appreciating shakespeare
TRANSCRIPT
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APPRECIATING SHAKESPEARE
By Kenneth J. Atchity
To know English is to know Shakespeare by heart. The rhythms of his prose and poetry so perfectly
reflected the essential character of Elizabethan English that today, four hundred years after his death,
the English language throughout the world echoes those rhythms whenever it is written eloquently or
spoken dramatically. The patterns of our speech, and the ways in which we think, are as much
influenced by Shakespeare as they are by the King James translation of the Bible. We still use the
language he forged to full brilliance; and so to read Shakespeare or to see his plays performed for the
first time is as delightful and surprising as being introduced to our better selves.
Before you begin to concern yourself with intricacies of plot and theme and imagery, complexities and
nuances of character, give yourself over to the sheer enjoyment of Shakespeareâs language. Do not be
worried about where it is taking you or whether you can follow it. His language is so powerful it will
carry you along easily to where it wants you to go, the more easily the more you cease resisting. Trust
the words and trust your intuitive response to themâdonât look up footnotes unless you absolutely
cannot comprehend a line without them. All that can come later, after you have been initiated into the
sacred mysteries of Shakespeareâs work and have seen yourself in the reflection of his mind.
Not to read Shakespeare, not to experience the world or words shaped in his indecipherable image, is
forever to remain out of touch with the deepest mirror of the human psyche available to us in English.
He gives us experience articulated to the utmost, presenting the darkest moments of our consciousness
as well as the most exhilarating. Precisely when we findâas in the last meeting between Hal and Falstaff
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in Henry IV, Part Twoâthe dark and the light together, we comprehend clearly as never before how
close the two contraries of experience forever are in the human mind. To know Shakespeareâs work is to
understand how unnecessary it is, and how misleading, to demand always the resolution of contraries.
To see his work in one way only, from any one exclusive critical viewpoint, is to misapprehend entirely
the magnificent, fully human, scope of his art. âOthello,â Pushkin said, âwas not jealous. He was
trustful.â
authentic vintage barber shops that have been serving customers for at least 50 years, and counting.
Shakespeare taught English how to sing in every key; his lyric versatility makes his work a grammar of
dramatic possibility. When Regan asks her father why he needs even one attendant to try her
hospitality, Lear replies with one of the most lyric tirades in the language, which begins:
Oh, reason not the need. Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluousâŚ
You Heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both.
If it be you that stirs these daughtersâ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely. Touch me with noble anger.
And let not womenâs weapons, water drops,
Stain my manâs cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shallâI will do such thingsâ
What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earthâ
O fool, I shall go mad! (I.4)
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For language more prosaic yet quite as eff ective, here is Mercutioâs retort to Benvolio in Romeo and
Juliet , III.1:
Thou! Why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more, or a hair less, in his beard than thou hast.
Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. What eye
but such an eye would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head
hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarreling. Thou hast quarreled with a man for coughing in the street,
because he hath wakened thy dog that hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for wearing a
new doublet before Easter? With another for tying his new shoes with old ribbon? And yet thou wilt tutor me from
quarreling!
