POSTHUMUS: Ay, and it doth confirm
Another stain, as big as hell can hold,
Were there no more but it.

I recently noticed a new stain on my skin, cranberry-sized and -hued, just below and to the right of my left breast. It pricks both vanity and fear: I want it gone. (Out, damn spot, out.) I show it to the man I've been seeing, a man who murmurs comforting words, gives me his dermatologist's name, then says, Be sure you wear a bra when you go. Why? I ask, confused. So he won't see your breasts, he explains. He is serious. I am so flummoxed by this exchange I am, in the moment, at a loss for words.

Meanwhile. I'm asked to write a piece on Cymbeline, a play I only vaguely (and probably mis-) remember from high school. In my life and my work, I both struggle with and am lured by the pathologies of love; in reading the play, in revisiting Shakespeare's fascination with this particular theme, I am immediately, happily, absorbed and enthralled. And I'm grateful for the distraction-or what I think is the distraction-from my own romantic slings and arrows, happy to escape into and put into words an obsession with other lovers' woes.

But the questions I fixate upon: Why do Shakespeare's women put up with Shakespeare's men? Why do they choose to love those courtiers and lords and gallants who behave so badly? Shakespeare's men are so quick to believe the worst of the women they purport to love-Othello is hungry to swallow Iago's toxic tales about Desdemona; Claudio is greedy to listen to those nasty insinuations against Hero. They are so eager to test a woman's love (Lear, Cordelia), humiliate (Hamlet, Ophelia), assert supremacy (Petruchio, Kate), abandon the commitment to a beloved who heretofore has evidenced nothing but virtue, commitment, faith. They are so happy to obsess over a perceived stain on their lady fair. They are often so quick to want their women dead.

I didn't see it this way back in school, when my early dates with this Shakespeare guy were all about the thrill of Renaissance romance, grappling with his lovely poetic puzzles, savoring the fairy dust and bloody sword fights and storms out on the moors, dreaming of teenage Romeo and Juliet rolling around naked in a De Laurentiis villa and dying to die for love. But I find my relationship with Shakespeare is trickier these days; my contemporary eye and feminist sensibility, my more mature (well, older, cynical, conflicted...) view of romantic love all seem to get in the way, make me squirm and balk. While still lured and enthralled, it is also guaranteed, now, that I will grapple in a new way with a play like Cymbeline.

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