Sensing the end of his life, my old friend George Greene
asked to read the mss of Seven Wonders of Shakespeare,
and as he went along gathered the remarks he liked. I thank him.
And how well I recall the sound of his quiet voice on the phone,
“are you the Michael Platt who…“
which began the many patient and searching conversations that followed.
All Shakespeare’s persons are in the midst not only of life, but of lives.
Grave moralists and nervous parents need not forbid the young to enjoy Shakespeare.
The audience Shakespeare wrote for delighted not only in quips and sallies, but in rhetorical figures and extended metaphors, in verse both elegant and mighty, in good stories and long speeches, rousing or pathetic; and in jesting conversations, piteous appeals, high-hearted declarations, and thoughtful soliloquies, and, yes, in big words. The ardent delight in the arduous.
A sign of such delight is not only all Shakespeare’s great speakers, but all his stumbling, malaprop, erring ones. Their grasp is weak, their pretensions immense, and their mistakes delicious. When we laugh at them, we are being encouraged to appreciate the right use of words, but at the same time, we are encouraged to credit their virtue for reaching beyond their grasp.
How can he know such life? Only because he observed it searchingly. Observed it both with eye and mind, in front of him in life and in what he read, and with his mind’s eye, as his Hamlet says. Truly, as Cleopatra floated on her barge, Shakespeare stood on Nile’s shore gazing; when the elder Brutus narrated the rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare was in the crowd that ousted the Tarquins; and when Falstaff and Hal drank long oaths at the Boar’s Head, Shakespeare was their waiter. More truly, he knew them because he had it in him to be them, all of them, and all at once.
Somehow we must acknowledge both that Shakespeare’s central subject is the human soul, which must everywhere be the same, and yet the manifestation of the soul differs as do the eras, epochs, and civilizations in which it appears.
Shakespeare attends to both soul and regime.
Only ancient Israel and holy Jerusalem are unrepresented in Shakespeare’s sweep of the human horizon, perhaps deliberately, certainly conspicuously.
II. A Second Wonder
There is also a wonder present on every page, in almost every speech, sometimes every line: Shakespeare is witty.
In wit, then, truth and poetry may coincide, and there’s the rub, for when play and seriousness waltz together, who can say whether charity or conspiracy leads . . .
In truth, the great domain of wit is in the Comedies, where on balance it belongs more to the women.
Certainly Shakespeare’s witty lasses are something new and lovely under the sun.
For most wits, a witty remark is like a fifty-cent piece in a boy’s pocket, burning to be spent.
There be few like Saint Francis who combine wit with sainthood, fewer still who like Thomas More combine it not only with sainthood but with statesmanship as well.
The list of his sage and sober students is distinguished: Marlborough, Goethe, Schiller, Lincoln, Bagehot, and Churchill being the most distinguished.
This is rare indeed.
The reason why wit suffuses not only the Comedies, but the Histories and the Tragedies, is that the vitality of a man reaches up into his speech, be he Hotspur, or Hamlet, or Petruchio.
And in Shakespeare wit has also to do with another part of the soul, desire.
In addition, there is a third part of the soul whose power in Shakespeare is evident in wit: intellect.
The seven most common adjectives in Shakespeare’s lexicon are “good,” “great,” “fair,” “sweet,” “true,” “poor,” and “noble,” in that order.
From Shakespeare you can learn to express yourself, your desires, the longings of your soul, your sufferings, and how to bear them.
With Shakespeare, phrase after phrase and sentence after sentence slips into our memory, or bids to. Shakespeare’s lines make his surface as sparkling as a stormless sea in sunshine, but they float on depths of thought. “Dive deep here,” each wave whispers. Almost each one, we feel, could become the one to interpret all the others by. And maybe interpret the whole universe.
III. A Third Wonder
The third wonder is that Shakespeare is the first poet ever to write both tragedy and comedy.
To his characters Shakespeare is prince and priest. It is he who arranges all marriages. It is through his self-invested power that his amiable young men come together in marriage with his witty lasses. And it is he who arranges all the deaths too.
What is the relation between these two preparations, the one for death and the other for marriage, and thus the relation between tragedy and comedy according to Shakespeare?
In this tragedy [The Tempest] it is not the gods that we find enchanting. Truly enchanting are humans. It is a wonder that there should be creatures with warm lips. That these lips will be cold, that human life is also mortal life, ought to inspire us not so much with fear (the Boatswain fears not), but with wonder and affection.
What Miranda finds enchanting (“oh brave new world”) are human beings, not immortal spirits. The spirit of Shakespeare’s comedy is the same as his tragedy. In preparing for death and for marriage we are to love well the human things we must leave ere long. The truly enchanting things are not the gods or nous or God, but human beings. ***p. 56
it is by looking at Miranda, looking at Cordelia, looking with wonder at them, gazing breathless, so caught up in looking that upon finishing a play one begins again (“is that Cordelia?” then “once more”), that we come to wonder at Being.
