Did Shakespeare Come Up With Love?

In 16th century Feudal England, in a society where your existence in life was ordained by God, personal crises, what undermines many illnesses like schizophrenia and manic depression, were uncommon. You can’t really fail at what you are because your identity in a system like that was secured at birth. In the new system, the system of social mobility (change in social status) and ambition, choice becomes a part of the equation. The responsibility falls off of God’s shoulders and onto yours. Suddenly, you can fail at becoming what you want to become with no one to blame but you. This was the bittersweet upshot of the new modernity. While many people were reaping the positive rewards of climbing the social ladders, others were plunging into personal crises by failing to do so. No longer secured by the clasp of your birth, personal identity needed something to balance out the dark side of modernity. Enter William Shakespeare.

Around 1593, at the height of this cultural upheaval, Shakespeare writes Romeo and Juliet. In this play we have basically the rulebook; the best definition of what we know today as love. No text before this elevates love to such an incredible height, no text gives it the same quality and value in language, the most important of symbolic systems.

Shakespeare’s mind was an extraordinary close coordination with the world around him. He could see what was happening the city of London. Like most cities, it played host to a number of the mentally disabled, most of whom had nowhere to go and so remain homeless. Shakespeare sees it all and we get amazing diagnostic insights into these conditions in plays like Hamlet and King Lear.

In Romeo and Juliet, he offers a solution. Love, as the poet writes in Sonnet 116 is “the star to every wandering bark.” In other words, the North Star to every wandering mind. Shakespeare effectively establishes love’s transformative power; a power for the average citizen that it did not have before. This kind of love is identity affirmed. To find a Romeo or a Juliet is to find someone who will reinforce your own positive identity as a person in love.

In extremely powerful symbolic logic, its power evidenced by the sheer turmoil of heartbreak, and Shakespeare being a writer for the common man makes it something that is applicable to anyone, rich or poor, wherever you stand in the now chaotic social hierarchy. In essence, and as you know it, Shakespeare invented love.

Down the generations, we can see the impact. Shakespeare has done more to define the current reality still than any other person or group of people since. He brought the culture into his mind at a critical historical moment, dissected it, thought through the logic, and expressed it to all of us in achingly beautiful verse.

Now you may wonder about texts like The Odyssey, Plato’s Symboissum, or even the film 500 Days of Summer because there are accounts in those of love, or it may nag at you that what I wrote is true; that love is somehow a sham, a bogus. As for these illustrations, it’s perhaps worth it to say that both affection and love were around before Shakespeare but the quality of love as we conceive of it today, the Hollywood-ness of it, the applicability to all, the identity-affirming power is what Shakespeare brought into the culture. As for feeling that love is a sham or false, you shouldn’t. What you feel when you’re in love is completely and totally real and the identity of affirming power of it is real too.

Shakespeare is not a genius because of his intelligence, he’s a genius because of his powerful imagination, his symbolic imagination, his ability to bound through steps of emerging logics and bring out new conclusions. What’s incredible is that we all possess the same exact ability. That’s the spectacular interplay between culture and the mind. The latter can revolutionize the former. We only have to take those symbols back into our mind, and like the great author, think them through again and again.

Copyright © Mohanad Zakaria, 2018