A world of stories

To specify the historical conditions that nourished Shakespeare’s development as a great poet and playwright is to take away nothing from Shakespeare’s consummate artistic achievements. Giving them historical resonance and a global context offers instead strong resistance to critical celebrations of Shakespeare as a transcendent figure, self-created if not self-begotten. In the strongest form of these descriptions—such as in Harold Bloom’s best-selling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998)—Shakespeare becomes the titanic figure who “invented the human as we continue to know it” by creating characters such as Lear and Hamlet. Bloom describes Falstaff as “the mortal god of my imaginings,” testifying with great eloquence to the power of Shakespeare’s most compelling characters to move us and to enlarge our imaginations. As Bloom rightly insists, supreme literary talent is the necessary precondition for the composition of Hamlet, King Lear, the sonnets, and Shakespeare’s other great works that have shaped our language, embedded themselves in our individual and collective imaginations, and inspired so much work by other artists.

Yet the vagaries of historical contingency must be acknowledged. This is not a matter of making the banal point that Shakespeare might have succumbed to some childhood disease and died early or of noting how many great poets die prematurely. This is to make the more important case that Shakespeare’s remarkable achievement—now recognized so widely—required the convergence of a number of historical forces. Had it not been for the efforts of the actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, who published the First Folio, 18 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays would have remained in manuscript form and probably would have been forever lost to posterity. These plays include Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. It is difficult to imagine our culture and our language without them: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury would have had a different title, a different way of alluding to existential despair; the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet would have taken a different form; no one would say “Et tu, Brute” when betrayed by a trusted friend.

Shakespeare’s works matter in ways too many and too various to count. His cultural effect is like the largest place-name on a world map—difficult to see because it covers so much territory. And, like that map, his works have helped readers and playgoers for four centuries to get their bearings. Beautiful and profound in themselves, they have provided readers and theatergoers with a world of stories and a language of unparalleled reach. More than any other single corpus of imaginative literature, Shakespeare’s works prove the immortality and universality of secular art.