TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080789/08078900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.2 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 66

A Midsummer Night's Dream: the Sequel


By Pico Iyer


    There has been so much talk of late of the cold war ending
and the arms race receding, the whole geopolitical world
shifting on its very foundations, that we have had little time
to notice how quickly the battle of the sexes has been heating
up. These, in fact, are hard times for lovers; in the age of
AIDS and the palimony suit, an affair of the heart seems less
a matter of chemistry than of medicine and law and politics. The
pattern now, it appears, is boy meets girl (or sometimes boy),
quizzes on sexual history, comes clean with an update on his own
antisocial diseases and puts it all down in writing, for the
lawyers. Precoital tristesse, in short. Shall I compare thee to
a summer's day? O.K. But remember that in 1989, summer days are
apt to be murky with smog, uncomfortably hot thanks to the
greenhouse effect and filled with local sequels.

    What, then, one wonders on an idle summer evening, would
the Shakespeare of Midsummer Night's Dream make of us, and what
can we make of him? The first thing we notice when we see his
play today is how little love has changed, with all its harsh
geometry of triangles and unrequited passions; nor do we have
any difficulty recognizing its evergreen cast of characters: the
impatient suitor trying to persuade his girl to let him share
her bed, the fair-weather swain shifting in an instant from
rhapsody to rancor, the lovers plotting to escape a tyrannical
father (only to find that they cannot so easily escape
themselves). Puck, we realize, would make a dream host on The
Love Connection, and the rude mechanicals, rehearsing "most
obscenely and courageously," would surely be an instant hit on
prime time. We recognize, too, that the malaprop artists'
confusion of "paragon" and "paramour" is not an idle joke; the
idealizing of love is as old as broken hearts.

    In some respects, the comedy of musical beds and drugs and
knockabout buffoonery seems almost made for MTV. The scene of
two young men playing mixed doubles with their interchangeable
girlfriends would not seem strange to the kids in Bret Easton
Ellis novels, who fall into bed with anyone at all, scarcely
stopping to ascertain identity, or even sex. Titania's sudden
passion for ass-headed Bottom seems almost natural in the age
of Ecstasy, when someone who takes a tab of MDMA is liable to
open her heart to the first person she sees. And Pyramus and
Thisbe, wooing each other through a chink in a wall, might
almost be model paramours -- paragons, in fact -- for the "safe
sex" generation.

    Besides, "the course of true love never did run smooth," as
Lysander observes, and in seeing the muddle of our own times we
are apt to overlook the fact that it was ever so. Faithlessness
was hardly patented by Cressida, and even in Shakespeare's day,
the theaters were full of Roman numerals. Sequels follow
sequels. Romeo, let us not forget, was a heartstrong adolescent
unable to imagine any girl save Rosaline -- until he set eyes
on Juliet; and Juliet was a 13-year-old upstart who roundly
abused both her murdering Romeo and her devoted nurse.
Shakespeare himself addresses some of his most heartfelt
statements of love to a beautiful young man, and to a mysterious
"dark lady" who was not his wife.

    Yet even though the heart may not have changed, the
pressures and restrictions brought to bear on it have surely
done so. The whole thrust of Shakespeare's play, after all, is
that "lovers and madmen have such seething brains," that lovers,
in short, are too full of folly, too much aflame, too rich in
their imaginations. Nowadays, often, our problem seems just the
opposite. Prudence makes us measure out our hearts with coffee
spoons, and discretion is the better part of Valium. Love has
always been a messy affair, and that is precisely why it cannot
be easily legislated. Make romance a thing for lawyers, and
callousness and shame turn into crime and punishment. Yet today
we have girls suing their dates for standing them up, and
star-crossed ex-lovers -- the former partners of William Hurt,
Mike Tyson and Rock Hudson, to name but three -- counting the
emotional cost in millions. Litigation means never having to say
you're sorry.

    Technology, too, serves to make our liaisons more
dangerous. Rob Lowe was apparently uncovered by a videotape,
common-law suitors are often betrayed by photographs, and, in
response to all this, more and more people choose to interface,
date or even make love over the phone. If a modern Juliet were
to try to reach her lover before feigning her own death, she
might well hear, "Hi! This is Romeo! Nobody's here right now .
. ."

    All this is not to suggest that caution is a bad thing:
Romeo and Juliet died prematurely, after all. Romance has always
included some degree of calculation. Indeed, the very notion of
true love, according to many scholars, is a relatively recent
invention; in most places, in most times, marriage has been a
practical arrangement. Those who scoff at matrimonial ads in
Indian papers may have few qualms about placing SWM notices in
their local tabloids; a blind date is only an arranged marriage
in potentia. If disease and collision liability have put a crimp
in promiscuity, that may be all to the good. But just because
love cannot be free, does it have to be so costly?

    Perhaps in the end, then, the thing that separates us most
from Shakespeare is simply his belief in fairies who can solve
all our confusions by going above the heads of lawmakers. The
classic premise of comedy, and the ritual revelry from which it
springs, is of a story that concludes with a vision of unity,
of natural harmony. So, after all the lunacies and bumps of
Shakespeare's starlit night are over, the spirits come down to
put everything to right, and the lovers awaken with the morning
lark only to suspect that it was all a dream. Love is blind, and
its victims are mad, the poet suggests, but only for a night,
a brief, forgetful spell. Perhaps even in 1600 that might have
seemed an escapist thought; in 1989, however, a midsummer
night's dream may be our best hope of a happy ending.