FoodSexLit

This morning I read a blog posting about Valentine’s Day brunch, where the writer suggested making crepes for breakfast to cultivate romance.  I totally agree that crepes are a romantic and sexy food, but as I read the entry, posted that morning, I thought, I needed to read this a week ago.  If I am to make a meal for a lover, I need time to plan, to shop, let alone some space to savor the imaginative part of the process—the part where I luxuriate in anticipation of the food, the presentation, the conversation.   So this particular piece came too late for me this year.

But then I thought about my own blog, this blog, and how many entries I started to write this week about/for Valentine’s Day that I never finished or perfected.  Turns out Valentine’s Day is a muse of sorts for me, since I’m always thinking about love.  And sex.  And romance.  And courtship.

Like this week, when I looked up the word “courtship” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I discovered that Shakespeare was the first writer to use the word.  Not only did he coin the term (in 1588, he used to word in Love’s Labor’s Lost to describe “Behavior or action befitting a court or courtier; courtliness of manners”), of the eight definitions given, Shakespeare was the first to use the word for four.

The definition I am most interested in, however, was the sixth one: “the action or process of paying court to a woman with a view to marriage; courting, wooing.”  Shakespeare used the word with this meaning in the Merchant of Venice, when Antonio says, “Be merry, and imploy your chiefest thoughts To courtship, and such faire ostents of loue” (II.vii).  Antonio is the merchant of the title—and he is bidding his dear friend, Bassanio, to leave Venice and go to Belmont, where Portia, Bassanio’s love and “an heiress richly left” waits to be won.  We don’t actually hear Antonio say these words—one of his friends, Salerio, is telling another friend about Antonio’s words.  We also hear, just before that, that all of Antonio’s fortune has been lost at sea.  And that puts a huge weight on his words to Bassanio: Antonio’s life.

Portia and her fortune constitute one of the two plots of Merchant—a sort of fairy-tale twin to the more grisly plot you may be more familiar with.  Just as in Grimm’s original fairytales there are some more macabre bits (like Cinderella’s stepsister cutting off her toes to jam them into the glass slipper), so Merchant has a nasty underbelly: Shylock, a moneylender, agrees to loan Antonio money—3,000 ducats— which Antonio will then lend to Bassanio.  Bassanio will use the money to outfit himself to court Portia.  The collateral for the loan, should Antonio not be able to pay Shylock back, is a pound of flesh, taken from wherever Shylock pleases, which later he will decide must be from the area around Antonio’s heart.

I taught Merchant last quarter, and while I found myself fascinated by the love Antonio has for Bassanio, by his perfect (and metaphorical) sacrifice of his heart, I found myself even more fascinated by the fairy-tale part of the play—by the lottery Portia’s dead father sets up for her suitors.  Potential suitors are presented three caskets: one gold, one silver, and one lead.  One of the caskets holds Portia’s portrait—that, of course, is the casket that wins her hand and her fortune.  The stakes, as in the Shylock-Antonio plot, are high: if a potential suitor chooses the wrong casket, he must swear never to marry.

I found myself drawn to Shakespeare because I started to realize, after teaching Othello and Hamlet a few times, that the plays have much to teach us about love and its attendants: courtship, sexuality, and marriage, to be exact.  And the symbol for love that I find myself meditating on the most from all of the plays I’ve taught so far are those caskets in Merchant.

The gold casket bears this inscription: “Who Chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.”  When Portia’s first suitor, the Prince of Morocco, opens the casket gold casket, he finds a death’s head.  The silver casket claims that “Who Chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.”  The second suitor, the Prince of Aragon, selects silver: in the casket, he finds a fool’s head.

Bassanio, our hero, chooses the lead casket.  Before he chooses, Portia plays a song for him—a song where the first three lines end in words that rhyme with “Lead”:

Tell me where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart or in the head?

How begot, how nourished?

Reply, reply.

I read the song, and especially the first three lines, as an act of courtship by Portia, who, after watching Morocco and Aragon, knows which casket holds her “counterfeit” (III.ii)—in other words, her likeness.   I love that word for her painted image—a counterfeit.  What Portia and Bassanio both have, at first, is merely fancy—they like each others’ looks.  They don’t know the “real” each other yet.  So the song (with its heavy end rhymes) and the casket, (in its contents) bear both invitations and warnings.

