Appreciating Shakespeare

8/17/2019 Appreciating Shakespeare

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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 Shakespeare’s 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 them—don’t 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 Shakespeare’s 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 find—as in the last meeting between Hal and Falstaff


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in Henry IV, Part Two—the 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 Shakespeare’s 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. “Othello,” Pushkin said, “was not jealous. He was

trustful.”

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 superfluous…

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 daughters’ hearts

Against their father, fool me not so much

To bear it tamely. Touch me with noble anger.

And let not women’s weapons, water drops,

Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall—I will do such things—

What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be

The terrors of the earth—

O fool, I shall go mad! (I.4)


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For language more prosaic yet quite as eff ective, here is Mercutio’s 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 nonsense—as in the

Fool’s speech to Lear in II.4: “Cry to it, Nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ‘em I’ the

paste alive. She knapped ‘em o’ the coxcombs and cried, ‘Down, wantons, down!!’”

There is method in the madness of one extreme, the Fool’s, as there is in that of the other, Lear’s—as he

speaks to the blinded Gloucester in IV.6: “Oh 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.”

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 Lear’s last speech—after his loyal daughter, Cordelia, has been hanged—

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? Thou’lt 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 Shakespeare’s characters exist in a similar

extraordinary realm of irreducible discourse—because they are as unanswerable as the questions

Achilles poses in Homer’s Iliad. Lear himself, of course, is famous for them: “Then let them anatomize

Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’’

(III.6). King Richard II, in his famous speech about “sad stories of the death of kings,” concludes: “I live

with bread like you, feel want,/Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,/How can you say to me I am a

king?” (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 Shakespeare’s characters seem to guide their lives by aphorisms. Timon of

Athens declares, “’Tis not enough to help the feeble up,/But to support him after”; Pandulph, in King

John: “When Fortune means to men most good,/she looks upon them with a threatening eye”;

Mowbray, in Richard II. “The purest treasure mortal times afford spotless reputation; that away,/Men

are but guilded loam or painted clay”; Casca, in Julius Caesar : “So every bondman in his own hand


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bears/The power to cancel his captivity”; the Fool, in King Lear: “Let go thy hold when a great wheel

runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following”; or Edgar, in the same play: “The worst is not/so

long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ”

Shakespeare’s 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 Night’s Dream)

As Edmund Blunder remarked, “No 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.” 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. Let’s see. Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles. (I.2)

KENT. This is nothing, fool.FOOL. Then ’tis like the breath of an unfeed lawyer. You gave me nothing for’t. Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?LEAR. Why, no, boy, nothing can be made of nothing. (I.4)

Ultimately our belief in Shakespeare’s characters is based on our emotional involvement with the words

through and in which they exist—as when Romeo defines himself, toward the end, by saying, to


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Balthasar: “The time and my intents are savage-wild, more fierce and more inexorable far, than empty

tigers or the roaring sea” (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 North’s translation of Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony, one of the

primary sources of Antony and Cleopatra, with the speech Shakespeare constructed from North’s

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 people’s 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 Plutarch’s text must have inspired Shakespeare, whose poetry transcends

North’s 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 i’ 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 North’s relatively

objective lead, Shakespeare typically finds the dramatic impact he seeks in going beyond excess: “The

city cast her people out upon her.” And the energy includes another element characteristic of

Shakespeare’s work: attention to detail. Antony sits alone, “whistling to the air”: 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 Shakespeare’s 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 instant’s awkwardness of expression that

offers insight to convince us that they are made of the same stuff as are we. “Though this be all,” the

Duchess says, in Richard II, “do not so quickly go,/I shall remember more.” Brutus, in Julius Caesar . “If

we do meet again, why, we shall smile/If not, why then, this parting was well made” and “O name him

not, let us not break with him, for he will never follow any thing, that other men begin.”


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Of all the keys in which Shakespeare’s 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 Night’s

Dream or Falstaff’s speech—“A good Sherris-Sack hath a two-fold operation in it”—in Henry IV, Part

Two. One of the most hilarious scenes in all of Shakespeare’s 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, “leading a dog”:

Nay, ’twill 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, I’ll 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 father—a

vengeance on’t! There ’tis. 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 dog—Oh! The dog is me, and I am myself.

Aye, so, so. Now come I to my father. “Father, your blessing.” 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 ’tis. Here’s my mother’s 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. Shakespeare’s “essential greatness,” says John Drinkwater, “lies not in his plots or

his humanity or his sense of character, but in his poetry.” Shakespeare’s 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 in’t, an autumn ’twas

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)

Shakespeare’s 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 “painful

integrity,” 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 Antony’s poetic eulogy overpowers

Brutus’ brilliant prose speech over Caesar’s 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 Edmund’s speech to Gloucester’s in King Lear , I.2. First,

Gloucester’s:

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 ’tw ist son and father. This villain of mine

comes under the prediction, there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature, there’s 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! ’Tis strange. [Exit .]

We are fully convinced by the old man’s 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 fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we 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 on—an 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. Edgar—(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 uncritical—unlike Iago, who said, “I am nothing ifnot critical”—in 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 Edmund’s viewpoint or in Gloucester’s, nor that

he believes in neither. He is able to present both as effectively as they are ever presented in “real life”;

accordingly, if we must conclude anything about Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 youngsters—from 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 pilgrims’ hands do touch, r

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ 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 prayers’ sake.

