Love in Shakespeare

William Shakespeare's glorious pastoral comedy As You Like It favours its notoriously melancholy character Jaques with this famous and most frequently quoted soliloquy, "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players". It sketches seven stages of a man's life- --- infant, school-boy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon and second childhood 'sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything" (As You Like It, Jaques, Act ii, Scene vii, lines 139-166).This essay deals with the most lovey-dovey, passionate, colourful and mysterious role of a human being as the lover.
On the third stage of the "Seven ages of man" delineated in As You Like It, he becomes a lover, a little remorseful and sad because he is not happy with anything. He likes to sing or listen to songs and he goes out for cultural activities. "And then the lover / Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress' eyebrow," Jaques underpins the very role that becomes a lover.
Should there be any more discourse on love to vex those that love? Shakespeare loved and married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older than him. The modern film Shakespeare in Love, which entangles him with the heroines of his plays, is interesting but has nothing to do with Will's own life. Shakespeare draws wonderful lovers being in love, defines love from all angles, notes different expressions of love and depicts passionate love being cooled.
Shakespeare has portrayed love from all angles, encompassing all ages, myths and cultures. He has looked at love from the traditional lovers' point of view without being oblivious of it, criticizing it from the viewpoint of a father or a sage. Challenged by the father or society itself, a lover's usual definition of love should be "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind"( A Midsummer Night's Dream1.1.234-235). Later in the same play Lysander tells Hermia, "The course of true love never did run smooth."
Lovers have their own code of life not bound by space and time. Gratiano succinctly defines this to Salerio in The Merchant of Venice, "Lovers ever run before the clock" quite unaware of what others think of them as people committing mistakes. Jessica is all too clear about it in her dialogue to Lorenzo, "Love is blind, and lovers cannot see / The pretty follies that themselves commit". So "To be wise and love / Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above."
Shakespeare makes Rosalind ask Celia this universal question that every youth faces at least once in life, "What think you of falling in love?" And later she sheds light on how her sister and Orlando's brother fell in love in As You Like It, "For your brother and my sister no sooner met, but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved, but they sighed; no sooner sighed, but they asked one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason, but they sought the remedy."
Simply put, the inner meaning of this as stated above in Will's own words while Prospero observes the exchange between Ferdinand and Miranda, "At the first sight / they have changed eyes." Or when Cressida tells Troilus, "I was own……/ With the first glance."
Lovers live in a world of their own beyond the tantrums of day to day life and feel that heaven is their final abode. Who but Cleopatra can visualize such an eternal state of bliss except in the company of Antony, "Eternity was in our lips and eyes / Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor / But was a race of heaven".
Does love have any border or does it transcend all continental boundaries to merge the East with the West, uniting Cleopatra with Antony? Antony and Cleopatra is the most famous love tragedy of all time. Told that love is without any boundary, Cleopatra insists on installing a boundary to her love with Antony. Here is a love-defining dialogue in which Cleopatra says "I'll set a bourn how far to be beloved." Antony's witty reply, "Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth," giving rise to Joyce Carol Oates's fiction a sweet name New Heaven, New Earth.

Which one of these is true love -- showing that one loves another too much or loving too much but not showing it all? The classic dilemma regarding the definition of true love will always remain unresolved for many more love stories to be written and scenes enacted in ages still sleeping in the womb of time. Here is a classic dilemma in the following dialogue about it in its finest and complete form:
Julia They do not love that do not show their love.
Lucetta O, they love least that let men know their love.
Shakespeare is so resourceful that a lover will love to quote him with heart's content and feel fully satisfied that he could bespeak his heart fully. Here Polonius is reading a letter from Hamlet to Ophelia, "Doubt thou the stars are fire / Doubt that the sun doth move / Doubt truth to be a liar / But never doubt I love." Hamlet becomes sentimental in the grave scene of Ophelia and shouts out, "I loved Ophelia, forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum."
Love is expressed here in the most simple terms without any exaggeration or hyperbole of the above when the Duke says to Isabella, "What's mine is yours, and what's yours is mine." Goneril is not true to her heart but the expression if sincere could be a unique example of true love, "I do love you dearer than: eyesight, space and liberty."
Shakespeare's observations on love are some of the most beautiful and proverbial in the English language. Expressions like 'hearts of gold', 'honey of thy breath', 'sweet and honeyed sentences,' 'you alone are you' surpass any proverb for their depth and sweetness.
Romeo and Juliet is the timeless story of doomed love that has fascinated and delighted readers for centuries. Juliet was only 13 or exactly two weeks away from her fourteenth birthday when Romeo fell in love with her at first sight and Juliet requited. She explains philosophically to her nurse, "My only love sprung from my only hate / Too early seen unknown, and known too late." Romeo aptly sums up the typical lovers' psyche, "Heaven is here where Juliet lives."
Romeo brings out the right condition of love, as how it begins with sighs for the would-be-beloved, develops through 'comfort and despair' and ends in sorrow, "Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs / Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes / Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears / What is it else? A madness most discreet / A choking gall, and a preserving sweet." He also unwittingly foresees the sea of pangs leading to their self-immolation, "Is love a tender thing? It is too rough / Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn."
The sonnets are the repository of love with all the connotations and variety to soothe the hearts of the lovers. Sonnet 116 defines typical love emboldened by loyalty and steadfastness in any situation, "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 / O no, it is an ever- fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken / It is the star to every wandering bark." In other words, love is tantamount to worship when Shakespeare urges his Dark Lady in Sonnet 105, "Let not my love be called idolatry".
How long can lovers sustain being in love? Does it not abate or get cooled too? Hamlet tells Ophelia, "I did love you once." Claudius, while referring to love says, "Time qualifies the spark and fire of it." Sir Andrew Aguecheek in a remorseful note recalls his love, "I was adored once too."
Love is not always applauded in Shakespeare as he looks at it very objectively. "Love is merely a madness." Not only that, Shakespeare has a character say "Love is a familiar; Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but love."
Shakespeare wrote comedies like Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest having unique plots built on love on the one hand and with equal virtuosity composed, on the other, great love tragedies like Romeo and Juliet as well as Antony and Cleopatra. Men and women of all ages love to enjoy ingeniously woven love stories by Shakespeare because none, not even the wisest sage, can resist the temptation of love. To conclude in this vein, here are two lines from Sonnet 141, "My five wits, nor my five senses, can / Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee."

Md Shafiqul Islam studied English literature at Dhaka University and is a senior civil servant