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Act 3, Scene 8
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If We Were Villains, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Free Will
Identity and Disguise
Love and Sexuality
Theatre and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
The next day, Oliver calls Frederick, Gwendolyn, and Dean Holinshed to try to figure out a plan for paying for Dellecher. They promise to help him work something out. Oliver looks around his Shakespeare-filled room and wonders what his life would be like without theatre and Dellecher. He resolves not to find out. Leah brings him food in his room, and as she asks him uncertainly whether he likes her as much as his friends at school. After she leaves, he thinks about visiting Meredith, who’d invited him to join her in New York over the break. But this makes him think of Richard, and Oliver suddenly feels guilty and uncertain.
Shakespeare exists outside of Dellecher; Oliver’s room at home is full of his plays, and the 2007 scenes reveal that several of the students continue to be involved with Shakespearean theatre after graduation. But for Oliver, Dellecher and Shakespeare have become intertwined, and he doesn’t want a life without either, even despite his good relationship with Leah—perhaps because he doesn’t know who he is without his lines in front of him.
Themes
Oliver drifts to sleep but wakes up an hour later when he hears a knock downstairs. He opens the front door to see James standing there. Oliver is surprised to see him and embarrassed about his bookless house, but he ushers James inside and to his room. James tells him that he couldn’t stand being alone in California, so he took a bus to Chicago and then to Oliver’s town. Oliver invites him to stay, and they decide to share Oliver’s bed rather than have one of them sleep on the couch. As they lie there, they reminisce about the summer when Oliver visited James in California and they slept naked on the beach in Del Norte. Their conversation turns to Richard and to Hamlet. James tells Oliver that when Hamlet’s world starts to collapse, he decides to “blame it on fate” to absolve himself of responsibility.
James appears right after Oliver considers going to visit Meredith—it’s as if he knew or suspected that Oliver might go to be with her, but the novel leaves it unclear as to whether it’s a coincidence. Once James is with Oliver, thoughts of Meredith seem to flee. Now Oliver is even sharing a bed with James instead of with Meredith. In a way, he’s replaced her by Oliver’s side. Meanwhile, Oliver and James are trying to justify and understand Richard’s death in the context of the Shakespearean corpus. Here, James’s interpretation of the play suggests that he’s aligning himself with Hamlet and trying to avoid the guilt of acknowledging his own free will.
Themes