ROMEO. Then move not while my prayer’s 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\ghgh—with the last line divided between them!). Their verbal wit, in fact, is not Shakespeare’s

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, Juliet’s nightingale-lark speech, her

comparison of Romeo to “day in night,” which Romeo then develops as he observes, at dawn, “more

light and light, more dark and dark our woes.”


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It is a commonplace of Shakespeare criticism that the Elizabethan mind is reflected in Shakespeare’s

verbosity, fullness of expression, celebration of detail, and intense energy. But as his contemporary Ben

Jonson said, Shakespeare was not “of an age, but for all time.” The human mind itself appears behind his

works, revealing its immensities. That is what makes certain writers like Shakespeare—Homer and

Dante and Cervantes and Chekhov—somehow 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 mind’s

ability to invent and therefore to cope with all of them. We experience infinity in the presence of

Shakespeare’s expressed perceptions, as we react to the shapes he has bodied forth from the depths of

his imagination—and of ours. In the presence of these sacred texts—-an infinite ocean of meaning in

which no single meaning is allowed to protrude in any restrictively insistent way excessively into our

awareness—we feel we are in the presence, somehow, of the shaper of our species, in the presence of

the maker. Shakespeare’s work brings us the presence of meaning itself. It may be, after all, not

important what the meaning of life turns out to be—we 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 poetry—and 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 Shakespeare’s 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 world—that 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 Shakespeare’s 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 “forth/ The forms of things


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unknown,” to turn “them to shapes, and” give “to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”( A

Midsummer Night’s 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 “brave new world” of his imaginings that we

forget ourselves and have to be awakened before we leave the theater. That is Puck’s 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 Shakespeare’s

dramas are “weak and idle,” 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 fairies’ 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 men’s noses as they lie asleep—

And in this state she gallops night by night

Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;

O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtseys straight;

O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees;

O'er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream... (I.4)

When Romeo replies, “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!/Thou talk’st of nothing,” Mercutio readily agrees:

“True, 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....” 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 “truth” and

“honor” (that Falstaff criticizes as being potentially lethal). We are “the stuff that dreams are made on,”

and he who allows us to participate together in new dreams is sacred among us. As Joseph Campbell has

it, “myth is public dream; dream is private myth.” Shakespeare has made his dreams ours by bringing

them from their mythic depths onto the well-lit stage.

A. A. Smirnov says of Shakespeare: “He recognized but one destiny: to exhaust all human creativepossibilities.” And Cogburn: “He had the abundance which is the hallmark of genius; words poured from

him.” 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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Shakespeare’s—and therefore of our own, the human—mind. 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 Shakespeare’s work. When he retired to Stratford,

it was only because he had exhausted, as Borges suggests, “all the possible shapes of being,” 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? “I am human,” he might

have said about himself as Chremes did, “nothing

human is alien to me.” To understand Shakespeare

completely—a lifelong study of love—to 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 futility—the 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 Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s

work—as in a multi-faceted, multi-surfaced,

infinitely complex mirror that shows you your face in every large and small and distorted reflection

conceivable—names 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. “The wholesome thing about

Shakespeare’s reputation,” John Drinkwater writes, ”is that it is founded on a genuine appreciation of

his work, unconfused by any problematic issues” of biography or intention. C. B. Purdom is another who

sees Shakespeare’s 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 work—and it is one of the most beautiful ironies of

literature that, as with Homer, poetics have in this case surpassed history, reminding us of Aristotle’s

statement in the Poetics that poetry is more “philosophical or scientific than history” because “history

shows us only things that are or were, while poetry shows us things that might be or could be.” Borges’

brilliant essay, “Everything and Nothing,” 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, “I am not what I am.” His passages on the fundamental identity of existing,

dreaming, and acting are famous.... The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither 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 persons—and none. (Dreamtigers)

Socrates reportedly said, “The mask an actor wears is apt to become his face.” If so, Shakespeare hasbecome the hero with the thousand faces, his true face visible only to those who, like Cervantes’ 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: “Hazlitt 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. (“From Someone to Nobody”).

This view of Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s vision refuses to render

experience as a determinable whole—not because he is darkly pessimistic: he is even-handedly realistic.

Shakespeare faces the world of experience, in its infinite possibilities,and imitates it (in Aristotle’ssense) 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 Shakespeare’s work is

life itself, with all its complexity, its diversity, its longed-for order, its suspected disorder—ranging from

Ulysses’ famous speech in Troilus and Cressida to Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

signifying nothing.” Walt Whitman might speak for Shakespeare as well as for himself when he wrote, in

Leaves of Grass, “Do I contradict myself? Then, I contradict myself. There are multitudes within me.”

This essay is adapted from its first publication in Frank Magill’s English Literature: Shakespeare, from Salem Press. All quotations from

Shakespeare’s works are taken from Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. G.B. Harrison. New York, Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & World,

Inc., 1948/1952.

Documents

Appreciating Shakespeare