The Amorous Heart Read online

  THE MOST FAMOUS TEXTUAL EXAMPLE OF THE CATHOLIC heart during the sixteenth century comes from the Spanish nun Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), who founded the order of Discalced Carmelites. In her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, she recounted how an angel pierced her heart and left her in a state of religious ecstasy.

  I saw in his hands a long golden dart and at the end of the iron tip there appeared to be a little fire. It seemed to me this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me.… The pain was so great that it made me moan, and the sweetness this greatest pain caused me was so superabundant that there is no desire capable of taking it away; nor is the soul content with less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; although the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal. The loving exchange that takes place between the soul and God is so sweet that I beg of Him in His goodness to give a taste of this love to anyone who thinks I am lying.

  It is difficult to convey in English the passion of the original Spanish. The Spanish word for heart, corazón, is itself redolent of love, more so, I think, than its analogs in any other Western language. Though English has the same idioms and an equal, if not greater, number of heart-laden expressions, “heart” doesn’t possess the same amorous overtones as “corazón.” In an oral contest registering the affective vibes given off by cor in Latin, heart in English, coeur in French, Herz in German, cuore in Italian, and corazón in Spanish, I believe the Spanish word would win hands down.

  Teresa’s words are charged by an ecstatic current that is shared with other notable mystics. As in the case of the thirteenth-century nun Gertrude of Helfta, the penetration of Teresa’s heart may appear to a modern reader as covertly sexual, whereas Teresa herself understood it as a spiritual encounter between her soul and God. The great baroque sculptor Bernini immortalized the moment of ecstasy in white marble for the Cornaro Chapel in Venice. He portrayed Teresa swooning as her heart is about to be pierced by an arrow held in the hand of an angel, who looks down on her with smiling satisfaction.

  A CENTURY AFTER TERESA OF AVILÀ PENNED HER VISIONS of spiritual ecstasy, the French nun Margaret Mary Alacoque had similar experiences within the convent of the Visitation at Paray-le-Monial in France. She described in her autobiography how Jesus revealed his heart to her in the years between 1673 and 1675: “Jesus Christ, my sweet master, showed himself to me, shining with glory. His five wounds were brilliant like five suns, and flames burst forth, on all sides from this sacred humanity, but especially from his adorable breast; and it opened and I beheld his most loving and most beloved Heart.”

  Then, in a practice reminiscent of Gertrude von Helfta, Margaret Mary and Jesus exchanged their hearts: “He asked me for my heart. I begged him to take it; he did and placed it in his own divine heart. He let me see it there—a tiny atom being completely burned up in that fiery furnace. Then—lifting it out—now a little heart-shaped flame—he put it back where he had found it.”

  Margaret Mary’s visions provided the impetus for renewed dedication to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the symbol of divine love. She promoted it through her correspondence with other members of the clergy, both priests and nuns, and also through the production of new images of the Sacred Heart made by her sister nuns. Many of their exquisite works, ranging from paper drawings and oil paintings to fine silk embroideries, have been collected at the Museum of the Visitation in Moulins.

  Margaret Mary Alacoque is generally recognized as the person most responsible for the dissemination of the Sacred Heart from the late seventeenth century onward; she was canonized in 1920. Yet the ground for her success had already been prepared in France by the priest Jean Eudes, who had founded the Congregation of Jesus and Mary in 1643 and spent the rest of his life promoting devotion to both the mother and the son. His book, Le Cœur Admirable de la Très Sainte Mère de Dieu (The Admirable Heart of the Very Saintly Mother of God) joined the hearts of Jesus and Mary in a mystical alliance. Despite his best efforts, however, Rome did not recognize the Immaculate Heart until the nineteenth century and did not fully officialize it until 1944, when Pope Pius XII instituted the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Today it is celebrated on the Saturday following the Feast of the Sacred Heart, which always falls on a Friday.

