Dating a Fictional Character

Okay, so Richard III isn't fictional— but he is dead. And the version of Richard III that I fell for and subsequently dated (as the result of a queer series of events that raises very interesting questions about how "real" any of our relationships are in a world of virtual communication) was not the actual historical figure, but the version of him written by William Shakespeare somewhere around the year 1591.

This fascination began in DeWitt Henry's Shakespearean Tragedy class in the fall of my junior year of college. I don't know if it was something about my complicated personal life at the time or just the natural result of my social life being limited, more often that I would like to admit, to the exclusive company of fictional characters... but something about Richard Gloucester reached through the centuries and the tiny typeface of my Complete Works to send an adolescent tingle of lust up my spine. It wasn't that I was attracted to his bitterness or his violent, scheming nature. Nor was I moved by his ability (despite his own modest protestations!) to "prove a lover—" I was not seduced alongside Lady Anne. No, it was neither of these facets of his thrillingly complex character that made me love him. I loved him because I was convinced that I "knew his heart" in a way that no one in his own small world could. There he was, trapped inside a play, surrounded by people who would never understand the pain and loneliness and self-loathing that lay beneath his twisted wit and his talent for pain and power. Why did no one else seem to see so clearly to the real Richard that lay beneath? I knew that Shakespeare could, and yet wrote him to his inevitable conclusion with the same compassionate indifference with which the author of us all drips ink on our dearest dreams. It was heartbreaking.

So there I was, in love with this collection of moldering ink blots, the product of a brilliant but long deceased imagination (which, in my mind, never inhabited the body of Joe Fiennes... but that's another story.) What could I do? First of all, every girl has to have a confidante for her unrequited love stories, and my friend Jim happened to sit at my right hand side throughout most of the semester. Though I'm not sure that he ever fully understood my fixation, he was sufficiently amused by it to spend spare moments reaching over to cover the back of my notebook with heart-encrusted doodles reading:
Mrs. Gloucester
Mrs. Richard Gloucester
Nora Gloucester?
Mrs. The Third!

During the weeks that followed, I went the way of many an overly infatuated 13-year-old girl and managed to work the object of my affection into almost every conversation. This is an important plot point, as it explains why the "contemporary" identity of my literary lover is still a mystery to me. Everyone knew that I had a crush on Mr. The Third, so when he friended me on Facebook I was clueless enough about any "real person" behind the charmingly constructed profile that I could conveniently ignore the logistical difficulties and imagine myself into an actual relationship with the object of my schoolgirl crush.

The next year and a half or so was idyllic. We played games of internet scrabble peppered with Shakespearean vocabulary, exchanged the occasional witty missive, and generally participated in virtual relationship behaviors appropriate to two people separated by time and distance.

Alas, however, our relationship eventually suffered from the same complaint that ends many such couplings— lack of physical incarnation. And now I can only dream that one day he will find a way to walk out of those cold pages to make the winter of my discontent into glorious summer once again.