From curse to pointed invective, and then another step into the rhetoric of madness, Shakespeare leads
the language through all its paces. Madness shows, at one extreme, in exuberant nonsenseâas in the
Foolâs speech to Lear in II.4: âCry to it, Nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put âem Iâ the
paste alive. She knapped âem oâ the coxcombs and cried, âDown, wantons, down!!ââ
There is method in the madness of one extreme, the Foolâs, as there is in that of the other, Learâsâas he
speaks to the blinded Gloucester in IV.6: âOh ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no
money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light. Yet you see how this world
goes.â
And, characteristically, Shakespeare goes beyond the extreme, his method taking him beyond method
into a transcendent realm where the foolishness of an insane mind and the perversion of madness come
full circle. An example is Learâs last speechâafter his loyal daughter, Cordelia, has been hangedâ
magnificently poignant:
And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life
And thou no breath at all? Thouâlt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
Some of the greatest rhetorical questions asked by Shakespeareâs characters exist in a similar
extraordinary realm of irreducible discourseâbecause they are as unanswerable as the questions
Achilles poses in Homerâs Iliad. Lear himself, of course, is famous for them: âThen let them anatomize
Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?ââ
(III.6). King Richard II, in his famous speech about âsad stories of the death of kings,â concludes: âI live
with bread like you, feel want,/Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,/How can you say to me I am a
king?â (III.3). Statement turns to verb-noun list to formal pun to a rhetorical question that is also a highly
poignant final statement. And the echoes of this statement take us back to the The Merchant of Venice,
where Shylock makes a list of the same question:
... Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the samewinter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? (III.2)
Like many of us, many of Shakespeareâs characters seem to guide their lives by aphorisms. Timon of
Athens declares, ââTis not enough to help the feeble up,/But to support him afterâ; Pandulph, in King
John: âWhen Fortune means to men most good,/she looks upon them with a threatening eyeâ;
Mowbray, in Richard II. âThe purest treasure mortal times afford spotless reputation; that away,/Men
are but guilded loam or painted clayâ; Casca, in Julius Caesar : âSo every bondman in his own hand
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bears/The power to cancel his captivityâ; the Fool, in King Lear: âLet go thy hold when a great wheel
runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with followingâ; or Edgar, in the same play: âThe worst is not/so
long as we can say âThis is the worst.â â
Shakespeareâs genius for the aphoristic style is what makes his work seem so popular, rooted where folk
literature is rooted, a culture of itself:Jesters do oft prove prophets. (Regan, King Lear )
They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness. (Flavius, Julius Caesar )
And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear,/Millions of mischief. (Octavius, Julius Caesar )
The course of true love never did run smooth. (Lysander, A Midsummer Nightâs Dream)
As Edmund Blunder remarked, âNo wonder if Shakespeare, in a country full of proverb, metaphor,
parable and pun, is supremely skillful in conducting his characters to their destiny by means of oracular
and laconic utterances.â He is a writer, after all, so we should not be surprised to discover that the world
he creates is more often than not held together with words. Words are the binding element within a
play, the force that makes its characters and dramatic movement cohere. Three scenes inKing Lear
illustrate the point:
LEAR. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
CORDELIA. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heaveMy heart into my mouth... (I.1)
GLOUCESTER. What paper were you reading?
EDMUND. Nothing, my lord.GLOUCESTER. No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing hath not suchneed to hide itself. Letâs see. Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles. (I.2)
KENT. This is nothing, fool.FOOL. Then âtis like the breath of an unfeed lawyer. You gave me nothing forât. Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?LEAR. Why, no, boy, nothing can be made of nothing. (I.4)
Ultimately our belief in Shakespeareâs characters is based on our emotional involvement with the words
through and in which they existâas when Romeo defines himself, toward the end, by saying, to
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Balthasar: âThe time and my intents are savage-wild, more fierce and more inexorable far, than empty
tigers or the roaring seaâ (V.3). We know his character from his words, and so vivid are the words we
feel we know Romeo better than we know many of our contemporaries.
How Shakespeare accomplished his unique magic power over our emotions can be suggested by
comparing a passage from Sir Thomas Northâs translation of Plutarchâs life of Mark Antony, one of the
primary sources of Antony and Cleopatra, with the speech Shakespeare constructed from Northâs
translation.
First, North:
Some of them followed the barge alongst the rivers side; others also ran out of the city to see her coming in. So that
in the end there ran such multitudes of people, one after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the
market place, in his imperial seat to give audience, and there went a rumor in the peopleâs mouths that the goddess
Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of all Asia.
The liberties North takes with Plutarchâs text must have inspired Shakespeare, whose poetry transcends
Northâs prose without seeming to be substantially different from it:
ENOBARBUS.... From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the senseOf the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her. And Antony,
Enthroned iâ the market place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air, which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature. (II.2)
More than anything else we find energy the determining stylistic differential. From Northâs relatively
objective lead, Shakespeare typically finds the dramatic impact he seeks in going beyond excess: âThe
city cast her people out upon her.â And the energy includes another element characteristic of
Shakespeareâs work: attention to detail. Antony sits alone, âwhistling to the airâ: the unexpected image
makes us chill with the appropriateness of these words to cause in us the emotions enacted by these
mighty characters.
