The Sweet Antithesis of Harmony: Comedic Love in Erasmus and Shakespeare

• In Event: No, but Seriously: The Art and Afterlife of Erasmian Humor

Abstract

In the Moriae Encomium, Erasmus's Folly presents romantic love as one of her many paradoxical gifts — underpinned by ignorance, self-regard, and self-deception. Her copiously deadpan account inverts many topoi of the Petrarchan and neo-Platonic traditions, and exemplifies Erasmus's use of humour to teach — and to persuade — where rational argumentation has failed. These lessons, literary and moral, were not lost on Shakespeare, and he reworked them extensively in his comedies of the later 1590s. Concentrating on Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream, this paper will sketch the model of romantic love proposed by Erasmus, before examining some of the ways in which Shakespeare made it his own. For Shakespeare as for Erasmus, falling in love is indubitably foolish when measured against the canons of rationality: but it is one of the things that makes us human, and should be neither denied nor deformed.

Author

• Rhodri Lewis, Princeton University