Shakespeare

There was, naturally and inevitably, a particle of himself in all of his characters; that is what brings them alive. He is the source of their being. He adverts to that fact in the plays themselves. Richard III declares that “a thousand harts are great within my bosome,” and in Richard II Aumerle cries out: “I have a thousand spirits in one breast”; in the same play the king himself reveals that “play I in one person many people.” It is an odd but insistent emphasis. As Hazlitt said of Shakespeare, “He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it.”¹ He had a preternaturally sensitive imagination, which could clothe itself in the being of another. This gift or capacity expresses itself in terms of another insistent Shakespearian theme. I am not what I am. Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Since there is an element of Shakespeare in all the myriad heroes and heroines of his plays, they must also remain fundamentally mysterious. They are not governed by rational choices; their logic is always the logic of intuition and of dream. Their dilemma often concerns the role that they must play, and the part they must assume in the world. It is the secret of his heroines. His characters are witty, and cryptic, and whimsical. They are sometimes inscrutable, and more than a little fantastical. As Ophelia remarks to her father of Hamlet’s behaviour, “I doe not knowe, my Lord, what I should thinke”(517). They partake of their maker. That is also why Shakespeare’s characters still seem “modern,” since they are based upon diversity and indeterminacy. It is sometimes said that he invented individual consciousness on the stage but it would be more true to say that, taking his cue from Montaigne, he conveyed the idea of consciousness as unfixed and unstable. This was almost certainly not a deliberate ploy on his part but, rather, the natural expression of his own genius.

It also reflects an actor’s consciousness. As the hero of Sartre’s novel Les Maim Sales reveals, “You think I am in despair. Not at all. I am acting the comedy of despair.” It has been remarked that in Shakespeare’s plays the language of self-knowledge is the language of acting; by impersonating others he became more himself. Or, to put it another way, Shakespeare understood himself by becoming someone other. He often resorts to metaphors of the stage, and one of his favourite phrases is “to play the part.” His lovers learn to perform and improvise before one another. His most interesting characters are actors at heart. No other dramatist of his age maintains such an emphasis. He did not owe this interest to the fact that he was a player; rather, he became an actor because he already possessed that interest. His plays, with the possible exception of those of Moliere, are the most entirely suited to the theatre in the history of world drama.

In the speech by Theseus on the nature of imagination, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is an apparently fluent and straightforward passage (1715-1717):

… the Poets penne

Turnes them to shapes, and giues to ayery nothing,

A locall habitation, and a name.

But in the vocabulary of the Elizabethan drama “shape” was the name for the actor’s costume, “habitation” for his place upon the stage, and “name” for the scroll on the actor’s chest revealing his identity.

When in his speech Hamlet adverts to “this goodly frame the Earth,” to this “sterill Promontory” and “this Maiesticall Roofe, fretted with golden fire” his audience would know that he was referring in turn to the walls of the theatre, to the bare stage, and to the roof of the pent-house above his head spangled with stars. The theatre was the occasion for the speech. Shakespeare is saturated with the language of the stage. Who would dream, in all his talk of “shaddowes,” that “shadow” was a technical term for the actor? Thus at the close of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Robin Goodfellow declares that “If we shadowes haue offended” he is speaking for the cast. When the actor playing Buckingham in All Is True declares that “I am the shadow of poore Buckingham”(258) he is making an overtly theatrical reference. The connection also lends resonance to Macbeth’s remark that “Life’s but a walking Shadow, a poore Player” (2004). In one of Shakespeare’s most theatrical plays, Richard II, there is a constant interplay between shadow as reflection of what is real and shadow as insubstantiality or unreality itself. There are shadows everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. There is also a curious fact about shadows that he understood very well: however insubstantial they may be, they lend depth and delight to any view.