Although critics through the centuries have emphasized the mightiness of Shakespeareâs characters by
way of either lamenting or praising their relationship to ourselves, you will find in Shakespeare
marvelous moments where the mightiness disappears in an instantâs awkwardness of expression that
offers insight to convince us that they are made of the same stuff as are we. âThough this be all,â the
Duchess says, in Richard II, âdo not so quickly go,/I shall remember more.â Brutus, in Julius Caesar . âIf
we do meet again, why, we shall smile/If not, why then, this parting was well madeâ and âO name him
not, let us not break with him, for he will never follow any thing, that other men begin.â
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Of all the keys in which Shakespeareâs English sings, perhaps the one that delights and stirs us most
deeply is the comic. You will never forget the play of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Nightâs
Dream or Falstaffâs speechââA good Sherris-Sack hath a two-fold operation in itââin Henry IV, Part
Two. One of the most hilarious scenes in all of Shakespeareâs work must be seen in the theater, or
vividly imagined, to be appreciated. It is the opening speech of II.3, of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Launce
enters, âleading a dogâ:
Nay, âtwill be this hour ere I have done weeping. All the kind of the Launces have this very fault... I think Crab my dog
be the sourest-natured dog that lives .My mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, ourcat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear. He is a
stone, a very pebble stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog. A Jew would have wept to have seen our parting.
Why, my grandam, having no eyes, look you, wept herself blind at my parting. Nay, Iâll show you the manner of it. This
shoe is my father. No, this left shoe is my father. No, no, this left shoe is my mother. Nay, that cannot be so neither.
Yes, it is so, it is so, it hath the worser sole. This shoe, with the hole in it, is my mother, and this my fatherâa
vengeance onât! There âtis. Now, sir, this staff is my sister, for look you, she is as white as a lily and as small as a wand.
This hat is Nan, our maid. I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dogâOh! The dog is me, and I am myself.
Aye, so, so. Now come I to my father. âFather, your blessing.â Now should not the shoe speak a word for weeping.
Now should I kiss my father. Well, he weeps on. Now come I to my mother. Oh, that she could speak now like a wood
woman! Well, I kiss her; why, there âtis. Hereâs my motherâs breath up and down. Now come I to my sister. Mark the
moan she makes. Now the dog all this while sheds not a tear, nor speaks a word; but see how I lay the dust with my
tears.
Laughter like this is what exonerates Shakespeare from accusations (like those of Bernard Shaw) ofcynicism and gloom. Shakespeareâs âessential greatness,â says John Drinkwater, âlies not in his plots or
his humanity or his sense of character, but in his poetry.â Shakespeareâs characteristic blank verse,
consisting of five stressed syllables and generally unrhymed, proved to be all the technique he needed
to build the unforgettable worlds of his plays. Juliet says, in one of her great monologues:
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
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And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun. (II.2)
And Cleopatra praises Antony to Dolabella:
I dreamed there was an Emperor Antony.
Oh, such another sleep, that I might seeBut such another man!
His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
The little O, the earth.
His legs bestrid the ocean. His reared arm
Crested the world. His voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends.
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb.
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty.
There was no winter inât, an autumn âtwas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphinlike, they showed his back above
The element they lived in. In his livery
Walked crowns and crownets, realms and islands wereAs plates dropped from his pocket. (V.2)
Shakespeareâs prose is the counter-balance that keeps each world in equilibrium. As such it operates by
the same principles as does his poetry, fueled by energy and alternation. His propensity for sudden
reversals, alternations from one extreme to the other, has been regarded as a symptom of his âpainful
integrity,â as though it were a disease to be whole. Instead this quality of his style seems easily the most
characteristic of all because it is the honest reflection of the characteristic propensities of the human
mind. A famous example is the sudden reversal that occurs when Antonyâs poetic eulogy overpowers
Brutusâ brilliant prose speech over Caesarâs body. We are convinced first by one, then by the other, and
the persuasion of the second is all the more impressive because the first has been so effective. Another
wonderful example is the opposition of Edmundâs speech to Gloucesterâs in King Lear , I.2. First,
Gloucesterâs:
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and
Thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities,
mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked âtw ist son and father. This villain of mine
comes under the prediction, thereâs son against father. The King falls from bias of nature, thereâs father against child.