In doing so Shakespeare never encourages us to so wonder at Being that we fail to care for beings, beings such as Lear, Edgar, and Cordelia. Beings who do not care for beings do not wonder at Being. And if you care for Cordelia, if you want her “once more,” then you will be ready to cry “hold your hand” to any villain approaching her. What, then, did Shakespeare consider the greatest suffering and the greatest happiness?
What, then, did Shakespeare consider the greatest suffering and the greatest happiness?
The evil that just is and refuses to speak seems as malevolent as the farthest galaxy from earth is merely distant.
In Belmont the love of beauty reigns; in Portia beauty is united with mind; and justice is its offspring.
It was from Plutarch that Shakespeare learned to think of a life as a whole fit for dramatic representation and especially of those men especially of antiquity who aspire to make their lives whole, worthy, and glorious.
Perhaps the greatest gift ever given to a nation by a poet, Shakespeare’s ten Histories represent the great events of his country’s recent past through its most striking kings
That this crown of the Histories completes a potential tragedy with a comedy suggests that Shakespeare is fundamentally an historian and hence something entirely unprecedented.
No wonder that some statesmen—Marlborough, Churchill, and Lincoln are examples—have learned the first lessons of their sagacity from Shakespeare’s Histories.
Shakespeare’s Histories are more like Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War
That Shakespeare wrote tragedy, comedy, and history is remarkable. He is the English Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the English Aristophanes, and the English Vergil, Thucydides, and Plutarch. And because he was all of these at once, that makes him a Homer. Because he was the tragedian he was, the comedian he was, and the historian he was, Shakespeare was . . . Shakespeare.
IV. A Fourth Wonder ***p. 83
And this is the Fourth Wonder, that Shakespeare is the first, and perhaps still the only poet to see that the God who loves virtue must be hidden, and because of His very love.
***p. 111
V. A Fifth Wonder p. 119 ***
It is remarkable how much borrowing Shakespeare does.
Since the life that Shakespeare can breathe into anything is so great, the result so radiant, and so independent, perhaps it would be more exact to speak of his “enlivenings” and his “ennoblings” rather than his “borrowings.”
What governs Shakespeare’s appropriations are his remarkable intellect and art.
Shakespeare had learned from Plutarch, Hooker, and Montaigne, as he had earlier from Ovid and Vergil, and would have us too.
Shakespeare’s art resides not merely in the phrase and sentence, but in the bigger orders, of scene, and play and oeuvre, and in the intelligent placing of the smaller within the larger order.
The way Shakespeare appropriates something from these authors teaches us something about how he read them. He read, he savored, he bettered.
It is hard to think of a soul more self-confident and less egotistical than Shakespeare’s.
Shakespeare seems to have conceived of nature as something wider, deeper, and higher than himself, something to be discovered by his reason and imagination, not invented by his rationality, and to be reached up to, not brought down, as his Iago says it should (1.3.319 ff.).
Shakespeare is remarkable for something else in his plots: that he often doubles them and sometimes triples them.
**p. 129
Shakespeare’s double plots are also binoculars, first his, then ours, bringing the far near
Instances without maxims are deaf, maxims without instances are blind.
Such a provocation to thought through designed opposition makes Shakespeare’s dramas perfect parliaments in eternal session
In Iago Shakespeare has given the greatest warning a poet has ever given against poetry
Verse itself is accident yielding truth through artifice
VI. The Sixth Wonder ***p.147
To create characters is an achievement, but to really imitate human beings is divine.
Such characters are so wondrously whole that we are even provoked to think of what they never speak of.
Hamlet shows us Hamlet not knowing enough, enough about Ghosts, about the afterlife, about Ophelia’ heart, and about whether his mother was illicitly linked to Claudius before he murdered her husband. And nonetheless the work Hamlet is complete.
***P. 151
Yet there is more to humanity in Shakespeare to recognize ourselves by than the virtues and the passions.
It is not only for the main and supporting characters that Shakespeare provides identities.
Certainly Shakespeare affirmed the proposition that all men are created equally peculiar.
To Hamlet, to us, it is a profound mystery how we are our perishable bodies and yet how
we are not them either.
Even so briefly appearing a character as Francisco has his own way of being.
Here is an evident clue to all Shakespeare’s characters. They not only have identity but depth. Each has such a secret as Francisco, a secret that is intrinsicate with himself.
In Gertrude Shakespeare has given witness to the power of art and the frailty of humanity.
It must be this power which allowed Shakespeare to portray evil as no one had before him.
Iago’s refusal to speak is more evil than any speech he might give.
