Montaigne wrote about himself, but you will recognize yourself. That is the mystery, the secret of his greatness. He knew himself so well, he looked at himself so honestly, that he saw through himself to the general human nature, which is ours as well (it has not changed much since the sixteenth century). He knew other men, and women too, I think, in high places and in low, and he also forgave them. For they too were human. He would forgive you—even you!
This is the way the book ends. It is Montaigne’s gift to all of us.
It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being lawfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own behind.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
1564?–1616?
Plays
I confess to believing that the biography of William Shakespeare is a great puzzle. It is hard to believe in “the man from Stratford"; to accept that the provincial actor who is ordinarily put forward as the author of the greatest poetic works ever written actually wrote them. It is possible, I admit, to think that “William Shakespeare” was a pseudonym and that the actual author of the plays was quite a different sort of man. Or perhaps a man named William Shakespeare, who did exist, allowed his name to be placed on the plays for purposes not fully understood but that can be surmised. Some people think the author of Shakespeare’s plays was Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Though I once believed this, I no longer do. Nor do I believe Francis Bacon wrote the plays, nor Christopher Marlowe, nor the Countess of Pembroke, nor any of several others who have been suggested. Feeling thus, I cannot recite the traditional version of the so-called facts of Shakespeare’s life. For that you will have to turn to a biographical dictionary.
And after all these years—four centuries more or less—it hardly matters. Someone wrote the plays, certainly one person—they are too alike in too many ways to have been the work of a committee. And whoever he was, he was possibly the most thoughtful man and probably the greatest writer who ever lived. And since genius is always a mystery, he may have been that “man from Stratford” after all.
The plays of Shakespeare fall into four quite distinct categories, although the First Folio recognized only three. There are tragedies, comedies, and histories, as the First Folio has it, but there are also romances, and they are quite different from the others. One must therefore approach Shakespeare from at least these four points of view. (And then, of course, there are the sonnets and the other scattered lyric poems—but among such riches how can we taste all?)
The categories sometimes become confused. Is Antony and Cleopatra a history or a tragedy? What about Richard II? Or Julius Caesar? Or Timon of Athens? There is a lot of history in all of these plays. Yet they are tragedies, too—the special kind of tragedies that Shakespeare wrote (which is to say very different from the kind that Aristotle approved).
Hamlet may, like the others, have a historical core, but if so it is very remote and finally unimportant. No play of Shakespeare is more purely tragic than Hamlet. No play so touches the heart, which is why the work has enjoyed an almost uninterrupted run, somewhere or other on this Earth, since it was first written in London around the year 1599.
Hamlet is about loss: loss of a father and loss of love, loss of beauty, charm, and wit, loss of life. The play’s great subject, therefore, is heartbreak.
It is heartbreaking that this glorious young man, “the glass of fashion and the mold of form,” should have had to dress in tatters and play the fool. It is heartbreaking that he had to lose his love and that she, Ophelia, had to lose her young life before she had more than just tasted its sweetness. It is heartbreaking that Denmark had to suffer any king but young Hamlet who, his rival Fortinbras said, “would have proved most royal if he had been put on.”
The play is heartbreaking but it is not sad. It is funny, sharp, challenging, full of movement and extraordinary changes. Only when we think back on it do we realize how much we miss our young friend, Prince Hamlet.
I don’t think that in all of literature there is any person more interesting. Perhaps Odysseus is his equal, but no other. That being so, how can anyone ever decide not to go to the trouble to meet him? After all, that’s easy enough; he’s there, waiting, between the pages of his book. Hold out your hand.
The tragedy of King Lear is even more intense than that of Hamlet, but Lear is an old man and perhaps we don’t feel his loss so bitterly. The tragedy of Othello is, if possible, even more intense than that of Lear. We cry out at the end of it, hoping that what we have seen is not so. As plays, Lear and Othello may be better than Hamlet, which is flawed in ways that scholars have been pointing out for two centuries. But Lear and Othello are not, as men, as interesting as Hamlet. Read their plays second, after you have read Hamlet’s. There is the incomparable place to start.
Not only do the plays of Shakespeare fall into four distinct categories (categories that, nevertheless, sometimes overlap), but the literary career of their author also falls into four distinct periods. The dates are not at all certain, but the sequence is fairly clear. During the first period, Shakespeare was trying his hand at various types of drama current during the last third of the sixteenth century in England: comedies, often based on classical originals, histories, and outrageously ranting tragedies.
During this first period, or perhaps the second, Shakespeare also composed the 154 sonnets that, alone and if all the plays were lost, would ensure his fame. Numerous attempts have been made to discover a narrative or plot or secret message in the sonnets. Maybe it is there, but I have never been convinced of it. What is there is incomparable poetry, verses that possess a grandeur of thought and a perfection of execution not surpassed in the language. Curiously, most of the sonnets also have a major defect: their last two lines, usually a couplet, are often artificial and banal. Usually it’s prudent not to read the last two lines but to assume the sonnet ends after the twelfth, instead of the fourteenth, line.
The best-known comedy of Shakespeare’s first period is The Taming of the Shrew; the best-known history is Richard III. One tragedy originates in this period: Titus Andronicus, which only a devoted Shakespearian can love.
The second period produced five luminous comedies, the four best histories, and one more tragedy, the captivating Romeo and Juliet. The comedies were Midsummer Night’s Dream, that thimbleful of moonshine which gives us two delicious quotations: “The course of true love never did run smooth,” and “What fools these mortals be!”; The Merry Wives of Windsor, written, according to tradition, at the request of Queen Elizabeth I, who wished to be presented with the spectacle of Falstaff in love; and Much Ado about Nothing, which is only exceeded in grace, charm, and wit by the greatest of all Shakespearian comedies, As You Like It, with its incomparable heroine, Rosalind. The four histories constitute a tetralogy, four plays that tell a continuous story from the reign of Richard II to the final triumph of Henry V.