Polyrama and the art of character. Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tati.

In The Uses of Division, John Bayley describes how Shakespeare’s characters are so well done they leave us feeling like there is a whole novel behind them waiting to be explored. He says the apothecary’s shop in Romeo and Juliet, for example, has “the appetite and curiosity of a Balzac” or that Caliban “might have been developed imaginatively by Dickens…