Without the song, I don’t think Bassanio would have picked the lead casket, which reads “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.”  The language itself is daunting, say nothing of the material the casket consists of.  It’s the word “hazard” that gives a reader pause—and, as a scholar of love, it’s the word “hazard” that grabs my attention.

Bassanio is a gambler, of course, and he’s in serious debt, which is why he asks Antonio for the money to court Portia in the first place.  I’m sure he understands the part about “hazarding” all you have, with its connotations of risk, because he’s already done it over dice.  Love is always a gamble because you can’t be sure of you’ll get your return.  Your relationship may not ever move from infatuation (the “fancy”) to real love.

“Hazard” has another shade of meaning: the third casket is lead—poisonous and hazardous to humans.  Love, at least at first, can be mortal.

There’s a final piece to the lead casket, and it has to do with magic and metaphor.  Alchemy was still being practiced at the time.  Incidentally, the Renaissance made several decisive blows between what they called magic and what we call science—they divided chemistry from alchemy, preserving one for the field of science and relegating the other to what the Western world now dismisses as magic.  Alchemists, of course, changed lead into gold.  So the lead casket gives us an extremely powerful metaphor for love—you take something hazardous and poisonous to the human system and transform it, through some mysterious process, into something beautiful and valuable.

It’s becomes a sort of paradox, because of course, it brings us back to the gold casket—death.  But here’s the difference: if you choose lead and give all you have, hazard all you have, by the time you get to the gold, you know you have the real thing.   It’s not because you wanted what many men desire, it’s not because you deserve it.  It’s because you risked the self.

Anyway, I could go on here, but I’ll save that for another blog entry.  Because I want to talk about my most recent Shakespearience.

This quarter, I’m teaching Much Ado About Nothing, and in tracing the love affair between two of the main characters, Beatrice and Benedick, I found myself both shocked and excited to discover that Benedick undergoes one of the most beautiful and substantive transformations in all of Shakespeare.

Early on in the play, we find out there is a kind of “merry war” (I.i) between Beatrice and Benedick, and that Benedick’s male friendships are very important to him.  Beatrice, upon finding out he is home from the war, asks if he has a new best friend, what the kids these days are calling a “man-crush” or a “bromance“: “Who is his companion now?  He hath every month a new-sworn brother” (I.i).

Benedick’s new “bestie” is Count Claudio, who loves Hero (and Beatrice’s cousin.)  In the first scene, after Beatrice and Hero (and everyone else who I haven’t mentioned for sake of this blog entry going on forever) leave the stage and they are alone, Claudio asks Benedick about Hero, and eventually confesses that he would like to make her his wife, Benedick is dismayed.  When the Prince, Don Pedro, (and close friend of both men) comes in the room, he promises to woo Hero—court her—for Claudio.

Benedick’s response to all this talk of love and marriage to rail against them, and when Don Pedro gently teases him by saying, “I shall see thee ere I die look pale with love” (I.i.), Benedick responds that while he may pale with “anger, with sickness, or with hunger,” he will never be pale with love.  “Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, pick out my eyes with a ballad-maker’s pen and hang me up at the door of a brothel house for the sign of blind Cupid.”

Translation: if Benedick ever does pale with love (rather than from a hangover), he wants the prince to take the pen that he would have used to write a song to Beatrice (the typical Petrarchan convention was to praise a woman’s beauty), gouge out his eyes with said pen, and then put his blind body over the door of a house of prostitution.  In this way, Benedick will represent Cupid, the god of eros—the god of love.

Perfect for Valentine’s Day.

After the Prince woos Hero for Claudio, he decides that Beatrice and Benedick would be a good match, and he asks Claudio, Hero, and the other characters to help him “undertake one of Hercules’ labors . . . . to bring Signor Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection” (II.i).  A the very end of the scene, he says, “If we can do this, Cupid is no longer an archer.  His glory shall be ours, for we are the only love gods.”  Love Gods.  Yes.  We will be love gods.

Of course, they succeed, because, as my students love to point out, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.  Love and hate are powerful energies—one leads to transformation—the other to mutation.  We’ve all been so angry at a former lover or a former spouse, I’m sure, only to realize that perhaps the hatred is an expression of all that strong feeling.  Benedick chooses love, and is transformed—translated—by the end of the play.

