“So what the devil do you want me to talk to you about if not Shakespeare?”
Flaubert, writing to Louise Colet, 30th September 1846.
Why you should read Shakespeare
I hardly know how to answer this question. It has always seemed obvious to me that Shakespeare should be read and read, and then read again. There is no God but God, as Harold Bloom liked to say, amending Heinrich Heine, and his name is William Shakespeare. If it not obvious to you, then you are certainly not beyond redemption, but all I have to convert you with is my enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm means possession by a spirit, from en-theos, literally with God, rapt, in ecstasy. It is a word from the seventeenth century that came to be used derogatorily of intense forms of belief. Samuel Johnson’s secondary definition is, “Heat of imagination; violence of passion; confidence of opinion.” I do not read Shakespeare with the genteel sense enthusiasm has now acquired, but to be occupied by the heat of imagination. Shakespeare is evangelist: it is as if he built a willow cabin at our gate, to call upon our souls within the house. It is the height of aesthetic accomplishment in English. Can you recite him and not feel yourself en-theos? The best reading is not when we are unselfed, but when we feel ourselves possessed, when the words take over our consciousness, compel our reactions, send shivers along our scalps and down our spines. “A great book, like a great nature,” said Virginia Woolf, “may have disastrous effects on other people. It robs them of their character and substitutes their own.”
That is Shakespeare: he robs us of our character, substituting the powerful characters of his own creation.
The essence of character
The essence of poetry, Johnson said, is invention, and the essence of Shakespeare is the invention of character. Shakespeare wrote people, not stories. Yet still today, as if four centuries were not long enough to correct this basic error, Shakespeare is criticised for being a “bad plotter”. But this is to say no more than that, having blindly accepted Aristotle as a totalising theory, and seeing that Shakespeare does not meet Aristotle’s criteria, Shakespeare must be deficient. This is to tie a blindfold on your face and ignore what is everywhere obvious in Shakespeare. He writes life. His work, as Ben Jonson said, is rammed with life.
It is impossible to confuse two characters in Shakespeare. No-one can ever be mistaken for Hamlet or Olivia or Rosamund or Desdemona. If you are presented with a choice between a misreading of Aristotle’s literary theory and Shakespeare’s genius for character, choose Shakespeare. No theory can accommodate him. As Hazlitt said, “If ever any author deserved the name of an ORIGINAL, it was Shakespeare.” It is through his characters that Shakespeare leaves us rapt and transported.
Shakespeare goes beyond critical description. His work is a form of mimesis, the copying of reality, the holding of a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet says. But mimesis makes it sound as if Shakespeare didn’t invent—and Shakespeare characters are the full panoply of humanity He stretches our understanding of ourselves. As Hazlitt said, “he is not so much an imitator, as an instrument of nature; and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.” To talk of Shakespeare’s weak fourth acts, his plotless dramas, or his technical failures is to make a peevish opposition to this power of imagination.
As Samuel Johnson said, in his notes to Cymberline,
To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names, and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.
Give up this pettifogging nonsense and you will see Shakespeare for what he is. We say that God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.
A panoply of whole and involuntary beings
Shakespeare makes characters live in a way that is singular to language. He does for personality in words what a portraitist like Rembrandt does in paint. There is a dimension of human character that dances on the ambiguity of language and seems inadequate in any other medium, just as a written description of a portrait captures so little of the experience of seeing the picture. He has a particular genius for describing his characters at second-hand: we often know them vividly from what other people say about the. Thus, Falstaff “lards the lean earth as he walk”. Talking of the way young men had imitated her husband, Lady Percy says, “speaking thick, which nature made his blemish, Became the accents of the valiant”. When Posthumous is separated from Innogen in Cymberline, his servant sees him off at the dock, and reports to Innogen,
for so long
As he could make me with this eye or ear
Distinguish him from others, he did keep
The deck, with glove, or hat, or handkerchief,
Still waving, as the fits and stirs of’s mind
Could best express how slow his soul sail’d on,
How swift his ship.
