The Philosophical Optimist

              In Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew , is Petruchio's wooing of Katherine not an image of unrelenting love?   He refuses to see the bad in her words and deeds and imagines in them great good.   Even as she wishes his death, he speaks and acts as if she only loves and adores him.   He will not hide from her what others say of her, but he will not join with them; rather, he repudiates what they say, even as we see how true it all is.             Yet, he is as rough with her as she is with him.   He confronts her with force for force, but it is so deftly handled as only to serve to undermine further all her attempts to rebuff him.   When she slaps him, he does not act shocked, but merely threatens to respond in kind; yet he never does, for she is so shocked by his response that it provokes not more violence, but a further war of w...

[Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to publish a note on this theme on the 14 th , but here it is, better late than never].                  Giacomo Chevalier de Seingalt Casanova, the man known to the world simply as "Casanova," was the proverbial lover, and a prolific writer who recorded his amorous adventures for later generations to read.   Although he was not a man most honorable men would think of as a role model, there is one lesson we can learn from his life, and how he lived it.   That lesson is simply this truth: every woman is lovely, and needs to be loved.             This was the secret, we are told, of Casanova's amorous success.   He treated each woman as if she were indeed, the loveliest woman in the world; for, for him, for the moment, she was.   His error was not in viewing each woman as lovely, b...

            Beatrice and Benedick; their very names tell us that they are surely meant to be together.   And of course, so it goes, for “Much Ado About Nothing” is, as the title implies, a comedy—even if the last word implies, by way of an Elizabethan pun, a slightly bawdier comedy than we are given.   Indeed, the closest we come to that type of comedy is in Signior Benedick’s very first words in the play:                         [Don] Pedro:…I think this is your daughter. Leonato: Her mother hath many times told me so. Benedick: Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her? Leonato : Signior Benedick, no; for then were you a child. (I.i.92-96)             From there on, the comedy is pretty much all chastity and virtue ( okay, maybe not all ...