Ii monologue — Shakespeare's treatment of love & marriage, and other essays

The norm of love lent itself both to comic and to tragic situation, but only within somewhat narrow limits. The richness, depth and constancy of the passion precluded a whole world of comic effects. It precluded the comedy of the coquette and the prude, of the affected gallant and the cynical roué, of the calf-lover and the doting husband; the comedy of the fantastic tricks played by love under the obsession of pride, self-interest, meticulous scruple, or superstition. Into this field Shakespeare made brilliant incursions, but it hardly engaged his rarest powers, and to large parts of it his ‘universal’ genius remained strange. We have only to recall, among a crowd of other examples, Moreto’s Diana (_El Desden con el Desden_), Molière’s Alceste and Célimène, Congreve’s Millamant, in Shakespeare’s century; or, in the modern novel, a long line of figures from Jane Austen to _The Egoist_ and Ibsen’s _Love’s Comedy_--to recognize that Shakespeare, with all the beauty, wit and charm of his work, touched only the fringes of the Comedy of love.