The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a boon to humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz." But it's a figure that has a serious side as well. The oxymoron expresses very well the contradictions inherent in literary and also human life. Life is a mingled yarn, is it not? Both fair and foul, sometimes in the same moment; sweet sorrow. Because Shakespeare tried to convey the complexity of things, he employed oxymorons throughout his career -- in simple straightforward formulas at the early plays, but in his maturity in innovative and sometimes startlingly beautiful ways.
The oxymoron has a long pedigree. It may go as far back as to a classical trope called the adynaton, or collection of impossibilities. There is a treasure-trove of oxymora in Alain of Lisle's thirteenth-century poem (or, more exactly, prosimetron) De Planctu Naturae in which "amor" is described as "pax odio, fraudique fides, spes juncta timor... mistus cum ratione furor,/ Naufragium dulce, pondus leve (peace in hatred, faith in fraud, hope joined to fear, madness mixed with reason, sweet shipwreck, light heaviness); there is a similar passage, from the same century, in Guillaime de Lorris extremely popular Romaunt of the Rose that begins "Love is a hateful peace and loving hate."
The oxymoron was given new life and vitality by Petrarch, whose sufferings for young Laura famously caused him to freeze in summer and burn in winter. Many sonneteers, continental and English, were indebted to Petrarch, among them Thomas Watson, a poet who flourished in the years of Shakespeare's adolescence. One of Watson's poems, which contained the lines "Love is a sour delight, a sugared grief/ A living death, and ever-dying life" lay behind young Romeo's modish and easily parodied oxymoron-rich rhetoric: "O brawling love, o loving hate,/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,/ Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health.... " Romeo was so besotted by his own rhetoric that Juliet couldn't resist a joke at his expense: "You kiss by the book." Romeo in 1595 owes a lot to Will in 1580.
Shakespeare knew that Romeo indulged too much of a good thing. Half a decade later, in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena imagined her perjured promiscuous lover Bertram at the French court dancing attendance on the ladies in a series of tired oxymora: "his humble ambition, proud humility,/ His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,/ His faith, his sweet disaster." In these lines, Helana, and Shakespeare as well, repudiated fashionable oxymoronic couplings. On the other hand, it is not love but hatred and anger that give rise to Timon's oxymorons. For him, the loathed Athenians, those "smiling smooth detested parasites, are "courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears."
In Hamlet, Claudius's insincere but brilliantly accomplished oxymorons camouflage his sin. He has
as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious, and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole
taken Gertrude as his wife. The pairing of "auspicious" (the root meaning of which is looking to the heavens to prognosticate by the flight of birds) with "dropping" is especially wonderful.
Claudius's "delight and dole" were anticipated by Richard II's rhetorical theatricality upon his return to England:
As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth.
And there's the "wholesome iniquity" of the bawdy house in Pericles -- a play in which calm comes in the form of "litigious peace."
In King Lear, a play about, among other subjects a "precious unprized" daughter, there is a submerged but stunning oxymoron when (in Edgar's words) Gloucester is at last released from his suffering: "his flaw'd heart.../ 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly." "Burst smilingly" is a phrase which the younger Shakespeare could not reach; nor could any other poet before or since.
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