we that are young

“Methinks I am a prophet new inspired And thus expiring do foretell of him: His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last, For violent fires soon burn out themselves; Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short; He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes; With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder: Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.”

“In an essay published in the 1980s, Jacqueline Rose has discussed the ‘fantasy of the woman’ as a symptom of reading with respect to Hamlet and Measure for Measure. How far, she asks, ‘has the woman been at the centre, not only of the internal drama’ (by which she means the Shakespearean play-text as represented) 'but also of the critical drama–the controversy about meaning and language–which each of these plays has provoked?’ By way of answering these 'accusations,’ she examines the modern critical tradition that fetishizes women’s sexuality both as site of interpretation and as symptom of the problematic hermeneutics of each play. Whether discussing the legendary Oedipality of Hamlet or the 'obsessive,’ 'hysterical,’ or 'saintly’ Isabella, male critics have longed to fix their readings (and their difficulties in reading) on female characters. Hence a textual woman can be constituted both as source of coherence and as principle of disorder, a center and a verge, damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.”

“In the early moments of their love, Romeo and Juliet seek to mold social reality to their changed perceptions and desires by manipulating the verbal signifiers of that reality. But between Romeo’s banishment and their deaths, both learn in different ways that not the word but the spirit can change reality. Juliet becomes a woman and Romeo a man not through changing a name but by action undertaken in a transformed sense of the self requiring courage and independence.”

“Converted by the sight of the lovers and the revelation of their heroic fidelity, Capulet offers his hand to Montague, sealing the bond of marriage between the two families in a dowry of love, not gold. Both families are bereft of an heir, and the exchange of promises that each father shall erect a statue of the other’s child, in gold, symbolizes the alchemical transmutation of worldly wealth, property, earth, into the spiritual riches of the heart and the imagination. When the play ends the image of the lovers lying side by side remains in the mind’s eye, the passionate speed of young love commemorated already in sculpture, an art which is free from the dimension of time. The youth of the lovers is made immutable, the violence and darkness in their story absorbed in the golden, still image.”

“Why give you me this shame? Think you I can a resolution fetch From flowery tenderness? If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms.”

“You have to implicate the audience. They’ve got to squirm, not just over what happens, but because they did nothing about it. They had all the knowledge – this guy was not to be trusted – and they just sat there. People have jumped onstage to stop Iago, wrestled him to the ground. One actor in the 19th century was killed in the part, shot by an audience member. I’m glad that didn’t happen. Maybe I just wasn’t good enough.”

“In King John, Shakespeare subjects masculine voices to skeptical feminine interrogation, and the history he represents becomes problematic, an arena for contending interests to compete and for unauthorized voices to be heard and to challenge the voices of patriarchal authority. Like Margaret and Joan, the disorderly women in the first tetralogy, women in King John usurp masculine prerogatives. Elinor announces in the opening scene that she is “a soldier” (I.i.150), and her role is no anomaly in a play where “ladies and pale-visag’d maids/Like Amazons come tripping after drums,” changing “their thimbles into armed gauntlets…their needl’s to lances, and their gentle hearts/To fierce and bloody inclination” (V.ii.154–8). Unlike Talbot, who found Joan’s presence on the battlefield unnatural, the men in King John seem to accept the fact of warrior women, even though the presence of women seems to lead to gender blurring. The English soldiers, for example, are said to have both “ladies’ faces” and “fierce dragons’ spleens” (II.i.68). When the Earl of Salisbury weeps, the Dauphin declares that he values those “manly drops” above the “lady’s tears” that have melted his heart in the past (V.ii.47–9). Both contenders for the English crown—the bold and warlike John no less than his infant rival—find their authority compromised by subjection to the domination of powerful, vociferous mothers, and the King of France bows to the threats of a mother church. Unwilling to break his truce with John lest they “make…unconstant children” of themselves (III.i.243), he finally agrees to do both after Pandulph threatens that “the Church, our mother, [will] breathe her curse,/A mother’s curse, on her revolting son” (III.i.256–7).”