A Mirror Up to Nature: The Many Faces of Love in Shakespeare
Review of: Marcus Nordlund, Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 245 pp. In: The Evolutionary Review, vol. 1, pp. 133-37, 2010.
Robin Fox
If, as Hamlet said, the drama holds “the mirror up to nature,” what is the “nature” that is reflected therein? Academic literary opinion today would hold that it is a totally culturally constructed nature: the cultural expression is the nature. Nordlund and the evolutionists hold that it is a universal nature molded by evolution, with particular expressions of it influenced by local (in time and space) culture. Lay opinion – the popular wisdom – since Shakespeare (indeed since Sophocles) has been closer to the evolutionists. The plays reflect “human nature” – the “Old Adam” as my parents used to say, which is timeless and universal and unalterable, however much its local expression might be influenced by parochial custom and usage.
Watch Kurosawa’s Ran without the subtitles. You miss very little. It is absolutely Lear even with three sons instead of three daughters. I have watched Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex sung in Latin by a Japanese cast in a Tokyo production with Jessye Norman, a black American, as Jocasta. Again it was as intact and intelligible as anything at the Met or the Old Vic. Many years ago I invented the term “ethnographic dazzle” adapted from the linguistic term “orthographic dazzle” – the confusion caused when writing departs from phonetics. What Nordlund in his excellent book asks us to do is look behind the cultural dazzle, and by using evolutionary insights actually identify the mechanisms of “human nature” that the audiences, if not the critics, know they are seeing in Shakespeare’s plays.
The dramatic intensity of many of the plays, says Nordlund, rests on his ability to violate human nature, to exaggerate or intensify a human need or disposition like “greed, integrity, jealousy, loyalty or even a distilled form of love.” Ordinary expressions of needs are predictable and relatively uninteresting. We can get that at home, as it were. The dramatic violation of our expectations at once gratifies, frustrates and excites us. But as Nordlund insists we have to know what it is that is being so dramatically violated. Is it just some time-bound Elizabethan cultural value? No one but theory-befuddled academics would answer “yes.” But Nordlund understands that human nature is not a list of fixed attributes but precisely the interplay of the general and the particular that is the stuff of drama. The constant attempt to push the envelope of human nature is a vital part of that nature.
Is “romantic love” a literary invention? He addresses this issue in his first chapter. Is “love” a species of Bowlby’s “attachment” or is it a separate, neurologically distinct, system? Do men and women see it differently? Nordlund and sexual selection theory say they do. I used to think Denis de Rougement showed it was invented by the troubadours, until I found they got if from the Arabs (via Sicily?), who were indebted to the Persians, who picked it up from India, who… Nordlund thinks it is “nearly universal” – 88.5% of 166 HRAF societies showed it. Actually, about the same percentage show a preference for polygamy (my observation.) It had always bothered me that the ethologists like Morris or paleontologists like Lovejoy, and others, equated romantic love with “pair bonding” and the supposed human preference for monogamy. This is a statistical preference because it is hard to work effective polygamous systems with equal sex ratios.. We might prefer (men that is) polygamy but can’t all have it. Nordlund does not fall for this trap (although we have to wait until chapter 4.) He knows that love and marriage are different. While there might be universal predisposition for romantic attachment, many societies find it an insufficient basis for marriage – even incompatible with marriage. Others, like post troubadour Western Europe and America can “hyper-cognize” it and make the only basis. The basic disposition and the cultural emphasis are in a tug of war that provides the matter of romance and tragedy. This is an excellent first chapter, masterful in its steady argument and progression from one pons assinorum to the next. We can only hope the Lit. Crit. people will read it. Don’t hold your breath.
On to Shakespeare. His first case study is of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, two “Roman plays” which have the author scrutinizing the concept of honor as it clashes with parental affection. It was good to see Nordlund’s attention to the authorship problem with Titus. Brian Vickers has established without doubt that the play was co-authored by Robert Greene, and Nordlund follows him in this and actually uses the point to see where the play changes its focus. The first part is pretty low-grade gruesome melodrama, but it does set up the plot. In Rome the elevation of “honor” over all other values led to a devaluation of kinship and appalling brutality towards offspring. Tamora’s revenge on Titus for his slaying of her son leads to the rape and mutilation (hands off, tongue out) of Lavinia.
There is no let up until Act III when, Norlund says, Shakespeare moves in to re-assert the values of parental love both in Titus and in Aaron the Moor. Aaron has been the most unrepentant and cruel of villains but in the end he sacrifices himself to save his son by Tamora. This volte face has been puzzling to commentators. The reader can judge how much more Nordlung makes of it with the help of Sarah Hrdy on the evolution of parenting. I think a lot, as he does with Coriolanus in the famous scene where, as he prepares to destroy his home town of Rome, the great general is confronted by his manipulative mother and his family, including his little son, pleading to be spared.
