Shakespeare's characters

among the lights and shadows of the mind’s theatre

“So what the devil do you want me to talk to you about if not Shakespeare?”

Flaubert, writing to Louise Colet, 30th September 1846.

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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.

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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.