We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us
disquietly to our graves. Find out this vi llain, Edmund, it shall lose thee nothing. Do it carefully. And the noble and
true-hearted Kent banished! His offense, honesty! âTis strange. [Exit .]
We are fully convinced by the old manâs astrological analysis of the contemporary turmoil. Then Edmund
has his chance to change our minds:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortuneâoften the surfeit of our own behaviorâwe make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an
enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting onâan admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother
under Ursa Major, so that it follows 1 am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am had the maidenliest
star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgarâ(Enter EDGAR.) And pat he comes like the catastrophe of
the old comedy ... Oh, these eclipses do portend these divisions!
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If we but once have suspended our disbelief to become impressionable to drama, we are convinced
completely by both speeches.
Does this mean Shakespeare is a sophist, who will take any side of the argument and argue it
successfully because he argues so well; or, worse, that he is a cynic, who will argue either side because
he believes in neither and none? Does it mean that Shakespeare, with such contrasts, means to warn us
of the dangers inherent in being impressionable and uncriticalâunlike Iago, who said, âI am nothing ifnot criticalââin a world filled with eloquent opposition? None of these things is necessarily true; we
need not conclude anything about them. Shakespeare believed in no part of life to the exclusion of any
other because he believed completely in the fullness of life, all its variety; and faithful to that belief he
reflected every part with full and absolute intensity and integrity, making each seem on his stage as real
as it is outside the theater. We cannot say he believes in Edmundâs viewpoint or in Gloucesterâs, nor that
he believes in neither. He is able to present both as effectively as they are ever presented in âreal lifeâ;
accordingly, if we must conclude anything about Shakespeareâs personal views, we must conclude that
he believed in both.
The same universality of acceptance and belief which makes Antony only slightly more convincing than
Brutus accounts for the sheer energy, the intensity, that characterizes Shakespeareâs style (in his
nondramatic poetry as well). What begins as style ends up being characterization until it becomes
impossible for us to distinguish the one from the other or to determine which gave rise to which. In
Romeo and Juliet , for example, the style of the play alternates between poetic gymnastics and pure and
simple lines of deep emotion. The unrhymed iambic pentameter is filled with conceits, puns, and
wordplays, representing both lovers as very literate youngstersâfrom the stunningly brilliant moment
of their first contact on the dance-floor:
ROMEO. [To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this,
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My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrimsâ hands do touch, r
And palm to palm is holy palmersâ kiss.
ROMEO. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET. Aye, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.ROMEO. Oh then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.
They pray. Grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET. Saints do not move, though grant for prayersâ sake.
ROMEO. Then move not while my prayerâs effect I take.
Thus from my lips by thine my sin is purged.
[Kissing her.]
JULIET. Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
ROMEO: Sin from my lips? Oh, trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.
JULIET. You kiss by the book. (I.5)
Only a reader (as opposed to a member of the theater audience) would notice the complexity of the
prosody here, although the complexity of metaphorical conceit is obvious to the listener. The rhyme
scheme of the meeting they construct between them is that of an extended sonnet (abab, ebeb, dede,ff\ghghâwith the last line divided between them!). Their verbal wit, in fact, is not Shakespeareâs
rhetorical excess but part of their characters. It fortifies the impression we have of their spiritual
natures, showing their love as an intellectual appreciation of beauty combined with pure physical
passion. The imagery of the play is as lush and complex as the language itself, making unforgettable the
balcony scene in which Romeo describes Juliet as the sun, Julietâs nightingale-lark speech, her
comparison of Romeo to âday in night,â which Romeo then develops as he observes, at dawn, âmore
light and light, more dark and dark our woes.â
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It is a commonplace of Shakespeare criticism that the Elizabethan mind is reflected in Shakespeareâs
verbosity, fullness of expression, celebration of detail, and intense energy. But as his contemporary Ben
Jonson said, Shakespeare was not âof an age, but for all time.â The human mind itself appears behind his
works, revealing its immensities. That is what makes certain writers like ShakespeareâHomer and
Dante and Cervantes and Chekhovâsomehow sacred, standing above the others, standing like giants
against the centuries so that they speak across them only to one another and thereby bring the human
dialogue together in a strangely contracted time span in which all that matters is what they say to one
another. These are authors whose texts are runes that form entire languages of exegesis and
interpretation around them, as Shakespeare has formed English after him. Like the Bible or the I Ching,
they can be opened at any point to be divined by, since every point leads directly to the heart of human
experience. They reveal countless accesses to the heart, to the depths of human nature, to the obscure
cave of the imagination where we see what matters to us most in the darkness they illumine.