Even characters who never appear on stage can come to life in this way: Yorick is famous as “a fellow of infinite jest” who had “flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar”. He is on stage only as a skull.
When the characters speak, these depths become so much greater, as their language slips and jumps, in running streams of consciousness, where irony and metaphor create the wide scope of personality usually so hard to convey beyond our inner mind. Shakespeare’s speeches bring out the unpredictable, intense variety of his characters, and when we recognise ourselves in them it is not in the plain flat way we recognise ourselves in the people around us: Shakespeare makes us see the hidden depths in ourselves, makes us recognise in words what we had only felt in large and indefinable ways before. He gives us language for our richest, strangest, most voluble states of consciousness.
When the Duke is discussing where to house Desdemona while Othello is sent to Cyprus, she petitions to go with her new husband.
That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world: my heart’s subdued
Even to the very quality of my lord:
I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,
And to his honour and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.
So that, dear lords, if I be left behind,
A moth of peace, and he go to the war,
The rites for which I love him are bereft me,
And I a heavy interim shall support
By his dear absence. Let me go with him.
Although this speech is framed as dutiful and submissive, Desdemona makes a passionate plea for herself not to become “a moth of peace”, but to maintain her “rites of love”. Like Juliet, she is far less obedient than she seems. Despite her “downright violence” against the Duke’s command, she appears subdued; but having made a marriage of defiance, she is not about to prostrate herself to the Duke. It is the terror of her heart that persuades, the antithesis of soul and fortunes, peace and war, and the support of a heavy interim. Just as Desdemona saw Othello’s visage in his mind, she joins the inward and the outward of her own self to appeal to the Duke. There is nothing subdued about this speech: these depths of downright violence are the moment when Desdemona’s hidden depths are trumpeted both to the world and to herself.
In The Uses of Division, John Bayley says that Shakespeare’s characters leave us feeling like there is a whole novel behind them waiting to be explored. The apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, for example, has “the appetite and curiosity of a Balzac” or that Caliban “might have been developed imaginatively by Dickens or analytically by Musil.” Here, in nineteen lines, is Romeo describing the apothecary, where we sense the deep cavern of character that sits behind this part. The apothecary speaks a mere seven lines but after this description by Romeo he remains unforgettable. The scene is dramatic because of the situation—the purchase of fatal poison—but the drama is so much more than the situation, because of the desperate nature of the apothecary.
I do remember an apothecary,
And hereabouts he dwells, which late I noted
In tatter’d weeds, with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples; meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones:
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuff'd, and other skins
Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread and old cakes of roses,
Were thinly scatter’d, to make up a show.
Noting this penury, to myself I said
‘An if a man did need a poison now,
Whose sale is present death in Mantua,
Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him.’
O, this same thought did but forerun my need;
And this same needy man must sell it me.
As I remember, this should be the house.
This speech reveals a darkness in Romeo, so often played as if he were a gentle, innocent lover. It also makes the apothecary as vibrant as anyone in the play. Bayley says, “Behind the swift passage of the plays there is time for a whole lifetime of events.” I once took part in a dramatic reading of Romeo and Juliet and saw the boy next to me, aspiring novelist that he was, make a marginal note in the apothecary scene—“there’s a novel in this.” As Virginia Woolf wrote, “the mind so brims and spills over with all that we know and guess” about Shakespeare’s characters “as they move in and out among the lights and shadows of the mind’s theatre.”
Shakespeare achieves this expanse of personality with a “resonance of words that could only be uttered by one character, giving us a glimpse into his whole and involuntary being.” He creates a panorama of a person, and gives us a window onto the scene, leaving to imagination all the rest. When you start to arrange several of these characters together in a play you get not a panorama but a polyrama, a kaleidoscope of these whole and involuntary beings. What’s extraordinary is that we feel this about even the most minor characters.
Everyone is capable of being presented with these depths, which is what makes Shakespeare so startling and universal a writer.
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