because Othello dramatizes the disintegration of the male protagonist, the emphasis falls on mutual constancy that is destroyed. Because Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra dramatize the ennoblement of the male protagonist, the emphasis falls on mutual constancy that is produced or reproduced.

The ravages of human love, which so often "with base infection" meet, never reach the "star" of absolute constancy. Absolute constancy exists instead as an ideal, "an ever-fixed mark" by which to gauge the tempests of sexual relations:

O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his highth be taken.

That is not to say that the female protagonists in the love tragedies are heroic in the depth and totality of their emotional commitment, and the male protagonists are less than heroic in their lack of a like commitment. Shakespeare depicts both constancy and inconstancy in the romantic comedies, the sonnets, and the romances, but nowhere more so than in the love tragedies, I think, does he force upon us the disparity between the two.

Love and friendship are distinct from other human traits or virtues in their being not states of being or activities, but in their very nature, relationships between separate individuals.⁵ Being loving or being friendly is not a state of character, such as the state of being courageous, for example, awaiting an appropriate opportunity, such as the battlefield, to reveal itself. Just as generosity involves another person, who must be there to receive, love involves another person, who must be there to be loved. The other person is significant, moreover, not merely as an object who receives the activity of giving or love, but as "an intrinsic part of love itself," as Nussbaum puts it, who actively gives or loves in return. Love and friendship are deeply relational—and therefore more vulnerable—because the particular nature of the other "enters more deeply" into defining the particular nature of the relationship (1986, 344).

Mutuality in affection depends not only upon connectedness but also separateness and a mutual respect for that separateness. The other needs to be recognized not as a possession, an extension, or a projection of the self, but as a separate, independent human being whose separateness and independence are valued for their own sakes—for their intrinsic rather than their instrumental value (Nussbaum 1986, 355). The uniqueness of Shakespeare's representation of sexual relationships is his creation of females who are independent, yet relational, human beings. Juliet, Desdemona, and Cleopatra are all endowed with a self-estimation that is independent of the estimations of the men in their dramatic worlds; perhaps it is this singular characteristic—their theatrical subjectivity—that accounts for the fascination that they, and Shakespeare's other female protagonists, hold for audiences and readers over a period of four hundred years. Shakespeare takes pains to convey this sense of independence in the opening action of each play. Yet, having established them as independent rather than clinging figures, he further endows them with a relational, affiliative capacity that the male protagonists often lack.⁶ One of the many remarkable things about Cleopatra is that she is a political being, Queen of Egypt, yet, at the same time, devoted to Antony. Men, of course, have "deep yearnings for affiliation," as Miller points out. These needs exist in men as well as women, "deep under the surface of social appearance," or cultural constructions of gender. Men, like women, long for "an affiliative mode of living," of course, but have deprived themselves of it for so long that they have made themselves unable to believe in it ([1976] 1986, 87-88). Shakespeare's females, like the contemporary women in Carol Gilligan's study, "replace the bias of men toward separation with a representation of the interdependence of self and other." Also, like the women in Gilligan's study, their sense of integrity is interpenetrated with "an ethic of care"—to see themselves as women is "to see themselves in a relationship of connection" (1982, 170, 171).

Shakespeare's comprehension of human complexity is equaled by his artistry, by his ability to transmute this understanding into the richness and diversity of particular characters in action. This understanding represents as supreme not structures of cultural, religious, military, or political power, but the emotional commitment of personal relationships among family, friends, and lovers. Even as we come to understand this implicit truth manifest in work after work across all genres, so we come to appreciate an artistry that simultaneously uses and breaks literary tradition, that exploits and criticizes in tragedy as in comedy cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity. It presents romantic and antiromantic discursive practices only to expose their inadequacy and to frame an authentic emotional commitment that is rooted in psychological reality. Romeo sheds chivalric roles in his deepening connection to Juliet; Othello falls prey to Iago's misogyny despite his connection to Desdemona; Antony oscillates between Petrarchist, Ovidian, and Orientalist constructions of Cleopatra in his incipient understanding of her "infinite variety."