Shakespeare, like these others, provides inroads to the labyrinth of the mind, its possibilities and its
purposes, both its past and future myriad in their configurations. Because the characters and situations
he invents provide us with all the examples we need in order to choose actions on the basis of their
possible and probable outcomes, Shakespeare becomes a kind of guide to us, a high priest, one of the
soaring shamans who can lead us forward with courage and determination in a life which is, as far as we
can tell objectively, otherwise devoid of certain meaning. They give us meaning in accepting all meaning,a religion based on the celebration of the infinite complexities of human experience and the mindâs
ability to invent and therefore to cope with all of them. We experience infinity in the presence of
Shakespeareâs expressed perceptions, as we react to the shapes he has bodied forth from the depths of
his imaginationâand of ours. In the presence of these sacred textsâ-an infinite ocean of meaning in
which no single meaning is allowed to protrude in any restrictively insistent way excessively into our
awarenessâwe feel we are in the presence, somehow, of the shaper of our species, in the presence of
the maker. Shakespeareâs work brings us the presence of meaning itself. It may be, after all, not
important what the meaning of life turns out to beâwe care only that it be elusively there, challenging
us to seek it, giving us assurance of its presence by directing our growth and our reaching outward
toward it as it always, ideally, resists our momentary captivities of it in prose or poetryâand is never
reached and apprehended until we are beyond the realm of expression.
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In reading Shakespeare, we do not doubt for an instant that the meaning exists. The meaning eludes us,
as we feel it eluded him, but precisely as it eludes us we feel it to be all the closer. We experience the
depth of the forest, as Jose Ortega y Gasset would put it, because, as we read or attend Shakespeare,
we have without noticing it lost interest in counting the trees. Sometimes in his plays, it may take an
entire scene to achieve this experience of depth for us. So inRichard II or Henry IV , we are introduced
gradually to another world, eased gradually from our own. In his most dramatic works, like Richard III, or
his greatest, like King Lear , the introduction is immediate; the full force of Shakespeareâs genius burns out to us immediately as the curtain rises on the opening scene. From the first lines we are impelled out
of this world of superficial counting in which we exist from day to day into a realm where we sense a
reality so much more meaningful than anything we consciously experience that all the bells of myth and
experience ring simultaneously deep within us. And we dare not look at our companions in the theater
for fear of breaking the spell that has made us all both isolated and at the same time unanimous in our
enchantment. We are transported out of ourselves into a world, that is, which exists not on the stage
with actors who play roles, but in that mythic space and time between the stage and our seats in the
audience. There, past and present, myth and psychological reality, become one and the same; and we
wander about as freely as shamans in that other worldâthat imitation Aristotle speaks of. Pure
experience. Shared vitality. The vastness of the mind; the heart of being human. That heart which wakes
and sleeps to the alternation of darkness and light indigenous to our planet as well as to our poeticimagination. As in the mystery of the Christian trinity, in Shakespeareâs plays opposites are merged
without losing their separate identity, transcending it, as real as the dawn which announces each
morning that light and darkness are not contraries but only the purest bands in a continuum too large
for us to perceive at once.
