Blooms essay, insightful as it was, left out one of the key characters of the play: Camillo. Bloom has an incredible eye for the importance of many minute statements and allusions, as well as a great ability to understand characters psychologically. Also, he thinks that Shakespeare is God. I was actually a little disappointed he left Camillo out, as he was one of the characters I was most interested in. He serves as a balm to lower tempers,, weighing all the sides and seeking a "win/win" solution. The seeming mellower counterpart to Paulinas conniving and confrontations, Camillo is a character often difficult to discern. He seems at times to be looking only for the universal good, at others only for his own. We are indeed tempted to take this latter route as Florizel cries "Camillo has betray'd me;/Whose honour and whose honesty till now/Endured all weathers." (V.i.192-3) "Endured all weathers?" the reader might ask; "this same Camillo who has been manipulating all sides throughout the play and justifying his actions as just?" Yet in the end, his plotting is not discovered, nor is he himself forgotten. Instead he is married off to Paulina, one who shares his heart for manipulating "those we love for their own (and our) good." Camillo and Paulina, often at opposite ends of the identical spectrum force us to question the morality of this manipulative "love." At the same time, they are not without their real life parallels, yet in real life rarely do things turn out so well in the end.

Copyright (c) 2004 Jason Helms.
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