Triangulation as a Problem in the Plays and Sonnets

in European Judaism
Author:
Richard H. Weisberg Yeshiva University

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Abstract

As to the risks of what I call the ‘triangulation’ of both public power and private emotion, I extend my earlier treatment of ‘mediation’ in The Merchant of Venice to Measure for Measure, King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest, linking to them Shakespeare’s Sonnet 134. For Shakespeare, whether poet or playwright, a private triangulation of direct romantic obligation is as nettlesome as the public official’s similar behaviour – as when the Duke ‘outsources’ Viennese power to Angelo – and the results are quite as disastrous. The complex and highly legalistic sonnet concerns the triangulation of passion from the speaker to a friend. The beloved winds up ensnaring both through ‘the statute of [her] beauty’. The word ‘surety’ – used centrally in the poem and twice in Merchant – pinpoints, through the delegation to a third party of obligations otherwise charged directly to two committed parties, the underlying Shakespearean problematic

Contributor Notes

Richard H. Weisberg, Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law, Yeshiva University, foreshadows these themes in Poethics: and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (1992).

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European Judaism

A Journal for the New Europe

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