If the dream of the artist is to make his return to the unlimited freedom of dream and to take us with
him as far as we can imagine, Shakespeare has succeeded beyond all others because his prodigious
imagination has, because of his prolific energies, managed to body âforth/ The forms of things
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unknown,â to turn âthem to shapes, andâ give âto airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.â( A
Midsummer Nightâs Dream, V.1) He has made us dream with him; we become intimates of his
imagination. So successful is he in introducing us to the âbrave new worldâ of his imaginings that we
forget ourselves and have to be awakened before we leave the theater. That is Puckâs closing function:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended.That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream.... (V.1)
Anyone who has experienced the slumber Puck speaks of will deny that the shadows of Shakespeareâs
dramas are âweak and idle,â unless it is to emphasize the irony of the last line quoted here. We
sometimes prefer dreams to waking. As we turn from Shakespeare, we feel we have, with him, explored
the far reaches of the human mind. He explores all of it, then, stepping back from the mind as though it
were a stage, he expresses its fullness with detachment and commitment, with exaggeration and
without distortion, in its magnificent pettiness and in its detailed magnanimity. Then, not yet having
exhausted his own energies which were, as far as we can surmise, as inexhaustible as the energies of the
universe, he beckons us to follow him to another experience. And those who watch us following him
may say, as Mercutio does to Romeo,
Oh then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairiesâ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart menâs noses as they lie asleepâ
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through loversâ brains, and then they dream of love;
Oâer courtiersâ knees, that dream on curtseys straight;
Oâer lawyersâ fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O'er ladiesâ lips, who straight on kisses dream... (I.4)
When Romeo replies, âPeace, peace, Mercutio, peace!/Thou talkâst of nothing,â Mercutio readily agrees:
âTrue, I talk of dreams,/Which are the children of an idle brain,/Begot of nothing but vain
fantasy,/Which is as thin of substance as the air....â But we are impatient with Romeo until, with us, he
weeps to see Mercutio slain; because we need the dreams as much as we need the air. The fantasy they
lead us to entertain with its author is better for us, we sense instinctively, than concepts like âtruthâ and
âhonorâ (that Falstaff criticizes as being potentially lethal). We are âthe stuff that dreams are made on,â
and he who allows us to participate together in new dreams is sacred among us. As Joseph Campbell has
it, âmyth is public dream; dream is private myth.â Shakespeare has made his dreams ours by bringing
them from their mythic depths onto the well-lit stage.
A. A. Smirnov says of Shakespeare: âHe recognized but one destiny: to exhaust all human creativepossibilities.â And Cogburn: âHe had the abundance which is the hallmark of genius; words poured from
him.â The vastness of his imagination is what awes us about Shakespeare, combined with the versatility
of technique and mighty resources of energy that allowed him to reprocess everything in the experience
of dramatizing it. He has shown us that art is indeed the playhouse of the mind, the screen onto which
imagination projects its creations, and its partial creations, and its excessive creations. His allowance of
his own excesses allows us to face and to shape our own; it also allows us insight into the vastness of
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Shakespeareâsâand therefore of our own, the humanâmind. No compulsive neatness intrudes to deny
full access. All here is disclosed. He is humanity at its most conscious.
No corner of human experience is left unexplored in Shakespeareâs work. When he retired to Stratford,
it was only because he had exhausted, as Borges suggests, âall the possible shapes of being,â having
given form to the shadows hidden in the vast cave of his imagination. There was nothing on the earth
left that he needed to express for us, nothing left to name, in order to reveal to us our mind. There wasno more work for him to do here.
Other authors, even among his contemporaries, are
more precise or more philosophical than Shakespeare.
But what does that matter? âI am human,â he might
have said about himself as Chremes did, ânothing
human is alien to me.â To understand Shakespeare
completelyâa lifelong study of loveâto know his
works by heart, would be sufficient humanistic
education. And, for many people, it has been just that.
It would be enough introduction to human nature. In
the presence of this library flowing from the pen of a
single human being, the teacher is filled with awe and
reverent futilityâthe futility of saying anything of
proper measure, but the necessity, nevertheless, of
communicating this awe so that the uninitiated will be
moved to explore that library for himself and so to
discover the depths of his or her own mind.
As you explore Shakespeareâs works, you will be
exploring parts of your own mind you had not
suspected were there before. Shakespeare will show
them to you and will tell you their names, what they
can do to you, what they have done to others. These
new regions of experience will continue revealing themselves toyou as you find in Shakespeareâs
workâas in a multi-faceted, multi-surfaced,
infinitely complex mirror that shows you your face in every large and small and distorted reflection
conceivableânames for the secret parts and hidden feelings and humors you had no idea you
possessed.
