Playing Shakespeare's Beautiful People

Introduction: “O beauty, where is thy faith …” (T&C, 5.2.80)¹

Louis Fantasia

“... culture is a battleground where some narratives win and others lose …”

Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang

“The Dominance of the White Male Critic’’

—New York Times (Opinion) July 5, 2019

Beauty, according to Webster’s online dictionary, is “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit: loveliness.”² The online Cambridge dictionary says pretty much the same thing: beauty is “the quality of being pleasing, especially to look at, or someone or something that gives great pleasure, especially when you look at it.”³

We shall, I promise you, get to other definitions and conceptions of beauty, but for the moment let us consider that, in both definitions above, beauty is first of all a “quality,” or an inherent feature, or essential characteristic, of a person, place, or thing that gives pleasure to the spirit, mind, or senses. There is some debate as to whether or not there is a single locus or “beauty center”⁴ in the brain, or whether it is a process of multiple regions of the brain coming together instantaneously to label this song or that painting or these people as “beautiful.” In either case, the judgment, in these definitions, seems to depend on whether the quality or aggregate of qualities pleases me, the viewer or listener. And, how do I know I am being “pleased”? Is it a sensual response? An intellectual one? A spiritual one? Some combination of the three? Does my response depend on how “refined” my physical, spiritual, and intellectual senses are through, say, education and travel, or exposure to arts and culture? Are there hierarchies of beauty, and if so, who determines these hierarchies, and am I a better person for aspiring (?) to the upper strata of this connoisseurship? And if someone does not see beauty where I do, or worse, claims it in some person or place or object that I consider repulsive or repugnant or just plain ugly, what are we to think of these barbarians? And ...

And thus you see the landmines waiting for any editor foolish enough to assemble an anthology on beauty and Shakespeare in the early 21st century! However, let us continue. Contemporary critics, such as Elizabeth B. Pearce, argue that beauty is:

[a]‌ social construct, based on societally agreed upon ideas that have been ingrained into our systems and our psyches over time and have been accepted as the norm. These ideas of beauty slowly become embedded into our minds on a micro level, and affect the way we operate. There is a bi-directional relationship with societal forces including media, marketing, businesses, government, and other institutions … which reinforce the dominant culture’s idea of beauty. (Pearce)⁵

Others see “beauty” or, as Richard O. Prum put it, the “evolution of beauty”⁶ as a process of Darwinian natural or, more precisely, sexual selection:

Beauty … does not have to be a proxy for health or advantageous genes. Sometimes beauty is the glorious but meaningless owering of arbitrary preference. Animals simply nd certain features—a blush of red, a feathered ourish—to be appealing. And that innate sense of beauty itself can become an engine of evolution, pushing animals toward aesthetic extremes. In other cases, certain environmental or physiological constraints steer an animal toward an aesthetic preference that has nothing to do with survival whatsoever … (Jabr)⁷

Shakespeare uses “beauty,” “beautiful,” or “beauteous” more than 350 times in his plays and poems. While it might be nice to know what definition he had in mind, it is more important that we understand what we mean when we use the word today. Ferris Jabr again:

Philosophers, scientists and writers have tried to dene the essence of beauty for thousands of years. The plurality of their efforts illustrates the immense difculty of this task. Beauty, they have said, is: harmony; goodness; a manifestation of divine perfection; a type of pleasure; that which causes love and longing; and M = O/C (where M is aesthetic value, O is order and C is complexity)” (Jabr).

Shakespeare sets up hierarchies of beauty through which his plays (and poems) move forward by what Francis Fergusson called an “analogy of action.”⁸ Juliet is presumed to be more beautiful than the never-seen Rosaline, so Romeo “trades up” and rumbles break out in Verona. As You Like It has multiple analogs of beauty—Rosalind/Celia, Audrey/Phoebe, Orlando and his brother Oliver—pushing the action forward through the forest. Who is more “beautiful,” Helena or Hermia? What about Titania or Hippolyta (or Thisbe or the boy Oberon wants, for that matter)? The male body is not immune from valuations of “beauty,” often with homosexual, or bisexual, or pan- sexual connotations as in Twelfth Night. Shakespeare, drawing on Classical and Renaissance conceptions of beauty, goodness, and morality, is fascinated by the contradictions between external beauty and moral or spiritual corruption. He loathes “seeming” where one’s beautiful outward appearance hides the rot within, as in Measure for Measure:

ISABELLA. Ha! … Seeming, seeming!

I will proclaim thee, Angelo, look for ’t.

Sign me a present pardon for my brother

Or with an outstretched throat I’ll tell the world aloud

What man thou art. (MM, 2.4.161-66)

Shakespeare’s beautiful people apparently benefit from what today’s social scientists call the “beauty quotient,” where beautiful students get better grades and beautiful employees get bigger raises. Andrew Ross Sorokin, writing in The New York Times, notes that “as shallow as it may be, better-looking people have been shown in various studies to have higher self-esteem and more charisma, are considered more trustworthy and are better negotiators” (qu. Eisold).⁹ If we wind up being betrayed by beauty, we have no one to blame today, or in Shakespeare’s day, but ourselves. “If we look at the deeper lesson,” psychoanalyst Ken Eisold writes, “we see a society infatuated with appearances, reliant on superficial impressions, all too willing to make bad decisions—and then blame the person who turned out to be not what he or she seemed” (Eisold).

HAMLET. Are you fair?

OPHELIA. What means your Lordship?

HAMLET. That if you be honest and fair, your honesty

should admit no discourse to your beauty.

OPHELIA. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?