By Bergotte
The series has moved, so far, through poets who held clear philosophical positions: Homer’s unflinching mortality, Ovid’s philosophy of change, Dante’s architecture of love. William Shakespeare holds no clear philosophical position. He holds all of them. He is the writer who most completely refused the consolation of a settled view, who gave the best arguments to every side, who made villains articulate and heroes self-deceiving, who could inhabit any consciousness with such completeness that readers across four centuries have argued about what he personally believed. The answer, in all likelihood, is that the question is wrong. Shakespeare did not believe. He imagined. And imagination, practiced at that pitch, turns out to be the most searching instrument we have for understanding what it is to be human.
The Problem of Shakespeare
Every series about great authors eventually arrives at Shakespeare, and every honest writer pauses here and feels something like vertigo. It is not simply the scale — thirty-seven plays, one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, two long narrative poems, a career spanning roughly twenty-five years from the early histories to The Tempest — though the scale is genuinely overwhelming. It is the quality of the attention, everywhere, at every moment, the sense that nothing in human experience has escaped the notice of this writer and that every observation, however glancing, lands with the precision of a long prepared thrust.
The biographical facts are meagre and, in a sense, provocative in their meagreness. William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of a glover and alderman. He attended the local grammar school, where he received a thorough education in Latin and rhetoric. He married Anne Hathaway at eighteen, had three children, and sometime in the late 1580s made his way to London and the theatre. He became a shareholder in the Globe and its predecessor, acted in plays, and wrote prolifically for the company. He retired to Stratford around 1613 and died in 1616. His will is a prosaic document that mentions, among other things, his second-best bed, and says nothing about the plays that were not yet published and that he apparently regarded as working documents rather than literary monuments.
The disproportion between this ordinary life and the extraordinary work has fuelled centuries of argument about authorship — Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford, and various others have been proposed as the real author — but the authorship debate, whatever its entertainment value, ultimately distracts from the more interesting question, which is not who wrote the plays but what the plays are doing. The answer to that question does not require a biography.
What the plays are doing, at the deepest level, is exploring the proposition that the self is not a fixed essence but a performance — that identity is constituted by what we say and do rather than by some kernel of being that pre-exists expression. This is not a position Shakespeare defends explicitly. It is a position the plays inhabit and demonstrate, again and again, with the relentlessness of someone who has seen through a comfortable illusion and cannot pretend otherwise.
Time’s War
The sonnets are the place to begin, because they are the place where Shakespeare speaks, or appears to speak, in his own voice, and because they establish the central anxiety that runs through all the work: the war against time. The sequence of one hundred and fifty-four poems, published in 1609 but composed over an earlier period, is addressed to two figures — a beautiful young man whose identity has been debated since the seventeenth century, and a dark lady whose identity is equally obscure — and it is structured around the opposing poles of desire and loss, beauty and decay, love and self-deception.
The early sonnets urge the young man to have children, to reproduce his beauty before time destroys it. They are, on the surface, persuasive poems, and they are, underneath, grief poems — the urgency of the argument betraying the depth of the fear. By Sonnet 18, the argument has shifted: it is not biology but poetry that will preserve the beloved, not children but lines of verse. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. The claim is enormous, and it is made with a confidence that the rest of the sequence systematically undermines. Poetry remembers, yes. But the sonnets that follow are haunted by the suspicion that what poetry preserves is not the living person but only the idea of the person, that immortality through art is a different kind of loss dressed in better clothes.
The dark lady sonnets, which occupy roughly the second half of the sequence, strip away even the consolation of elevated love. The speaker is in thrall to a woman he knows to be faithless, in a desire he knows to be degrading, and he cannot stop. The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action. That famous opening does not describe someone else’s lust. It describes the speaker’s own, with a self-knowledge so clear and so useless that it becomes its own form of torment. Knowing what is wrong with what you feel does not, the sonnets insist, help you stop feeling it. The intelligence that can diagnose the condition is not the same faculty as the will that would cure it. This is a very modern understanding of how the mind works, delivered in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter at the turn of the seventeenth century.
What the sonnets ultimately say about the human condition is that we are temporal creatures with a horror of time, that we love things precisely because they will not last, and that the attempts we make to hold them — through reproduction, through art, through the force of desire — are all, finally, inadequate. They are also, finally, all we have.
The Performance of Self
The comedies are the place where the instability of identity becomes play rather than crisis. Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing — in all of them, characters disguise themselves and discover, in the process of inhabiting another identity, something true about their own. Viola becomes Cesario and falls in love while pretending to be a man. Rosalind becomes Ganymede and tutors Orlando in love while conducting her own. Bottom becomes — briefly, mysteriously — something other than a weaver.
