"Here is her hand, the agent of her heart
Here is her oath for love, her honour's pawn"
These initial trochaic, anaphoric, isocolonic lines begin a wonderful thought that also stemmed from Jamie's post about the importance of letters within this work, especially here at the beginning. Proteus asserts that the use of Julia's own hand here illustrates her fidelty and truthfulness in love. The fact that he has received her hand-written note translates into the fact that he receives her true affection and love. To me, this becomes problematic both historically for Shakespeare and thematically for the characters. To the latter first, we obviously watch as Proteus shifts his one true love from one woman to another. His devotions seem to become too much about LOVE than about the love object. Julia, Sylvia, it does not matter to the courtly gentleman who only cares about pursuing the lover. This makes his emotions and his desire duplicate, a copy so to speak.
This brings us back to the former issue. I can't help but wonder if Shakespeare is investigating the idea of duplicitous love within the framework of writing because his age was experiencing the awe-ful power of the printing press. Print allows for easy duplication of words, ideas, etc. Though it does not produce exact copies, the press's variants are less immediately detectable, and copies can continuously be made. Are typed words less true or less sincere than hand written ones? I think culturally we would agree that yes they are. The duplicitous nature of print, the way that it is easily copied and changed creates distance between the writer and addressee, which the relative difficulty in creating an exact duplicate hand-written copy makes the connection between writer and audience more intimate. Interestingly, Shakespeare takes this whole issue up again in Merry Wives of Windsor, when Falstaff destroys our notion of the intimacy of handwritten notes by handwriting the same letter to two different ladies (one of whom is Mistress PAGE...)
Perhaps then, Proteus is a printing press of emotions, who too readily fabricates identical feelings.
Thoughts?
Thanks for your comment on my last post, Michael; This is great - I explored this very question of letter-copying and early modern print culture in the parody assignment we did for Research Methods; Granted, it was a parody, but also certainly a topic I've been considering for my thesis, which is why I initiated my inquiry here with a proposed survey of text-questions. Another interesting "discovery" I made was in Macbeth -His act of writing a letter to Lady Macbeth is actually a manifestation of his desire for the Weird Sisters' prophesy to come true... The audience already has the information given in the letter, and Macbeth or a servant could have delivered the same message orally, however the act of writing the foretold events down gives them a material life and, in a way, reveals Macbeth's desire for the events to come true. Perhaps similar conclusions may be drawn between Proteus, Julia, and their letters...
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