Of course, the plot works, and both Beatrice and Benedick discover they love the other person.  However, they haven’t told each other, or anyone, about their changed feeling.  Later in the play, after a disastrous (failed) wedding, when Claudio publicly humiliates Hero because of a supposed infidelity, Benedick finds Beatrice, asking her tenderly if she has been crying “all this while.”  After they declare their love for each other (which is currently my absolute FAVORITE scene in Shakespeare), he tells her, “Come, big me do anything for thee” (IV.1).  Beatrice’s response is immediate: “Kill Claudio.”

Kill Claudio.

Beatrice wants Benedick to kill his best friend, and, while his first response is “Ha, not for the wide world,” after she assures him that she does think Claudio wronged Hero.  “Enough,” Benedick says grimly: “I am engaged.”

Note the double meaning of “Engaged” here—Benedick will engage Claudio (the formal language of the duel) and it’s a sort of symbolic engagement to Beatrice.  And since Claudio is such a noted swordsman, Benedick is signing up for almost certain death.  And in my current Second-Favorite scene in Shakespeare, Benedick goes to Claudio and challenges him to a duel—and he removes himself from the Prince’s service.  For a soldier during that time, he’s just given up his livelihood.   Talk about giving and hazarding all you have.

Of course, everything works out in the end.  But I am so struck, today, and on Friday, when I showed a film clip of the scene to my students, by Benedick’s courage, that I am humbled and honored and inspired.

Last year, when I taught Romeo and Juliet (incidentally, the play where Shakespeare used the word courtship for the second time), swept up in the beautiful language (R and J has the best love poetry, I think, of any Shakespeare play) and in that couple’s supreme acts of bravery (there are many), I offered my students an extra-credit opportunity: to do something courageous in the name of love.  To get the points, they just had to write a paragraph or so about what action they took.  It was so successful I decided to do it again this year, for all my classes.

I told my students that I only offer this to my Winter Quarter students—that this is an extra credit opportunity I only offer once a year, because of course, Valentine’s Day only comes once a year.  Which brings me back to the beginning of this piece, where I was complaining about the blog entry about Valentine’s Day posted on Valentine’s Day.

I’d like to extend the challenge to you, my reader, as something to think about for the year: to do something courageous in the name of love.  Turns out I’m just as bad, if not worse, because Valentine’s Day has just passed.

Except I don’t think it’s too late.  In high school, one of my favorite books was 1001 Ways to be Romantic.  Even though I lost my copy years ago (ironically, I lost it in my divorce), the author, Gregory Godeck, calls Valentine’s Day “obligatory romance.”  You have 364 days of the year to be romantic, and those days are the important ones.

I deliberately leave the nature of the courageous act open-ended.  If you are married, so much the better, because the vows of marriage, from what I understand, are more a contract of daily renewal, rather than something fixed and static.  My parents, with their weekly romantic dinners, are testament to that.

If you are single, as I am, you can make a commitment to courageous courtship, whether marriage is the goal or not: pre-pay an Americano for the cute guy you flirt with every morning at the local coffee shop.  Talk to the cute guy in your anthropology class—suggest a study date, or, if you’re feeling daring, a dinner date.

That said, a courageous act in the name of love doesn’t have to be prompted by erotic desire.  It could be an act of love—to a friend, to a family member, to a stranger you’ll never see again.  And a courageous act in the name of love could also be something tough: like telling the truth you know your best friend doesn’t want to hear.

Let’s perform more acts of courage in the name of love—to friends, to lovers, to strangers, to people we might not ever see again.  Because we too are the only love gods—because we do have enough time– because we 264 days that are not Valentine’s Day– because we just might turn the poison of lead into the gold we desire.

As a further act of courage, in the name of Jen-Love, you might write about what you do as a response to this blog.

I’m sure, as soon as you read the words “courageous act in the name of love” something instantly occurred to you.  Like when I issued this challenge in my creative writing class, one of my students looked extremely anxious and raised her hand.  “Could it be killing something?” she asked.  “Like I was going to make crab for my fiancé and I know he loves lobster.  Could I get a live lobster and kill it and cook it for our him Valentine’s Day dinner?  Could that be my act of bravery?”

I nodded and smiled, told her yes, indeed.