Having just finished rereading Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra for class next week, I am reminded yet again of the absurdity of so many of our "epic love stories," this one (and, of course, Romeo and Juliet) included. In particular, I am irritated by our response to the tragic love stories with which we we are inculcated by literature classes and movies.
These two of Shakespeare's - along with, let's say, Gone with the Wind - are perhaps the ones that aggravate me the most. It is not that they are poorly written or badly presented. Not at all. It's the placid insipidity of the characters and their utterly irrational behavior that drives me insane.
Like Jane Austen's Eleanor of Sense and Sensibility, I do not see the point of dying for love, unlike her more emotional sister Marianne, who can think of nothing more grand. I just don't see the beauty of dying for love. Dying to protect those you love, certainly. But dying for love betrays a kind of insipid and ignorant melodrama.
But I - as has often been determined - am cold and dead inside. I was never happier during my reading of Gone with the Wind than when Rhett walked out. The best part of Madame Bovary was when Emma finally died the horrible death she deserved. I desperately wanted Gwendolen of Daniel Deronda to drown when she was shoved off the boat. If Romeo had been killed by Tybalt at the beginning of the play, or if Rosaline had opened her bloody window, or if that plague Mercutio mentions had struck a little earlier... You get the idea.
I am particularly vexed by melodrama in young love - R&J aren't even old enough to drive in contemporary society - though in Antony and Cleopatra, one cannot help but think that two people of their age really ought to know better. At least R&J have the excuse of "young and stupid."
Ultimately, though, it isn't the works or their authors who drive me insane. It's the cultural response. We name our children and our pets after Romeo and Juliet, we happily quote "Quite frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," as though it were the most romantic mantra in the world, and we get starry-eyed over the great love of Antony and Cleopatra.
Wake up, people. Scarlett and Rhett made out the best of the lot, because at least they LIVED. Romeo, Juliet, Antony, and Cleopatra all DIED. By dagger and sword and snake. Dead. All of them. Not exactly a fairy-tale ending.
And you know what? They don't get to live happily ever after. They don't achieve the fulfillment of their love because they're dead. Death is not a good way to go about finding love. In fact, it's pretty much the best way to not find it at all.
So when the editors of the edition of Antony and Cleopatra suggest that Antony and Cleopatra win in the end because their love allows them to transcend the petty concerns of the world... I call bullsh*t.
Antony and Cleopatra caused widespread war, neglect, civil and international conflict, infidelity, slavery, and an epidemic of suicide (Enobarbus, Eros, Charmian, Iras, to say nothing about themselves). They were screwups of royal proportions. So don't go immortalizing their love story as if it were the great lauding of love. It's not. It's about how two daft people should not let their privates govern their countries. You can't even definitively prove they did love each other. Only that the gratification of their private desires completely screwed both Rome and Egypt and only got hauled back out of the muck because Caesar Octavian was a serious bad*ss.
Ah, yes. The joys of love. The complete obliteration of all you've ever worked for so you can stab yourself dejectedly when some strumpet fakes her own death, only to discover she's not dead at all, and then you die anyway. Oh, yeah, she dies, too. And so do your friends. And her friends. And then the guy you were fighting wins.
Personally, I'd rather not.
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