Shakespeare's female protagonists are remarkable for their totality of being that eludes and defies, disrupts and subverts male constructions of the female. This is nowhere more evident in the canon or, perhaps, in all of western tradition, than in his characterization of Cleopatra. Yet as early as a crossdressed Viola, Shakespeare stresses not patriarchal constructions of femininity but, rather, human traits—sturdiness, sweetness, wittiness, melancholy, resilience—that surpass constructions of either gender. When Shakespeare does decide to endow his females with stereotypically feminine traits—the obedience of Juliet and Desdemona; the chastity of Desdemona; the fear of Juliet and Cleopatra; the devotion of all three female protagonists—it is to evaluate not them, but rather, men and the constructions of woman that operate so powerfully in the dramatic worlds of the plays. Juliet, Desdemona, and Cleopatra recognize and appreciate their lovers' totality of being; this recognition and appreciation, as the dramatic action of play after play discloses, demands reciprocity. For the value of all of Shakespeare's protagonists lies in their human traits, the capacity for love—its generosity, its confidence, its constancy, and its mutuality—supreme among them. Our own understanding of the comprehensiveness of Shakespeare's view of humanity depends upon our understanding of the complexity of his females, as of his males.

Notes

¹ I agree with Kate McLuskie's claim that an important part of the feminist project is "to insist that the alternative to the patriarchal family and heterosexual love is not chaos but the possibility of new forms of social organization and affective relationships" (1985, 106). The difference between McLuskie and myself is her refusal to acknowledge the contribution of the artist to such a project. The assumption that the dramatic text mimetically reflects the patriarchal culture in which it is produced seems overly deterministic to me. The assumption that artists participate in the consolidation of the dominant ideology rather than any subversion of it renders them, of course, mere factotums of that order—all exposure, critique, or condemnation of the inequities in the dominant order drained from their texts. See Louis Montrose for a discussion of "the inevitably reductive tendency" toward an "overcompensatory positing of subject as wholly determined by structure" (1986, 9).

² I am aware of the difficulty of considering the generosity of Shakespeare's female characters as an admirable trait. Because it is a stereotypically feminine trait, some assume it is, therefore, not admirable. This view, again, reveals the intervention of materialist/ historicist thought upon feminist thought. In psychotherapy, it is true that, as Jean Baker Miller notes, "women often spend a great deal more time talking about giving than men do." By contrast, the question of whether a man is a giver or giving enough does not enter into his self-image; he is concerned more about doing than giving ([1976] 1986, 50).

³ By invisible I mean that we cannot point to a specific moment in the dramatic action of Romeo and Juliet, whether the feast scene or the orchard scene, and say, "Here, Juliet makes her choice." Rather, her nature is imbued, in the way Fromm describes, with a readiness for emotional commitment that governs all her interactions with Romeo: "Faith is a character trait pervading the whole personality, rather than a specific belief (1956, 121).

⁴ See Sonnet 115, chap. 3, n. 8.

⁵ For the understanding of mutuality in this and the following paragraph, I am indebted to the views of Nussbaum. She is discussing Aristotle's notion of philia, which she translates as love rather than friendship (1986, 354). See her chap. 12, on relational goods and the vulnerability of the good human life (1986, 343-372).

⁶ The attribution of relational capacities or affiliative modes of living to Shakespeare's female characters leads some critics to conclude that Shakespeare is a "patriarchal bard" (McLuskie 1985; but see also McLuskie 1989, 224-30). The assumption is that his attribution of those human traits which are culturally labeled feminine to female characters constitutes his active, if not deliberate, participation in the reproduction of patriarchy. This view, again, reveals the enormous impact of materialist/historicist thought upon feminist thought; Peter Stallybrass, however, concludes a recent interrogation of the problems of connecting analyses of gender to analyses of class with a useful suggestion: "it is important to work with both feminism and marxism," he maintains, "without trying to 'marry' them" (1989). Acting to create female-defined values is a more fruitful endeavor, I believe, then reacting to those of male-dominated approaches. Shaping female-defined discursive practices is, in other words, a more valuable strategy than aping male-dominated discursive practices.