Shakespeare, Love and Language by David Schalkwyk (review)

David Schalkwyk's Shakespeare, Love and Language tackles "the large and impossibly complex topic" (1) of love and desire in Shakespeare. Its title notwithstanding, the book is less an argument about "language"—which Schalkwyk characterizes as central "in the pursuit of desire"—than it is a survey of Shakespeare's "multifaceted and nuanced vision of love and desire" (12). Schalkwyk's approach is "critically eclectic" (12): he gives us a Lucretian Midsummer Night's Dream and a Lacanian Two Gentlemen of Verona; Marion and Cavell inform readings of Othello; Todorov is paired with Romeo and Juliet. Echoes of Schalkwyk's earlier Shakespeare, Love and Service (2008) resound in his new discussion of Much Ado About Nothing. His book does broach a strong thesis in the final chapter: "for Shakespeare[,] desire is an emotion or affect" while "love is not merely a feeling . . . [and] cannot be reduced to any emotion" (7). But Schalkwyk seems less interested in constructing a definitive theoretical argument about any given play or plays than he is in testing and applying various theories in his readings of the plays—as if to say, "here are theoretical and historical frames through which I have tried to interpret the themes of love and desire in Shakespeare's language." Literary criticism often starts with such overtures, in conversation or in silent dialogue with oneself. Like Allan Bloom, Stanley Wells, or Maurice Charney, Schalkwyk has produced an honestly wrought set of reflections on the themes of love and sex in Shakespeare.

Before getting to the substance of my review, I would like to register some objections to Schalkwyk's use of my own work. Nowhere do I "divorce the social from the individual" in my reading of Romeo and Juliet or Othello, nor do I ever speak of "the individual's freedom to choose" (192) with respect to love or freedom. In my recent Love as Human Freedom (2017), I turn to love as a matrix through which to better grasp broad social-historical-institutional transformations, such as the advent of the bourgeois family, abortion rights and birth control, the rise of feminism, or the erosion of social opposition to same-sex marriage. But rather than try to "set the record straight" with respect to my own work, let me turn to my reservations about the final chapter of Schalkwyk's book to make a broader point about what I see as the limitations of the book's methodology.

Schalkwyk's last chapter presents what he calls a "culminating argument": "Love is not an emotion, although it does indeed involve a variety of often conflicting emotions" (210). Here, Schalkwyk ventures beyond thematic analysis, broaching an answer to the conceptually broad question "Is love an emotion?" (15), posed early in the book. The answer given on page 210 is telegraphed on page 15 in a way that explains the book's eclectic interpretive method: "Love cannot be reduced to desire, it cannot be encompassed as any single emotion … it is rather a disposition or attitude, a form of embodied action and behavior" (15). The methodological point I want to make amounts to this: many phenomena call for such a broad "conceptual" approach—for the right application of a concept, as in the question "Is love an emotion?" But not every puzzle can be solved in this way. And after reading Schalkwyk's book, I was not convinced that the broad conceptual question "Is love an emotion?" had opened a field of inquiry that might profitably change the way we read Shakespeare.

Schalkwyk writes, for instance, that "the person loved, as seen through the eyes of loving bestowal, remains irreducibly individual because he or she is seen with a vision unique to the person who loves him or her" (178). Or: we would not experience the same "anger, exasperation, impatience, embarrassment … about someone we did not love" (219). Such passages, of which there are many, offer truisms about human feelings, behaviors, and attitudes. But my suggestion is that—had these...