Who was Shakespeare? The question intrigues us precisely because we will never answer it, any more
than we will discover the identity of Homer or of the authors of the Bible. âThe wholesome thing about
Shakespeareâs reputation,â John Drinkwater writes, âis that it is founded on a genuine appreciation of
his work, unconfused by any problematic issuesâ of biography or intention. C. B. Purdom is another who
sees Shakespeareâs relative anonymity as a literary asset: It was necessary ... that Shakespeare should be unknown. So bright a soul was beyond human nature, and
the incidents of his life are not to be understood as those of an ordinary man.... The lives of great men of genius are
frequently hid in mystery.... The advantage for these secrecies is that the more we know of a man the more we are
apt to be concerned with his peculiarities, weaknesses, and mere human nature; and this gets in the way of the ...
work.... The truth is that these works come from a source that, whatever else we get to know, remaining unknown. It
is better that such men should have no history, so that their works, which are their gifts to mankind, should speak for
themselves. {Producing Shakespeare, London, 1950)
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Still the mystery of his historical identity has inspired writers from Ben Jonson to Borges to tell us what
they have known about Shakespeare in their hearts, the outlines of his face they have seen in their own
imaginations. They are given the poetic license to do this because so little about his history is definitely
known. The true history of Shakespeare is his workâand it is one of the most beautiful ironies of
literature that, as with Homer, poetics have in this case surpassed history, reminding us of Aristotleâs
statement in the Poetics that poetry is more âphilosophical or scientific than historyâ because âhistory
shows us only things that are or were, while poetry shows us things that might be or could be.â Borgesâ
brilliant essay, âEverything and Nothing,â elaborates on how Shakespeare was able to present things as
they might be:
Instinctively, he had ... trained himself in the habit of pretending that he was someone, so it would not be discovered
that he was no one. In London he hit upon the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who plays
on stage at being someone else.... Nobody was ever as many men as that man, who like the Egyptian Proteus
managed to exhaust all the possible shapes of being.... Richard affirms that in his single person he plays many parts,
and lago says with strange words, âI am not what I am.â His passages on the fundamental identity of existing,
dreaming, and acting are famous.... The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: âNeither am I one self; I dreamed the
world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are
many personsâand none. (Dreamtigers)
Socrates reportedly said, âThe mask an actor wears is apt to become his face.â If so, Shakespeare hasbecome the hero with the thousand faces, his true face visible only to those who, like Cervantesâ Don
Quixote, are able to see through each new mask of appearance the hidden reflection of themselves, the
truth that change itself is the only constant. Borges, in another essay, adds: âHazlitt corroborated or
confirmed⌠that Shakespeare was like other men in every way except in being like other men; and that
intimately he was nothing, but he was everything that others were, or could be. Later Hugo compared
him to the ocean, the possible forms of which were infinite. (âFrom Someone to Nobodyâ).
This view of Shakespeareâs character explains why his vision rings so true to experience, seems all-
encompassing. Other authors, such as Dante or Proust, express a vision of order which they offer, with
great conviction, as the truth of human experience. But Shakespeareâs vision refuses to render
experience as a determinable wholeânot because he is darkly pessimistic: he is even-handedly realistic.
Shakespeare faces the world of experience, in its infinite possibilities,and imitates it (in Aristotleâssense) so that the finished imitation we experience in his works gives us the world both as it is and as it
is enhanced by art so that we can feel in control of it in the theater. He gives us a view of the infinite
that we can bear, and that in itself is a miracle. Others, such as Rabelais and Cervantes, are more
consistent in their inconsistency, leave you with a certain taste, an ineffable feeling that you will forever
associate with characters like Panurge and Sancho Panza. When you leave Shakespeare, on the contrary,
you discover that you have left nothing behind: there is nothing to leave because Shakespeareâs work is
life itself, with all its complexity, its diversity, its longed-for order, its suspected disorderâranging from
Ulyssesâ famous speech in Troilus and Cressida to Macbethâs âtale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.â Walt Whitman might speak for Shakespeare as well as for himself when he wrote, in
Leaves of Grass, âDo I contradict myself? Then, I contradict myself. There are multitudes within me.â
This essay is adapted from its first publication in Frank Magillâs English Literature: Shakespeare, from Salem Press. All quotations from
Shakespeareâs works are taken from Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. G.B. Harrison. New York, Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & World,
Inc., 1948/1952.