Até que a morte nos separe: o amor e a representação do indivíduo em quatro tragédias de William Shakespeare

Abstract

This research focuses on the ways through which love/ erotic experience takes part in the plot of four Shakespearian tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth. It treats the tragic hero as an autonomous individual, free from the power of fate and the control of the gods, differently from what happened in the classical tragedy. The hero or heroine is a being who considers himself/ herself free to make choices, yet being responsible for the decisions made, especially before superior powers from which he or she has not been totally released, such as family and state. Among his or her choices is the choice of a spouse or partner which, due to its personal nature, becomes a hindrance to the tragic hero or heroine, once he or she is usually a public person, whose private acts tend to gain a magnified dimension. His or her choices become thus tragic when they break conventions in search of an individual value that is still being shaped during Renaissance. One can thus perceive the extent to which love/ erotic experience will take part in the representation of this individual. Even though love cannot be considered the central theme of all the four tragedies analyzed in this work, they share the fact that they all portray heroes and heroines who are involved in romantic relationships which are inseparable from the tragic action. Analyses of features from the classical tragedy and from the beginning of the English drama, besides enabling an investigation of the behavior of medieval and Renaissance societies toward certain concepts such as individual, love and marriage, provide an invaluable background for the understanding of the reasons why Shakespeare used such a theme as love to interact with the notion of individual responsibility and to take part in the protagonist's march towards his or her tragic end. The study of each one of the four tragedies shows how differently the English bard handled the imbricacy between love and freedom so as to reflect, in a variety of contexts, the new modes of thought among which, the very notion of 'individual' that started to be established during the Renaissance