  THE REFORMATION AND COUNTER-REFORMATION PROVIDED new venues for the heart icon in prayer books and stained-glass windows, in statues and paintings, in family seals and other personal objects of devotion. As a religious symbol it rivaled the amorous heart icon that had been so popular in the late Middle Ages.

  But increasingly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the heart began to expand beyond its earlier symbolic boundaries. Though it continued to stand for love, both religious and amorous, the heart acquired a new host of psychological meanings. It was understood to contain a variety of emotions jostling with one another, and the emotion or attribute that won out defined the owner of that particular heart. If your heart was loving, gentle, kind, and compassionate or hateful, vengeful, fearful, jealous, brutal, and avaricious, that was who you were. In a way the idea of an “independent heart,” from late medieval allegory, became a template for a new theory of personal character.

  Whereas outward signs of identity attested to one’s membership in a certain class or religion, the truth of one’s heart could be ascertained only by oneself and God. This inner truth, with all its complexities, began to overtake the exclusive association of the heart with love that had prevailed in medieval Europe. The heart was becoming the repository of all the emotions. Yes, love would endure within the heart, whether directed toward another person or toward God. But love was obliged to share the heart with other feelings, which sometimes existed in a conflicted relationship with love or obliterated it entirely.

  Chapter 13

  How Shakespeare Probed the Heart’s Secrets

  THE ENGLISH WERE SLOWER THAN THE ITALIANS IN CREATING great love poetry and slower than the French, Dutch, and Germans in publishing emblem books, but during the sixteenth century, English poets and playwrights produced immortal literature that illuminated the amorous heart. Since then readers worldwide have looked to Elizabethan writers for exemplary lovers, most notably those springing from the mind of Shakespeare.

  But before turning to him, let us not forget his contemporary, Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote one of the most widely anthologized poems featuring the heart: “My True Love Hath My Heart.”

  My true love hath my heart and I have his,

  By just exchange one for the other given:

  I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;

  There never was a bargain better driven.

  His heart in me keeps me and him in one;

  My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

  He loves my heart, for once it was his own;

  I cherish his because in me it bides.

  His heart his wound received from my sight;

  My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;

  For as from me on him his hurt did light,

  So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:

  Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,

  My true love hath my heart and I have his.

  Once again the exchange-of-hearts metaphor signals true love. It’s an old trope, already deconstructed in the twelfth century by Chrétien de Troyes, and the idea of being “wounded” by the sight of the beloved had been commonplace for even longer. Yet when hearts are exchanged in iambic pentameter by a master craftsman, they effectively convey the harmonious sense of oneness that lovers—if they are lucky—come to experience.

  Is the speaker who has wounded the lover’s heart a woman? Most probably. But whatever hurt she has inflicted on him pains her as well. And whatever trials they have undergone, they have undergone together, creating a perfect union.

  Sidney’s version of the exchange of hearts carried medieval rhetoric into sixteenth-century England, where it was kept alive
, reinterpreted, mocked, and ultimately displaced by Shakespeare’s soaring depictions of hearts brimming with love. It has been estimated that the word heart appears more than a thousand times in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, almost as often as the word love.

  Shakespeare gave voice to the heart’s turbulent emotions, ranging from youthful fervor to old-age fears and all else in between. His lovers knew not only desire and tenderness but also jealousy, rage, deception, and murderous revenge. Simple-hearted Othello, goaded on by the wicked Iago, ends up killing his beloved Desdemona. Large-hearted Antony is blindly led by his heart as he adulates Cleopatra, follows her into military defeat, and ultimately precipitates their dual tragedy. In Shakespeare the heart has characterological significance: one’s heart determines one’s destiny.

  Very occasionally in a Shakespearean play a hardened heart is shocked into a renewed state of grace and recognizes the wrong it has done, usually to a guiltless woman. Such is the case of the block-hearted Claudio in Much Ado, who certainly doesn’t deserve his loving bride, Hero. And such is the case of the heartless King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, who imprisons his wife, Hermione, on false grounds of adultery, obstinately rejects their baby daughter, and loses them both—until reunited sixteen years later in a classic happy ending.

