ESSAYS AND REVIEWS 75

Ronald Gray. Shakespeare on Love: The Sonnets and Plays in Relation to Plato’s Symposium,
Alchemy, Christianity and Renaissance Neo-Platonism. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2011.

LAURENCE WRIGHT

Will and Wille

Best known as the author of Kafka’s Castle (1956) and a number of highly regarded works on
Goethe and Brecht, Ronald Gray turns his attention to Shakespeare in a rich and succinct little
book, developed from his earlier article “Will in the Universe: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Plato’s
Symposium, Alchemy and Renaissance neo-Platonism”, which appeared in Shakespeare Survey
59 (2006). Works produced by senior intellects – Gray retired from Emmanuel College,
Cambridge in 1982 – can sometimes spin sugar floss at unnecessary length, or else fling
themselves recklessly at momentous questions without tact or scholarly measure. (Helen
Gardner’s unfortunate In Defence of the Imagination, 1982, would be an apposite illustration of
the latter tendency.) Shakespeare on Love avoids both dangers, holding to its challenging thesis
with admirable economy. The short Preface scampers over current scholarly literature, raising
points of disagreement or differences of perspective to be taken up later, and indicating politely
that the author’s interests lie elsewhere. Gray then embarks on his argument, which is wide-
ranging, cogent, and refreshing both in content and presentation. A lifetime of reading supports
this investigation into Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic exploration of the human experience of
love, in all its ambiguity. One has a pervasive sense that Gray is writing about issues that really
matter to him, not just as a scholar, but as a human being.
Gray focuses on Shakespeare’s insistent tendency in his treatment of love to entertain, with
whatever emotional anguish, radically disturbing opposites and contraries, while asserting their
fundamental unity. This is much more than Keatsian ‘negative capability’ – a notion Gray
forbears to mention – and is perhaps most distinctly apparent in the neo-Platonic notion of the
coincidentia oppositorum, invented by Cusanus, which sees the male/female contrast as
symptomatic of “the state of the world as we know it, a continual opposition of all kinds, and the
coincidence of all such opposites in God” (9). Plato is fundamental here. In the Symposium,
Aristophanes tells the story of a race of hermaphrodite humans being sliced in half, like apples,
in retaliation for assaulting Zeus. The resulting halves have either male or female genitals, and
their quest for a restored wholeness explains the perennial human need for erotic love. To
suggest how this erotic love can transmute into the beauty of universal love, Socrates recounts
what he has learned from his encounter with the wise woman Diotima: falling in love with the
beauty of one individual body breeds awareness of ubiquitous beauty in other bodies, and this
troubling sense of bodily universality paradoxically awakens a new sensitivity to the greater
beauties of the individual soul. This more rarefied devotion tracks a comparable path to fruition,
love for an individual soul expanding to become admiration for laws and social institutions – a
theoretical direction not specifically pursued by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s complex treatment of universal love seems never wholly to escape the erotic,
the personal and bodily, while the capacity of nature itself to calibrate erotic and tragic passions
(think of Antony and Cleopatra or Lear) registers humanity’s inescapable imbrication in the
universal. Indeed, Gray invokes Schopenhauer’s concept of Will (Wille), not shying away from
the cross-lingual pun with Shakespeare’s name as it functions in the sonnets, to designate this
ambiguous nexus between the personal and the universal in Shakespeare’s writing. The issue of
whether his vision of universal love is Shakespeare’s own, or something borrowed from neo-
Platonism, Christianity and the alchemical tradition, is something Gray treats illuminatingly in
his short chapter on “The Muse”, the upshot of which is to show that Shakespeare himself was

