Shakespeare's wicked pronoun : a Lover's Discourse and love stories

Abstract

This paper analyses Shakespeare's treatment of love from the theoretical vantage point of Roland Barthes's entry on "gossip" in A Lover.s Discourse: Fragments. According to Barthes, love narratives are the effect of "gossip" third person counterfeits of a discourse of desire that in its purest form can only be addressed by a first to a second person. As the pronoun of gossip, the third person is the "wicked pronoun". Shakespearean drama displays the dialectics of lover.s discourse and love story, the contrast between a discourse of desire and a discourse about others, desires. This contrast is registered in the transformation of a referential universe which exhausts itself in "I" and "you" (the lover's) into forms of discourse where the lover becomes "he" or "she", a "theme" rather than the subject of desire. Shakespeare constructs a heroics of love whose main feature is the lovers, resistance to be narrated by others. But this resistance usually ends up in the lovers, final yielding to third-person narratives, sometimes told by others, sometimes by themselves. The analysis of pronominal forms in Twelfth Night (1601), Troilus and Cressida (1602), and Anthony and Cleopatra (1607) constitutes the basis for a wider concern with the effects of third-person narratives upon the shaping of erotic identity in these plays.