Transcript for Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare's Views on Love

0. Introduction

I always find myself most excited about a girl when I’m still trying to win her over. I’m daydreaming about her, I’m nervous when she doesn’t text me back, I bubble with joy when she does. And yet when I do win her over, that type of excitement fades away. For me, the relationship has always been less passionate than the courtship. And it turns out I’m not alone in this pathology. It turns out that this isn’t too far from how Shakespeare himself wrote about romance.

My guest today is one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars, Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, and we’re here to discuss Shakespeare’s somewhat bleak view on love.

Now that’s quite a surprising claim, because we think about Shakespeare as the great playwright of love. It turns out he is, but only for a very specific type of love, the love of the pursuit of the honeymoon phase like Romeo and Juliet. But when his characters settle down, the actual marriages in Shakespeare are almost always terrible. Whether it’s Brutus, who doesn’t share his intimate thoughts with Portia, whether it’s Leontes, who wrongly accuses Hermione, or whether it’s Othello, who literally kills Desdemona with his own hands.

So that’s the puzzle. What do we make of the fact that the great playwright of love doesn’t write any good marriages? What is he trying to tell us about what we can expect from our relationships?

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1. Shakespeare's Bad Marriage

Johnathan Bi: In this interview, I wanna focus on Shakespeare’s love life and how that love life influenced his writings and his depiction of love in his plays. So Shakespeare when he was 18, married Anne Hathaway who’s 26, in Stratford. And your claim is in your book, that given everything we know about Shakespeare’s life, this was not a happy marriage. Why is that? 

Prof. Stephen Greenblatt: Well, I think there’s a number of reasons to think it’s not a happy marriage. They had three children in very close succession, and then no further children. In a world in which women, families normally had as many children as possible and stack them as it were, one after the other, three children by Elizabethan standards is a little bit like the Chinese one child family. This is a very dangerous gamble against the future because of the level of child mortality, so that’s unusual.

Secondly, that suggests that he wasn’t cohabiting necessarily. Shakespeare doesn’t bring his wife and children to London when he moves to London, and we could say that Stratford was a nicer town, more salubrious. His parents were living there, but that happens to be… We happen to have the wills of many of the people who were involved in the theater, actors, playwrights, and from those wills and also from other documentary sources, we can find out a lot about their domestic lives. And there’s overwhelming evidence that people in the theater world, wherever they came from, moved their families to London when they moved to London. Shakespeare doesn’t do it. Well, that’s interesting.

Then Shakespeare’s sonnets, which whatever else they are, the sonnets of the young, the love songs to the young man and the love songs to the dark lady, whatever else they are, they’re not written to Anne Hathaway, they’re written to somebody else. And they’re among the most remarkable love poems ever written, and no one thinks that they were written somehow before Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway.

In Shakespeare’s will, in the first draft of his will which he wrote when he was very ill, probably understanding that he was not gonna make it, he didn’t leave anything to his wife of many, many years. He didn’t address her with any of the terms of endearment. Again, you can look at dozens of wills in the period, and people say, “to my dearest wife,” “to my beloved wife,” “to my marvelous spouse,” and so forth, not a word of this kind about his wife. And then interleaved, there’s “to my wife Anne,” not “to my beloved wife Anne,” or maybe it just says “to my wife, the second best bed.”