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/sisa.v24i1.10
76 SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

undecided and conflicted over the issue. The dialectic between artistic self-assertion and self-
immolation operates with the same fraught ambivalence in the presentation of the sonnet poet as
it does in the erotic entanglements explored in the overt subject matter of the poetry. Indeed,
Gray makes a good case for the poetic flatness of A Lover’s Complaint being attributable to the
determined detachment of the rejected woman, in contrast to the tortured engagement which
animates the complex predicaments of the sonnet poet. The Complaint becomes a bathetic
complement to the high drama of the sonnets, strangely analogous to the way in which the
ludicrous production of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream operates across
plays to mock the ending of Romeo and Juliet; or Touchstone’s grudging union with the uncouth
Audrey in As You Like It counterpoints the zestful love story of Orlando and Rosalind, at the
same time setting off disturbing reverberations with memories of the “black” mistress of the
sonnets (78). These very different figures stand related, however awkwardly, within
Shakespeare’s (or is it “Shakespeare’s”?) vision of love.
The difficult point Gray emphasises so well is that Shakespeare’s sense of true love,
echoing the steadfastness invoked in Paul’s description of Agapé in 1 Corinthians 13, in its
contrast with the self-centredness of Eros, not only refuses to admit impediments (that sedate
word ‘impediments’, borrowed from the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer, seems
unutterably banal when one considers the erotic tensions entertained in the sonnets), but
somehow carries on regardless, neither denying faults, however gross, nor ignoring them, nor
wishing them away. The reference to one of the weaker “Carry On---” films is deliberate: the
capacity of love to persist despite disillusionment or even disgust is exactly what makes it at
once so wonderful and so abject, so ridiculous. Without succumbing to delusion, love both
acknowledges and somehow supplants that which offends. Ontological legerdemain is at work,
suggesting the ultimate paradox which troubles Hamlet: man is “infinite in faculty”, but also “the
quintessence of dust” (Hamlet 2.2) – though Gray doesn’t mention this example. Gray concludes
his book by unpacking Eliot’s comparison between Shakespeare and Dante: “Shakespeare gives
the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth” (97). Dante
is invoked to supply spiritual altitude, supplementing an apparent dearth of credible ascetic or
spiritual love in Shakespeare’s imagination, which remains finally tied to Eros, person and body.
As Gray puts it: “nobody has the right to say his own knowledge corresponds to a confirming
reality outside himself, and the same holds for a Muse. Yet both the prophet and the poet
astonish themselves and everyone else with the incomparable quality of their language” (82-83).
Opposites shine through that which denies them, in what Gray, invoking Wittgenstein and his
progenitor, Schopenhauer, allows to be the most moving effect of Shakespeare’s art: somehow
managing to say the unsayable. Invoking the “cloud-capped towers” speech from The Tempest as
“Prospero’s farewell to all the human condition”, Gray comments, “The beauty of these lines is
itself an affirmation of what they deny; though what they deny is unsayable” (91). An absence of
abstract doctrinal assertion there may well be, but who says Shakespeare lacks sufficient
spiritual altitude?
Gray is as serious as Shakespeare (whose surface flippancy on the matter is spurious), or the
grimmer Schopenhauer, in joining their adventitious agreement “to speak of Will” (91). The
extent to which Will (Shakespeare) understood himself to be responding to will (Wille), as an
artist, is at the heart of Gray’s investigation. The segue from Shakespeare to German philosophy
might seem awkward, but Gray’s treatment of “the dialectical tradition” is circumspect and,
despite manifest differences of literary temper, this adds value to his readings. It may well be
that Gray’s scholarly immersion in German literature and thought has alerted him to
Shakespeare’s extreme sensitivity to wrenching contrasts and contradictions, where others are
more inclined to treat them as pervasive hyperbole, or emotional exaggerations having more
dramatic than philosophical import. The volume’s brevity certainly belies its range. Among the
moderns, Blake, Baudelaire, Eliot, Kleist, Thomas Mann, Von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George,
Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Brecht, and Rilke make telling appearances, while there
is throughout rich reference to classical and Renaissance authors as well as Shakespeare’s
modern-day scholars and critics. Even Taoism is invoked to offer a supplementary and
 ESSAYS AND REVIEWS 77

