Ask Standing On The Shoulders Of Giant Midgets: Shakespeare on love

And this is it. Our very last day of this series of "Ask Standing On The Shoulders Of Giant Midgets" I would like to thank everybody once again for contributing; I feel like these have been excellent questions and, if I'm allowed to say so myself, some pretty good responses.

Our last question is from Jeri, who writes:

Shakespeare says, "Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love."

First, was it really Shakespeare? Second, is it true? And third, does the same apply to women?

First, it was Shakespeare, sort of: the quote is a slightly-mangled version of something Rosalind says in Act IV, scene 1 of As You Like It:

No, faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicit, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was 'Hero of Sestos.' But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

I should say at the outset that As You Like It is a work I am almost wholly unfamiliar with at this point in my life: as someone who is and was very serious about language and fond of Shakespeare and who was a theatre geek and would-be actor from junior high school through college, it is very possible I've read As You Like It or have seen it performed--but at this point I can recall nothing about it at all and had to resort to Wikipedia for a plot summary.

With that disclaimer placed out front, I don't think one needs to be too familiar with the play to see what's happening: Rosalind is rebuffing a would-be paramour, Orlando, with quite a bit of snark. Orlando has just claimed he'd die because Rosalind has just teasingly spurned his advances; Rosalind quite rightly calls bullshit on his melodramatic claim. Citing two romantic legends that were popular subjects of medieval and renaissance romances, the stories of Troilus and Cressida (a matter Shakespeare would himself visit two years after As You Like It was performed) and Hero and Leander, Rosalind points out that the common romantic assertion that Troilus and Leander "died for love" (swoon) is ridiculous: the former died of a head wound in battle and the latter drowned in the Dardanelles. It's hard to argue with.

I think we know this. Ironically, it's actually essential to the romantic ideal of "dying for love" that "dying for love" is, in fact, a euphemism for dying from something more conventionally fatal as a result of doing something (usually something pretty stupid) because one was in love (or thought he or she was). There is something romantic in the Knights Of The Round Table getting themselves killed in assorted ways because they're emotionally wracked over Guinevere, Iseult or any of the various other femme fatales of Arthurian Romance; when a character in a romance dies for no particular reason and then someone says it was caused "by a broken heart" (yes, we're talking about the Star Wars prequels again, dammit), it just seems stupid, it just seems to reflect a certain lack-of-access-to-clues about basic physiology. We can accept that somebody who is in love might take a foolish risk that leads to tragedy, but we all know perfectly well that there's no coroner's report in existence with "Love" written on the "CAUSE OF DEATH" line in place of, oh, I dunno, "Knife Wound To Eye" or whatever.

Panda Bear didn't die of "Broken Heart", she died of "Plot Contrivance". Search your feelings; you know it's true.

Shakespeare talks about men dying from real-causes-of-death-not-love because he's referring to the romantic conventions of his era and anyway it's Rosalind (a woman) thumping Orlando (a dude). (Though As You Like It is one of Shakespeare's cross-cross-dressing plays, with male actors playing female characters who are disguised as men.) There's no reason Rosalind's statement-of-fact doesn't run the other way. What Rosalind is saying for Shakespeare, really, is "cut the crap". It may be a bit hard-nosed on her part, but sometimes it's called for, especially when some creep has just said he'd die without you. ("Sure, and you'll call me in the morning, too, right?")

Don't get me wrong. I like love. I like being in love. Then again, I also like having aged out of all that melodramatic horseshit that afflicts the young, that state of cluelessness in which every hormonal surge, every infatuation, every sweaty surge of horniness is mistaken for lifelong passion more essential to life than the very air itself, etc. and ad nauseum; if you so much as look at anyone else I shall die, my heart is breaking as we speak, blah blah blah, ugh. Passion, sure, but good riddance to the emotional theatrics played large enough to be seen up in the cheap seats.

You know what has killed more men than love? cows.

But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. No, they've died for cows. Man, those things are vicious. Stomping on people with those big-ass hooves of theirs, knocking them over and stepping on them. Motherfucking cows. That's why I'm not a vegetarian, Orlando.

Fixed.

Hope that answers your questions!

And thank you once again, everybody. It has been a lot of fun, and I hope everybody had a good time!