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 Shakespeares 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 themdont 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 Shakespeares 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 findas in the last meeting between Hal and Falstaff

in Henry IV, Part Twothe 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 Shakespeares 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 womens weapons, water drops,
Stain my mans cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shallI 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)

For language more prosaic yet quite as effective, here is Mercutios 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 nonsenseas in the
Fools 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 Fools, as there is in that of the other, Learsas 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 Lears last speechafter 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? Thoult 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 Shakespeares characters exist in a similar
extraordinary realm of irreducible discoursebecause they are as unanswerable as the questions
Achilles poses in Homers 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 same
winter 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 Shakespeares 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

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.

Shakespeares 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 Nights 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 in King Lear
illustrate the point:
LEAR. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
CORDELIA. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My 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 such
need to hide itself. Lets 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 fort. Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?
LEAR. Why, no, boy, nothing can be made of nothing. (I.4)

Ultimately our belief in Shakespeares characters is based on our emotional involvement with the words
through and in which they existas when Romeo defines himself, toward the end, by saying, to

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 Norths translation of Plutarchs life of Mark Antony, one of the
primary sources of Antony and Cleopatra, with the speech Shakespeare constructed from Norths
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 peoples 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 Plutarchs text must have inspired Shakespeare, whose poetry transcends
Norths prose without seeming to be substantially different from it:
ENOBARBUS.... From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of 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 Norths 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
Shakespeares 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 Shakespeares 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 instants 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.

Of all the keys in which Shakespeares 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 Nights
Dream or Falstaffs speechA good Sherris-Sack hath a two-fold operation in itin Henry IV, Part
Two. One of the most hilarious scenes in all of Shakespeares 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, our
cat 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, Ill 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 fathera
vengeance ont! 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 dogOh! 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. Heres my mothers 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) of
cynicism and gloom. Shakespeares essential greatness, says John Drinkwater, lies not in his plots or
his humanity or his sense of character, but in his poetry. Shakespeares 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,

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 see
But 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 int, 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 were
As plates dropped from his pocket. (V.2)

Shakespeares 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 Antonys poetic eulogy overpowers
Brutus brilliant prose speech over Caesars 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 Edmunds speech to Gloucesters in King Lear, I.2. First,
Gloucesters:
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 twist son and father. This villain of mine
comes under the prediction, theres son against father. The King falls from bias of nature, theres 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 villain, 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 mans 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 fortuneoften 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 onan 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!

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 uncriticalunlike Iago, who said, I am nothing if
not criticalin 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 Edmunds viewpoint or in Gloucesters, 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 Shakespeares 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 Shakespeares 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 youngstersfrom 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,

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 prayers 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\ghghwith the last line divided between them!). Their verbal wit, in fact, is not Shakespeares
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, Juliets 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.

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

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 ShakespeareHomer and
Dante and Cervantes and Chekhovsomehow 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 minds
ability to invent and therefore to cope with all of them. We experience infinity in the presence of
Shakespeares expressed perceptions, as we react to the shapes he has bodied forth from the depths of
his imaginationand 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
awarenesswe feel we are in the presence, somehow, of the shaper of our species, in the presence of
the maker. Shakespeares work brings us the presence of meaning itself. It may be, after all, not
important what the meaning of life turns out to bewe 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 poetryand is never
reached and apprehended until we are beyond the realm of expression.

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 in Richard 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 Shakespeares 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 worldthat 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 poetic
imagination. As in the mystery of the Christian trinity, in Shakespeares 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

unknown, to turn them to shapes, and give to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.(A
Midsummer Nights 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 Pucks 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 Shakespeares
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 mens noses as they lie asleep
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers brains, and then they dream of love;
Oer courtiers knees, that dream on curtseys straight;
Oer 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 talkst 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 creative
possibilities. 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

Shakespearesand therefore of our own, the humanmind. 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 Shakespeares 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 was
no 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
completelya lifelong study of loveto 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 futilitythe 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 Shakespeares 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 to you as you find in Shakespeares
workas in a multi-faceted, multi-surfaced,
infinitely complex mirror that shows you your face in every large and small and distorted reflection
conceivablenames 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
Shakespeares 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 Shakespeares 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)

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 workand it is one of the most beautiful ironies of
literature that, as with Homer, poetics have in this case surpassed history, reminding us of Aristotles
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 personsand none. (Dreamtigers)

Socrates reportedly said, The mask an actor wears is apt to become his face. If so, Shakespeare has
become 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 Shakespeares character explains why his vision rings so true to experience, seems allencompassing. 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 Shakespeares vision refuses to render
experience as a determinable wholenot because he is darkly pessimistic: he is even-handedly realistic.
Shakespeare faces the world of experience, in its infinite possibilities, and imitates it (in Aristotles
sense) 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 Shakespeares work is
life itself, with all its complexity, its diversity, its longed-for order, its suspected disorderranging from
Ulysses famous speech in Troilus and Cressida to Macbeths 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 Magills English Literature: Shakespeare, from Salem Press. All quotations from
Shakespeares works are taken from Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. G.B. Harrison. New York, Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & World,
Inc., 1948/1952.