The logic of Shakespearean comedy is that the normal social order, with its fixed identities and prescribed roles, is not a natural or inevitable arrangement but a fragile construction that can be dissolved by the right kind of disruption — a forest, a shipwreck, a night of fairy magic — and that in the dissolution something true is revealed that the normal order suppresses. Love, in the comedies, is arbitrary and unruly and does not respect social hierarchy or prior attachment: it attaches where it will and demands that the social arrangements catch up. The comedies end in marriages that restore order, but the order restored is different from the order disrupted, slightly loosened, adjusted to accommodate what the disruption revealed.
The disguises in the comedies are not simply plot devices. They are philosophical propositions. When Viola, dressed as Cesario, woos Olivia on behalf of Orsino, she is simultaneously performing an identity she does not have, experiencing a desire she cannot express, and demonstrating that the categories of gender and social role through which people organise their experience of love are less stable than they appear. Olivia falls in love with Cesario — with the performance of a young man — and what she falls in love with, the play subtly suggests, is not accidentally or superficially like Viola. It is Viola, imperfectly masked. The performance and the self it conceals are not as distinct as either character imagines.
This is the comedies’ deepest claim: that who we are is at least partly constituted by the roles we play, that the mask, worn long enough and sincerely enough, becomes a face. It is the comic version of what the tragedies will explore at the cost of everything.
Hamlet and the Inward Turn
Hamlet is the play that broke the back of medieval theatrical convention and invented, or discovered, or released something that had not previously existed in literature: the modern interior self. This is a large claim, but it is difficult to dispute once you have sat with the evidence. Before Hamlet, characters in drama and narrative literature tell us what they feel and why and what they intend to do about it. Hamlet tells us what he feels, contradicts himself in the next speech, does the opposite of what he said he would do, cannot say with certainty why, and analyses his own paralysis with an intelligence that the analysis itself seems to perpetuate. He is the first character in literature to be interesting specifically because he does not understand himself.
The crisis of Hamlet is set in motion by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who commands him to revenge. The command is clear. Hamlet’s response — nearly five acts of delay, self-recrimination, feigned madness, real madness, theatre, philosophy, and death — is not clear at all, and Shakespeare provides no definitive explanation. The critics have offered dozens: Hamlet is genuinely mad; he is only pretending to be mad; he cannot act because he is too philosophical; he cannot act because he cannot verify the ghost’s testimony; he cannot act because killing the king would implicate his mother; he cannot act because of an unresolved Oedipal attachment. None of these explanations is sufficient, and their insufficiency is the point. Hamlet does not know why he cannot act, and we do not know either, and the play treats this mutual opacity as the most honest thing it can say about the relationship between intention and action, thought and deed.
What Hamlet discovers, in the course of his paralysis, is that the self is not a stable foundation from which action issues. It is itself in question. To be or not to be is not, primarily, a meditation on suicide, though it is that too. It is a meditation on the ontological status of the self — on whether there is, beneath the performances and the doubts and the layers of self-consciousness, anything that could be called a core of being. Hamlet looks and cannot find one, or cannot trust what he finds, and the play does not rescue him from this discovery by providing one. He acts, eventually, but not because he has resolved the question. He acts because the opportunity presents itself and the alternative is worse.
The tragedy of Hamlet is not that a good man is destroyed by evil circumstances, though that is also true. It is that the quality of mind that makes him most interesting — the refusal of easy certainties, the inability to perform without understanding — is exactly the quality that makes action impossible until it is too late.
Lear and the Stripping Away
If Hamlet is about the discovery that the self has no stable core, King Lear is about what happens when the external structures that substitute for that core are removed. Lear is a king who divides his kingdom, retires his authority, and discovers that the power and identity he thought were his own were lent to him by the role he occupied. Without the role, his daughters do not recognise him. Without the role, he does not recognise himself. He goes out onto the heath in a storm and goes mad, and the madness is, in the most precise sense, the experience of the self without its social architecture.
King Lear is the most extreme of the tragedies — the one that pushes hardest against any available consolation. Gloucester, blinded, falls from what he believes is the cliffs of Dover — a fall staged by his illegitimate son Edgar as a kind of therapeutic fiction, a fake death that will convince him life is worth continuing — and survives, and finds a reason to go on. It is a small hope, carefully constructed by a loving son, and it is immediately overtaken by events. Gloucester dies of joy when he discovers Edgar’s identity. Cordelia is hanged. Lear enters carrying her body and speaks the five most devastating words in English literature — Never, never, never, never, never — and dies. The good are not spared. Virtue is not rewarded. The cruelty that the play has been accumulating does not find its counterweight in justice.
Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest readers Shakespeare has had, famously said he could not bring himself to re-read the last act of Lear until he was editing it, and even then found the ending almost unbearable. Nahum Tate, in 1681, rewrote the play with a happy ending — Cordelia survives, marries Edgar, Lear is restored — and this version held the stage for a hundred and fifty years, because audiences could not tolerate what Shakespeare had actually written. What Shakespeare had actually written is that the universe does not arrange itself to reward the good or punish the wicked, that love is not sufficient protection against cruelty, that old age strips us of everything we thought we were, and that the proper response to this is not acceptance or transcendence but Lear’s naked, animal grief.
And yet. There is something in Lear that is not nihilism, something that persists despite the catastrophe. It is in the relationship between Lear and Cordelia, in the scenes of reconciliation in the fourth act where Lear wakes to find his faithful daughter beside him and can barely believe he is seeing her, and asks her forgiveness, and she gives it instantly, without reservation. It is in Edgar’s patient fidelity to his father through all the disguises and deceptions. It is in the love itself, which the play insists on even as it demonstrates that love cannot save anyone. The tragedy is not that love fails. It is that love is real and the world is indifferent to it. Both things at once.
Prospero’s Island
The late romances — The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles, The Tempest — are the work of a writer who has been through the tragedies and arrived at something that is not quite the opposite of tragedy but is its completion. They are plays about forgiveness: about the capacity to absorb enormous wrong — the wrongful accusation, the abandoned child, the usurped kingdom — and to offer, at the end, not justice but grace.
The Tempest is the last complete play Shakespeare wrote, and it has always attracted the reading that makes Prospero, the exiled duke who commands the island’s spirits and stages the events of the play, a figure for Shakespeare himself. Prospero the artist, manipulating his creatures, orchestrating the final reconciliation, and then — in the famous epilogue — releasing the audience from the spell he has cast and asking them to set him free in return. Now my charms are all o’erthrown, / And what strength I have’s mine own. The magician without his magic is just a man. The playwright without his theatre is just a man.
The Winter’s Tale gives the series the fullest expression of forgiveness as a theme, in the extraordinary final scene where the statue of Hermione — the wife Leontes destroyed with his irrational jealousy sixteen years earlier, now apparently turned to stone in grief — begins to breathe and move and proves to be Hermione herself, preserved by Paulina in hiding, waiting until Leontes’ long penance had made reunion possible. It is staged as a miracle and explained as art — Paulina is the sculptor, the statue her creation — and the play makes no strong effort to distinguish between the two. The miracle and the work of art are the same thing. The love that kept Hermione alive through sixteen years of hiding and the craft that presented her return as something that exceeds ordinary explanation are both forms of the human refusal to accept that loss is final.
This is where the late romances part company with the tragedies. Not by denying that the catastrophes happened — Leontes really did destroy his family; Prospero really was usurped — but by insisting on the possibility of repair, which is different from the possibility of reversal. You cannot undo what was done. But you can, given enough time and enough willingness, make something out of the ruin.
What Shakespeare Knows
The philosopher John Keats, writing in 1817, coined the term negative capability to describe the quality he most admired in Shakespeare: the capacity to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. It is the best description of Shakespeare’s method that anyone has produced, and it explains why the plays have remained inexhaustible across four centuries of radically different cultural conditions. They do not reach for resolution. They do not tell you what to think. They dramatise the full complexity of human experience and trust the audience to live inside that complexity without demanding that it be simplified.
This is a radical act of respect — for the audience, and for the truth. The world, Shakespeare’s work implies, does not resolve itself into the patterns we would like it to have. The good suffer and the wicked sometimes prosper and love is not always sufficient and the self is not what we imagine it to be and time takes everything. These are not comfortable propositions. They are, however, accurate ones. And the plays that embody them are not, despite their darkness, experiences of despair. They are experiences of recognition — the shock of seeing something true that you had known but not quite articulated, the strange relief of having your own private sense of things confirmed by a genius who has gone further into it than you were able to go alone.
What Shakespeare finally says about the human condition is nothing and everything: nothing, in the sense that he holds no doctrine, advocates no creed, imposes no resolution; everything, in the sense that there is no aspect of human experience — love, power, grief, jealousy, ambition, forgiveness, time, identity, the approach of death — that his work does not illuminate. He is the writer who most completely cleared the field of comfortable certainties and stood, alone, in what was left: the full, unmanageable, astonishing fact of being human, rendered in the most perfect instrument that the English language has ever been made to be.
The second-best bed goes to Anne. The first-best has been in continuous occupation ever since.
Sources and Further Reading
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Edited by John Kerrigan. Penguin Classics, 1986.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. University of California Press, 1988.
Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. Macmillan, 1904.
Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Updated ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. New Directions, 1951.
Keats, John. Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817. In Letters of John Keats. Edited by Robert Gittings. Oxford University Press, 1970.
Nuttall, A. D. Shakespeare the Thinker. Yale University Press, 2007.
Wilson Knight, G. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. Methuen, 1930.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. Pantheon Books, 2004.
My World of Interiors 