Love and Service in Twelfth Night and the Sonnets

Abstract

theoretical transformation of Shakespeare studies some twenty years ago, scholars have been reluctant to engage with either the word or the concept in Shakespeare's work. A pair of terms that now regularly do service in its placepower and desire-have replaced love. The word is impossibly general and vague, while power and desire, properly theorized, have promised to strip of its murkiness and sentimentality. They have enabled us to shift our attention from a relatively naive and common-sense obsession with what characters feel to the structural conditions that allow such feelings to be manipulated in relations of power and subjection. Desire and power thus assure entry into the history and politics of sexual relations that positively debars. Their critical keenness permits them to reveal the structural reality underlying talk of love. But we need to take care when we reduce one concept to another. Such a transformation, whereby one argues that love is not love-being instead desire, formations of power, ideological obfuscation of real relations, and so on-runs the risk of simplifying or distorting the concept as it does its work in the complex interactions of Shakespeare's poetry and plays. Such reductions may be analytically illuminating, but when they begin to supplant the original concept, they generally lose more than they gain. It is curious that now, within a critical milieu so committed to an historical understanding of texts, we have replaced words that Shakespeare uses frequently with ones he seldom uses and whose theoretical inflections he would have found strange. Rather than offering a refreshed, overarching concept of in Shakespeare or the early modern period, or even attempting to recover a unifying notion peculiar to Shakespeare's time, I wish to look more carefully at how the word is used in Twelfth Night and in Sonnets 26, 57, 58, and 120. Love is what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a family-resemblance concept: that is to say, it has no single, core meaning in all of its separate uses.1 Instead it produces a network of meanings, each of which may in turn be