Love and courtship

Abstract

Men and women meet, match, marry, and mate. This is the eternal story which Shakespeare's comedies retell again and again: Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill: The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well. ( A Midsummer Night's Dream , 3.2.461-3) The details may vary considerably – and all is not always well – but in every comedy this basic formula remains the same. Sometimes men chase after women. Sometimes women chase after men. Often men pursue women who pursue other men who pursue women, giving us the mad merry-go-rounds of love we find in plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream or The Two Gentlemen of Verona . Frequently women turn themselves into men for a while, like Julia, Viola, or Rosalind. Less often men get themselves turned into women, like Falstaff, or, like Bottom, into beasts. But even if their actual shape or sex remains unchanged, everyone is in some way altered by love, transmuted into something rich and strange, or “metamorphis'd” like Proteus and Valentine ( Two Gentlemen of Verona , 1.1.66, 2.1.30). The experience of passion changes everything: one's view of the world, of the beloved, even – or above all – one's own sense of self. Characters who, out of youth, inexperience, or disinclination had hitherto remained untouched by love suddenly find themselves caught up in the maelstrom of desire where everything is thrown into moral and emotional chaos before falling into a new Gestalt of socialized couples which represents the final (and, with luck, stable) product of this mysterious process of human natural selection.