Playing Shakespeare's Seemers and Deceivers

Louis Fantasia

It’s not a lie if you believe it.

Seinfeld

People lie. They deceive. They withhold information, augment, embellish, and pretend to be something, or someone, they are not. Sometimes they get away with it. Usually they don’t. Reasons, motives, and excuses are found in the studies of ethics, morals, philosophy, psychology, pathology, forensics and even more! Fortunately, since this an anthology devoted to Shakespeare, I hope I will be forgiven if I avoid the above areas of inquiry, and focus only what I can call the Bard’s obsession with seeming and deceiving.

Is there a play in the canon that does not have a lie or deception or disguise at the center of its action? In the most benign situations, such as Love’s Labour’s Lost or The Taming of the Shrew, deception is a minor plot point: the King of Navarre and his followers dress up as “Muscovites” to woo the ladies they love in the former play while Lucentio and his servant Tranio, disguise themselves in each others’ clothes to woo Bianca in the latter. But it is the lies that propel the plots forward that do the most damage: Iago lies about Desdemona (who lies about the ill-fated handkerchief); Iachimo lies about seducing the innocent Imogen; Juliet feigns her death to deceive her parents; Macbeth’s web of lies spins out of control until it ensnares his own wife; Prince Hal’s entire life with Falstaff in Eastcheap is a lie, and one of his first acts as Henry V is to unmask the treasonous lies of Lords Scroop, Cambridge and Grey. Sometimes, in Shakespeare, the inverse can be even more deadly or dangerous than the lie. Cordelia tells Lear the truth—or rather “nothing”—in Act One, and a court built on flattery and sycophancy quickly comes crashing down. The rot—moral, personal, or political—is clearly not just confined to Hamlet’s Denmark. It is to be found in Duke Vincentio’s Vienna, on Prospero’s island, at Portia’s Venice, throughout the England of Lancasters and Yorks, and, of course, in the forests of Arden, Windsor and Athens, or on the seacoast of Bohemia.

Where would Shakespeare’s comedies (comedies, mind you!) be without deceit and deception?