Shakespeare's Language of Love

From almost the beginning of his career, Shakespeare seems to have been fascinated with language. In part, this fascination seems theoretical: in Love's Labour's Lost, for instance, when the Princess toys with the Forester, who is teaching her how to shoot a bow, she indicates by toying on the word "fair," that language contains inherent ambiguity, a point that he not infrequently visits later, from Portia's technical exploitation of the verbal imprecision of the bond in The Merchant of Venice to Feste's banter with Viola in Twelfth Night in which he deliberately takes her use of the preposition "by" in a meaning different from that which she intended.

But while Shakespeare is always alive to the theoretical implications of the matter of his plays, he never rests in them; the practical implications of these themes seem always uppermost in his mind. In Much Ado about Nothing, for instance, he seems quite alive to the theoretical questions of epistemology that troubled the Renaissance (and have disturbed our philosophical dreams ever since), but he shows still more interest in the practical problems posed by epistemological uncertainty in everyday life: if it is difficult to know another, then we may well--to our great cost--attach ourselves to those who while acting as friends end up inflicting considerable pain. This concern with the practical questions of life is perhaps the chief hallmark of Shakespeare and gives rise to his complex vision of life as it is in all its glorious and ungovernable particularity that the best of critics, from Samuel Johnson onward, have found at the heart of all his work.

And his concern with language, while sensitive to theoretical problems, is similarly practical. For the twentieth-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, language is in large part a fundamental expression of love, an extension of that concern of each individual with the other that precedes all philosophical thought, and such seems to be the same for Shakespeare. An almost randomly-selected minor line serves as a powerful clue: in Merchant, Gratiano says to Antonio in the first scene, "I'll tell thee what, Antonio--and 'tis my love that speaks," an admission that the primary point of language is to express love. Shakespeare returns to the point several times in the play, as when the villainous Shylock uses the language of the bond not to express love for another but for his own purposes, a pattern that reaches a climax in the court room, when implicit to Portia's argument is the idea that language, like more financial means of currency, should be used not primarily for one's own benefit but with an eye toward the welfare of others. Thus in 3.3, when Antonio wishes to speak to Shylock, the latter responds with a curt "I'll not hear thee speak, I'll have my bond." In the same way, in Much Ado, Don John, the sole locus of evil in the play, who desires to thwart others' love, greets Leonato by saying only "I am of few words, but I thank you." Beatrice and Benedick, while speaking a great deal, can never speak too much, for speech, rightly used, is an expression of love, something that Claudio and Hero, who say very little to one another in the play, learn to their great cost.

Of course Shakespeare would be alive to the importance of language, for he worked in words and was the greatest master of them in one of the world's richest languages. And his own torrent of words, pouring forth daily from the mouths of his characters in his plays, remind us that those words, whether we read them on the page or hear them spoken by men and women whose characters have been called into existence by Shakespeare's creating words, are themselves Shakespeare's act of love for all who will listen.