There is no more primal evil than shunning speech. It expresses misology, the hatred of Logos, of the Word and of reason, perfectly.
Not the destruction of a human being but the self-destruction of a human soul destroying his own beloved, is Iago’s aim, his “soul’s dark joy.”
*** p. 179
The attractiveness of Shakespeare’s witty, good ladies to men, not only to their suitors in the plays but to their admirers in the audience ever after, has been consequential for the West, certainly for the English-speaking portion of it.
Shakespeare was the first to take the veil off women’s minds.
The same power of mind and heart that presented intelligent women to the world and renders remarkably evil persons intelligible is active in a third novel group of characters.
Shakespeare’s simple ones: his yokels, mooncalves, and oafs; his ninnies, noddys, sillies, and zanies; his jesters, clowns, and fools, and all his innocents make a gallery no other author, not Rabelais, let alone Swift or Petronius can equal; close only is Dickens, or Brueghel.
Instead [all these simpletons] extend the range of our sympathies.
No poet has exceeded Shakespeare in showing that unexamined lives are worth living.
In Shakespeare’s Venice there is modern toleration but not much trust, not enough to temper suspicion of a foreigner, be he a suave Florentine, a swarthy Moor, or an abused, if abusing Jew.
Everywhere in Shakespeare, how childish and infant life is treated marks the point of that movable line between evil and good in all of us.
The faeries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the witches in Macbeth, and the Ghost of old Hamlet, these creatures of Shakespeare have a power to charm, to disturb, and to frighten us.
Although all Shakespeare’s characters speak very differently from each other and most do not understand each other very well, the wonderful thing is that we understand almost all of them perfectly.
The souls of Shakespeare’s characters are open to us, even when they are not much open to themselves.
Despite the ugliness in [the world], opaqueness of much of it, and the terrible things we do to each other, the world Shakespeare knows is beautiful, intelligible, and thus waking to it, to go forth into it all day, full of attentive activity, is happy.
How can you praise a pane of glass for letting in the look of the whole world and yet also praise it for a fine tint it and it alone possesses?
The whole must be like the human. And the human must be the image of the whole. That is Shakespeare’s deep intuition of eternity.
Running through all Shakespeare, from top to bottom, is a ladder, beginning in necessity and mortality, rising to honesty, proceeding to honor and nobility, and in some on to bliss.
Shakespeare provides over nine hundred persons whose actions we can imitate and whose person we can play at being.
we may both fall in love with Cordelia but also fall in love with the actress playing Cordelia.
What was the first play that boy Shakespeare saw?
It is hard to see the beauty of a virtue and not want to imitate it.
In Shakespeare there are parts to take, parts to behold, parts to unite with, and parts to be. Each, and all, have consequences.
The pleasure that Hal and Falstaff take in playing King and Prince, the one looking forward to gains, the other to duties, must have been their actors’ pleasures too, and perhaps not only in imagination. **p 207
There in Shakespeare’s smithy mind it once began and there in ours it must flame again.
In the fiery, vigorous, and beholding mind, all partial and contributory experiences of Shakespeare come together and achieve their end.
The mind is the true stage where Shakespeare firstly, ultimately, and always plays. *** p. 210
Let us begin, glass in hand, and speak confidently, armed with the reflection that the same words that are Shakespeare’s vocabulary are the same words in which some of his speakers are so witty, some so wise, and all so vivacious;
Might not Mercutio have, as some have suggested, got away from Shakespeare’s plot, by fascinating the author, and so Shakespeare had to kill him, to save plot and play.
And did not Falstaff grow so large as to distort the story of Hal, almost usurp his kingdom, and likewise Shakespeare had to kill him.
It seems that the wisdom of Shakespeare differs from Socrates and Plato importantly in the bounty of his characters.
The love of Shakespeare is something more than aspiring ascent, and more comprehensive. **p223
The persons in Shakespeare wonder abundantly, primarily, and far and away most about other human beings.
VIII. A Seventh Wonder **p. 232
Shakespeare was a dramatist, a very joyful imitator, and every time he shows us a dramatist in his works, he is showing us some part of his art and his self-understanding, even as he probably learned both in the course of doing so.
I think the latter. Shakespeare seems to have believed, with some Christians, especially Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, and Rembrandt, different as they are, that reason and revelation agree.
Shakespeare dreamed awake.
Art is not a conquest of nature, either hostile or chaotic, nor a forming of the massy. Art fulfills nature by saving it from falling back into its invisible beginning. **p. 246
IX. An Upshot **p. 255
In truth, when one compares the wise with the unwise, the wise seem united, like the rays of the one sun, but when one compares the wise with each other, they seem like so many stars, each differing from all the others, each a sovereign sun, and how could we judge among them, they being so high above us. **p. 260
Epilogue: the Good Is Many, and Many Are the Good
**p. 264
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