Rene Girard - Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare

With thousands of books about Shakespeare already on library shelves, anyone attempting to write a new one should begin with a profuse apology. My excuse will be the usual one: an irrepressible love of the subject. I would be disingenuous, though, if I claimed that this love is as gratuitous and disembodied as Immanuel Kant recommends in his writings on aesthetics.

My work on Shakespeare is inextricably linked to everything I ever wrote, beginning with an essay on five European novelists. I loved these so equally and impartially that, in my blissful ignorance of literary fashion, which imperiously demands that critics look for what makes their chosen writers absolutely singular, unique, peerless, and incomparabletotally isolated, in other words, from all other writersI gambled on the possibility that my five novelists might have something in common. A shocking thought, to be sure, but in my eyes at least, the gamble paid off; I discovered something and called it mimetic desire.

When we think of those phenomena in which mimicry is likely to play a role, we enumerate such things as dress, mannerisms, facial expressions, speech, stage acting, artistic creation, and so forth, but we never think of desire. Consequently, we see imitation in social life as a force for gregariousness and bland conformity through the mass reproduction of a few social models.

If imitation also plays a role in desire, if it contaminates our urge to acquire and possess, this conventional view, while not entirely false, misses the main point. Imitation does not merely draw people together, it pulls them apart. Paradoxically, it can do these two things simultaneously. Individuals who desire the same thing are united by something so powerful that, as long as they can share whatever they desire, they remain the best of friends; as soon as they cannot, they become the worst of enemies.

The perfect continuity between concord and discord is as crucial to Shakespeare as it was to the tragic poets of Greece, serving as a rich source of poetic paradox as well. If their work is to outlast fleeting fashionability, dramatists as well as novelists must discover this fundamental source of human conflict,namely mimetic rivalryand they must discover it alone, with no help from philosophers, moralists, historians, or psychologists, who always remain silent on the subject.

Shakespeare discovered the truth so early that his approach to it seemsjuvenile, even caricatural, at first. In the still youthful Rape of Lucrece, his potential rapist, unlike the original Tarquin of the Roman historian Livy, resolves to rape a woman he has never actually met; he is drawn to her solely by her husbands excessive praise of her beauty. I suspect that Shakespeare wrote this scene just after discovering mimetic desire. He was so taken with it, so eager to emphasize its constitutive paradox, that he created this not entirely unbelievable but slightly disconcerting monstrosity, a totally blind rape, just as we say a blind date.

Modern critics intensely dislike this poem. As for Shakespeare, he quickly realized that to wave mimetic desire like a red flag in front of the public is not the sure road to success (as I myself have never managed to learn, I suppose). In no time at all, Shakespeare became sophisticated, insidious and complex in his handling of desire, but he remained consistently, even obsessively, mimetic.

Shakespeare can be as explicit as some of us are about mimetic desire, and has his own vocabulary for it, close enough to ours for immediate recognition. He says suggested desire, suggestion, jealous desire, emulous desire, and so forth. But the essential word is envy, alone or in such combinations as envious desire or envious emulation.

Like mimetic desire, envy subordinates a desired something to the someone who enjoys a privileged relationship with it. Envy covets the superior being that neither the someone nor something alone, but the conjunction of the two, seems to possess. Envy involuntarily testifies to a lack of being that puts the envious to shame, especially since the enthronement of metaphysical pride during the Renaissance. That is why envy is the hardest sin to acknowledge.