  Does the heart still stand primarily for amorous love in the world of Shakespeare? Yes, most certainly, but it has also taken on a broader emotional range. Examples of the traditional heart-equals-love metaphor jostle with many other metaphoric meanings.

  IN ACT I, SCENE I OF ROMEO AND JULIET A BESOTTED ROMEO bemoans the suffering inflicted upon him by the fair Rosaline. He complains to his friend Benvolio that “griefs of mine lie heavy in my breast” and repeats the ancient lament that Cupid has sent a deadly arrow into his heart while bypassing that of his lady. This love Romeo professes for Rosaline is mere imitation of an already outmoded fashion. But when he falls in love with Juliet it’s the real thing, and he recognizes the difference immediately:

  Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!

  For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.

  Juliet, too, barely fourteen, knows instantly that Romeo is the only man for her. Defying her father, who would have her marry her kinsman, Paris, she engages Friar Laurence to perform a secret wedding ceremony. To him she declares unequivocally, “God join’d my heart and Romeo’s, thou our hands.”

  Juliet represents a new type of heroine who emerged in England during the second half of the sixteenth century. She is courageous, intelligent, steadfast, and endowed with a mind of her own. Unlike some of her medieval predecessors, worshipped from afar or tugged into adultery, Juliet insists upon marriage before she and Romeo consummate their love.

  One result of the Protestant Reformation was that marriage gained greater prestige. Rejecting the notion that celibacy was a higher state than marriage, Protestants eliminated the celibate clergy and replaced it with the pastoral couple, exemplified by Luther himself and the former nun Katharina von Bora, who became his wife. In England, with the establishment of the Anglican Church, preachers spoke of husbands and wives as “yoke partners,” implying that they bore equal weight, if not equal authority, in sustaining a conjugal union. And in this new kind of marriage the mind of the woman was beginning to be touted along with her beauty; indeed, many male Protestant writers made a point of stating a preference for mind and virtue over physical attributes, though this high-minded stance probably did little to change the practices of most people.

  One of Shakespeare’s most beloved sonnets begins, “Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.” Several of Shakespeare’s delightful heroines—Viola, Beatrice, Portia—are quick-witted women who find a way to bring to fruition the love matches they so fervently desire.

  But then there is The Taming of the Shrew, where the heroine is a bit too clever for her own good. She becomes an out-of-control monster, and Shakespeare ultimately sends her back to the straightjacket of traditional bondage, placing in her mouth these words:

  Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

  Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,…

  Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

  Even such a woman oweth to her husband.

  Following this speech Kate places her hand beneath her husband’s foot to indicate the subservient path she plans to follow. For centuries readers have been debating why Shakespeare ended The Shrew on this note. Suffice it to say that most American women today would reject this feudal picture of the marriage bond.

  HEARTS OF EQUAL VALOR RETURN TO THE STAGE IN ANTONY and Cleopatra. Indeed, some critics believe that this late play contains the fullest expression of Shakespeare’s metaphorical heart and that by merging traditional conceptions of the heart with new meanings, it offers “one of the most heart-rich works of art in existence.” The play opens with the news that Antony’s wife, Fulvia, has died in Rome while he has been in Egypt famously consorting with Cleopatra. Though he must hasten back to Italy, he assures the Egyptian queen, “my full heart remains in use with you.” Whereas her heart is mainly devoted to erotic love, with a long history of lovers before Antony, his is divided between his love for Cleopatra and other loyalties that have nothing to do with eros. He has a military heart, a family heart, a Roman heart—all of which come into conflict with his amorous heart. After the death of his wife Antony accepts a second marriage to Octavia, young Caesar’s sister. One of Caesar’s close friends tells Antony that the marriage will make him and Caesar brothers and “knit your hearts.”