King Lear is another test case on parental love and its vicissitudes. Who has not been puzzled by Cordelia’s response to the “love test” or by Lear’s demanding it? Does it make more sense if viewed through the lens of parent-offspring conflict, the corollary of Trivers’ parental investment theory? The parent-child relationship is always asymmetrical. This is at the root of it. Cordelia tells Lear she loves him “according to my bond, no more, no less.” What is going on here? Nordlund strikes out boldly from the text itself to argue Lear’s senility rather than systemic or political factors as the basis for his impulsive foolishness. He is the old parent in a panic. What of Cordelia.? What is her “bond”? It is what she “owes” her father, but it is also how she is “bound” to him. The asymmetry means that while parents must invest in their children, the reciprocal is by no means certain. There is always a negotiation. Goneril and Regan make profuse professions of boundless and unconditional love; Cordelia is honest and will not dissemble her feelings, and for this she suffers. Perhaps Nordlund could have benefited here from Frederick Turner’s discussion of bonds in Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics (OUP 1999) which one of the very few but surprising omissions. He finishes with the triangle of Gloucester and his two sons Edmund and Edgar, locked in a parallel conflict.
The mystery of romantic love (which Bernard Shaw defined as “overestimating the difference between one woman and another”) is rekindled in the chapter on the two “problem plays” Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well That Ends Well. Parental investment, divergent male and female strategies, and female choice set the analytical scene. I cannot possibly in these few words do justiuce to the richness of Nordlund’s analysis, but this is perhaps the most acute set of insights on the debate about Helen among the Trojans (was she worth it?) and the (again) puzzling motivations of the hero and heroine. If he truly loves her, why does Troilus not resist the Trojan surrendering of Cressida to the Greeks? And why does Cressida so easily seem to switch allegiances (to Diomedes) once there? Let the reader find out the answer; it would be giving away too much to tell it here.
All’s Well That Ends Well is its own problem. Why does Bertram not recognize, as everyone else does, the virtues and beauty of Helena? (Another Helen. These plays were probably written in sequence.) Why then does Helen take off in such relentless – and by the standards of the time such “unwomanly” - pursuit of Bertram? (And as an aside note that Nordlund is bound by no nonsense about the text as autonomous etc. He sees that the writer, as all writers, means us to treat these as real human characters with real, if puzzling, motivations.) In both cases, and in the subplots, Shakespeare’s secret is to work against the stereotypes of male desire and female choice. In understanding these though we understand better what is so stark and alarming about the plot. In both plays Shakespeare makes uncomfortable. Now we know better what arouses our discomfort.
Othello (with a side glance at A Winter’s Tale) is about jealousy – we know that. But what is jealousy? In both plays the male sexual jealousy seems pathalogical; there is no ground for it. Is it something that mate guarding, parental investment, paternity certainty and concealed ovulation, can explain? Obviously not, but these can tell us what the norm of male jealousy is and how Othello and Leontes represent an egregiously exaggerated version of the norm. This is as we saw where drama comes from. Aristotle’s “tragic flaw” is exactly this tendency to go off at a terrible tangent. Normative, predictable behavior is not interesting. If David Buss is right and we have a “mate-killing module” then Othello and Leontes would be boringly normal. Obviously Nordlund disagrees and so do I. A modern viewer might well ask why Othello didn’t just ask Desdemona about the damned handkerchief. Well, there would have been no play, just a domestic row. It is the very irrationality of the jealousy and the ease with which Iago plays upon it that drags everyone inexorably down and keeps us agog as we watch the psychological train wreck. It is extraordinary. Every man might be nervous about his wife’s fidelity, but this is ridiculous. And it is dramatic.
The biographical approach is out in literary analysis, but I can’t help noticing that there are zero correspondences between the life of William Shakespeare of Stratford and the characters in these plays (or any of the others). There are, however, numerous and often quite specific correlations with the life of Edward de Vere, the most plausible alternative candidate. In his youth he was Berowne, in his old age Lear (with the three daughters), and in between he was definitely the obsessively jealous Othello (with his own Iago) and the conflicted Hamlet (down to the pirates) – with everyone agreed that Polonius was his father-in-law Lord Burghley. A study of these correspondences might throw as much light as does Nordlund’s biocultural analysis, but this is not the place to pursue it. Enough to say that no petty review can do justice to the detail, the mastery, the sound judgment and logical argument of this book. We need only ask two questions:
- After reading the book do we understand Shakespeare better?
- Is this due to the author’s use of a biocultural perspective?
If the answer is a resounding “yes” to both, and it is, then that is enough to justify the effort and out attention to it. This is the best read on Shakespeare (whoever he was) and also on the very nature of biocultural analysis that I have seen in a long time.