By Thomas MacFaul
Renaissance Humanism constructed a myth of friendship within which males might be completely equivalent to each other, yet Shakespeare and different dramatists fast observed via this rhetoric and built their very own rules approximately friendship extra firmly according to a recognize for human distinction. They created a chain of extraordinary and sundry fictions for human connection, as frequently opposed as sympathetic, utilizing those as a way for people to say themselves within the face of social domination. when the myth of equivalent and everlasting friendship formed their considering, dramatists used friendship so much successfully as a fashion of shaping individuality and its boundaries. facing quite a lot of Shakespeare's performs and poems, and with many works of his contemporaries, this learn provides readers a deeper perception right into a an important element of Shakespeare's tradition and his use of it in artwork.
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Additional resources for Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
Sample text
1 The bridges are made by fictions of mutuality, which Shakespeare often knows to be fictions, and only temporary ones at that. In the larger sequence, each creation of a bridging fiction tends in turn to open another gap between the men. In the end a respect for distance and difference emerges, but this fatally compromises any idealized friendship, which (according to the Humanists) should be based on similarity, closeness and equality. 2 Whilst some have questioned the prevailing view that the Sonnets have only one male addressee,3 the sense of discontinuity may come from the fact that Shakespeare finds himself forced to reconstruct his addressee from poem to poem: the Sonnets succeed in conjuring moments of mutuality and intimacy which collapse in the larger sequence.
His self-assertion (paradoxically to the friend) is based on his possession of the friend, the implication being ‘you have all these things and glory in them; I bask in the reflected glory, and, what is more, I have you, the substance, as well as the attributes, to glory in. ’ The ‘general best’ he claims in line 8 develops this sense: All these I better in one general best. Thy love is better than high birth to me. (lines 8–9) 40 Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries But the poem cannot end on this note of self-aggrandizement (which resembles the idea of standing on giants’ shoulders).
In this poem, the idea of winning a game in which both win is fully explicit, but it is an undertone of the whole sequence. The young man is constantly used as an object of contemplation to mutual advantage. Shakespeare gradually comes to terms with the fact that he himself gets more advantage. He builds bridges to the young man, but these bridges remain his own. At first the advantage Shakespeare gets is merely a matter of improving his own mood through the contemplation of the young man. This can be Momentary mutuality in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 33 seen most clearly in the sequence of sonnets 29–31.