‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’: Folie à Deux in Shakespeare’s Love Duets

Abstract

Of the myriad versions of face-to-faceness in Shakespeare, an elementary case is what this paper calls the “love duet.” Lawrence Manley’s contribution pursues a formal and dramaturgical route into the broader problem of Shakespeare’s ways of depicting and understanding couples by focusing on a specific instance of the love duet in the earlier work of Shakespeare. The “unchaperoned duet” is a scene or portion of a scene in which the absence of third parties is a theatrical pre-condition and a token for the absence of inhibitions to erotic face-to-face encounter. The paper also considers the impact of inhibiting factors (such as separation, absence, the presence of other characters, impinging circumstance, and erotic betrayal) on the duet. Examples are set against both early modern contexts (ancient literature, Renaissance theories of sympathy, and the development of musical duets) and modern theories, including Beckerman’s taxonomy of duets types, J. L Austin’s speech-act theory, and the clinical diagnosis of “Shared Psychotic Disorder (folie à deux)”(DSM-IV) or “delusional symptoms in partner of individual with delusional disorder” (DSM-V).