8. Shakespeare: The Return of <i>Fin’amor</i>

This chapter discusses Shakespeare’s plays, specifically focusing on the economic, authoritarian, and even dynastic impediments to love in the marital and family structures of the time, and the way love is portrayed as in resistance to those structures. Here the project moves to a close consideration of several plays (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Pericles, the Prince of Tyre), examining the ways in which love operates as both a subject-enabling force, and as a subversive, if sometimes unsuccessful, force in the dramatic contexts of arranged marriages as exchanges of property and political influence. Criticism is engaged throughout.