illuminating perspective (85). This by no means implies a cavalier exercise in ‘presentism’:

historical context is treated with propriety throughout, and Gray writes with full alertness to
persisting human concerns that infuse the historical legacy. At the furthest remove from a sterile
search for sources and influences, Gray is concerned with “the great surge of ideas of Love over
many centuries” (98), and their contemporary import for his readers.
One of the delights of the book is the way in which Gray treats critical discourse from
different eras with consistent courteous rigour. He contests arguments by Cusanus (86), Knight
(93), Danby (57-59), Nuttall (51-52) and Grudin (87), for instance, as part of one extended
conversation. Naturally there are flaws. The chapter on A Lover’s Complaint, though interesting,
is out of key with the rest of the book, being heavily concerned with arguments over the
authorship question. The chapter’s contribution to the overall thesis could have been captured in
a few paragraphs. Gray states flatly that in the nocturne which concludes The Merchant of
Venice “Shylock is totally forgotten” (47). By no means. Though absent physically, “The man
that hath no music in himself” pervades the moonlit gardens of Belmont in a way that contrasts
tellingly with the manner in which insurgent memory of the absent Caliban disturbs the betrothal
masque in The Tempest, though the backwash from Shylock is less immediately violent.
Belmont evades but does not escape its contradictions, as today’s economic crisis reminds us so
forcefully. One could nit-pick further, but to little purpose. Here are 101 brief pages of
Shakespearean criticism which lend fresh impetus to that neglected word, “puissant”.
88 SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Victor Houliston is Professor of English Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand,

Johannesburg, and author of Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England (2007). He is currently
working on a 3-volume annotated edition of the correspondence of Robert Persons, whose
international network makes him one of the most significant figures in Europe in the 1590s and
early 1600s.

Brian Pearce is Associate Professor in Drama Studies at Durban University of Technology

(DUT) and a member of the Institute of Systems Science at DUT. He was the Editor of
Shakespeare in Southern Africa from 2000 to 2008. He has published articles on Henry Irving,
William Poel, Harley Granville Barker and Herbert Beerbohm Tree and on the critical reception
of Shakespeare’s late plays. His work as a theatre director has included student productions of
plays by Shakespeare, Anouilh, Beckett, Ibsen, Strindberg, Wilde and Shaw.

Donald Powers is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English Literature at the
University of Cape Town, where he teaches South African and American literature. He has
written on Coetzee and McCarthy, and his current research focuses on the figure of the urban
pedestrian in the work of Teju Cole, W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair.

Chris Thurman is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of the
Witwatersrand. He is the editor of Shakespeare in Southern Africa and compiler of Sport versus
Art: A South African Contest (2010). His other book publications include the monograph Guy
Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life (2010), At Large: Reviewing the Arts in South
Africa, a collection of journalistic essays (2012) and Text Bites, a literary anthology for high
schools (2009). He contributes to various publications as an arts critic and political commentator,
and has been awarded the English Academy of Southern Africa’s Thomas Pringle prize for
reviews.

Brian Willan is currently Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of
English in Africa, Rhodes University. After a career in publishing he has returned to his earlier
academic interests, interrupted in the 1980s when the South African government refused him a
work permit and prohibited him from taking up a research fellowship at the University of the
Witwatersrand. He is currently working on a revised edition of his biography of Sol Plaatje,
having also edited Plaatje’s Selected Writings (1996) and co-edited an edition of his Mafeking
Diary (1999). Apart from Shakespeare in South Africa, his interests include the history of film
and the history of sport, both the subject of recent articles.

Laurence Wright is Director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes
University. His research interests include African literature in English, Shakespeare and the
history of Shakespeare in South Africa, South African Language Policy and language education
for teachers. A member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, he is Honorary Life
President of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, Chairman of the Grahamstown
Foundation and Vice President of the English Academy of Southern Africa. He was recently
awarded the English Academy’s Gold Medal for services to English.
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