  And though Antony and Octavia do marry, the course of subsequent events is such that he must eventually fight against Caesar. In a major naval battle, when Antony should be directed by his warrior heart, he follows his amorous heart instead: he retreats to follow Cleopatra after she has withdrawn her own ships. Afterward, in full defeat, Antony cries out despondently to Cleopatra, “thou knows too well / My heart was to thy rudder tied by thy strings.” He acknowledges that his love for Cleopatra has triumphed over his other loyalties.

  In the end the two lovers display the magnanimity of their hearts when they choose to die in tandem from self-inflicted wounds. Along with Tristan and Isolde and Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra belong to a small but impressive cohort of lovers whose hearts struggle against insurmountable obstacles and seek ultimate union in death.

  IT IS BEYOND THE PURVIEW OF THIS SINGLE CHAPTER TO EXPLORE the many ways that Shakespeare’s vocabulary of the heart enriched his own work and the English language. Still, one can fairly swiftly highlight a few heart-laden passages that have, over time, become so associated with a certain character as to become a sort of identity card.

  Take an oft-cited passage in Twelfth Night when Duke Orsino compares his own heart to that of a woman—any woman—with the assumption that his heart is bigger, stronger, more passionate.

  There is no woman’s sides

  Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

  As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart

  So big to hold so much: they lack retention.

  Shakespeare put this masculinist credo into the mouth of his self-deluded hero as a way of suggesting that Orsino’s love for the distant Countess Olivia—like that of Romeo for Rosaline—is not what he thinks it is. His one-sided adulation has merely the appearance of love. A truly deep, steadfast love belongs to the heart of Viola, the Duke’s trusted servant, who has disguised herself as a man in order to gain employment and, once in the Duke’s service, falls in love with her master. She serves him faithfully throughout this gender-bending plot until he eventually recognizes her as the woman who has, with spunk and steadfastness, worked her way into his heart.

  The hearts palpitating in Shakespeare’s comedies make for high-spirited drama. Who wouldn’t want to be a lover in Twelfth Night or As You Like It or, most fancifully, A Mid-summer Night’s Dream? But when we turn to the tragedies, the heart takes on a darker hue.
/>   Consider the villainous Iago in Othello when he declares, “I will wear my heart upon my sleeve.” This is a way of saying that he will openly display his feelings, yet Iago only pretends to speak honestly so as to deceive his gullible entourage. His ploy convinces Othello of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness and leads to their final tragedy.

  The “heart upon my sleeve” expression is sometimes used today in the negative: “I won’t wear my heart upon my sleeve,” or, put another way, I won’t let people know just how I feel about a certain man or woman. This idiom harkens back to medieval jousts, when knights wore the colors or insignias of their ladies on their sleeves, but the expression did not exist, according to lexicographers, until Shakespeare invented it circa 1600.

  In Macbeth the duplicitous heart belongs to a more complicated character than Iago. From the start Macbeth knows that he and his wife, Lady Macbeth, will need both deceit and courage to murder Duncan, the king of Scotland, and usurp his throne. Macbeth admonishes himself: “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.” Then, after Duncan’s murder, Macbeth publicly attributes the murder to the king’s two guards, whom he also kills under the pretense that the fierce love he felt in his heart for Duncan and the courage rooted in his heart had obliged him to do away with them at once.

  In Shakespeare’s time it was understood that love and courage often vied for supremacy in Englishmen’s hearts. Queen Elizabeth I played upon the association between the male heart and courage in her oft-quoted 1588 speech to her troops at Tilbury after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, when she proclaimed, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Clever lady!

  The opposite of the courageous heart is the “pale-hearted fear” that enters into Macbeth’s psyche after he has added to his list of murders. Fearfully, his “heart throbs to know one thing”: whether the crown he has usurped will pass on to his own sons or, as predicted, fall to another line. Macbeth’s heart carries a stock of ignoble feelings—greed, envy, fear—buttressed by a modicum of courage and unwavering attachment to his wife. All of these sentiments coexist in his troubled heart, that metaphorical space that Shakespeare expanded more than any other Renaissance artist.