The Generous Imagination of William Shakespeare

Reckoning back from the recorded date of William Shakespeare's christening, scholars calculate that he was born in Stratford-on-Avon on April 23, 1564. He died there fifty-two years later, having spent much of his adult life in London, where he transformed the theater of his age.

We know more about Shakespeare than we do about most commoners of his time. His father was a leatherworker and a leading citizen of Stratford. Shakespeare attended the grammar school there, where he acquired the "small Latin and less Greek" that his university-educated friend Ben Jonson affectionately mocked. He married Anne Hathaway and had three children with her. In his twenties, he left his family in Stratford and went to London. There he became an actor; shared in managing a theater company; and wrote sonnets, narrative poems, and plays. When he retired from the theater and returned to Stratford in his late forties, he was a wealthy man and a gentleman, complete with a coat of arms. A few years after his death, his colleagues in the theater paid him the unprecedented tribute of collecting and publishing his plays in a single volume, the First Folio. Their affection and esteem ensured that we would come to know and cherish the plays that Shakespeare himself had never bothered to preserve.

Though we know a great deal about Shakespeare, we know less than we would like. What went on behind the intelligent, level gaze that looks out at us from Martin Droeshout's engraving on the frontispiece of the Folio? How did Shakespeare acquire the knowledge that has made members of widely different professions—botanists, lawyers, sailors, schoolteachers, and musicians—claim him as one of their own? What did he feel for the wife from whom he lived apart for months on end over a long career? How did he regard the intrigues at court, where his company provided entertainments for a queen and a king? Was his religious belief a matter of convention or conviction? For four hundred years, scholars have speculated, then speculated some more. To discover the truth, we might hope for an afterlife in which Shakespeare, bored with the heavenly routine, would answer our questions in exchange for news of the world he so closely observed and so evidently loved.

Though Shakespeare's inner life remains unknowable, we know a great deal about his astonishing achievement. In the late 1580s, he served his apprenticeship in a theater that for the most part presented highly stylized actions and typical characters speaking workmanlike verse or prose. Two talented contemporaries taught him to imagine a better way. Christopher Marlowe showed him that speech can be exalted into poetry; Thomas Kyd showed him that every scene in a dramatic action can be a drama in itself. Once Shakespeare had mastered these lessons, the pupil quickly surpassed his teachers. With remarkable regularity over the next two decades, he wrote for the members of his company the comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances that demonstrate his restless genius.

Shakespeare found his story lines in classical and Italian sources and in the chronicles of English history. When we compare one of these narratives to the play Shakespeare made of it, we can see his dramatic imagination at work: how he upended, rearranged, and concentrated the action; heightened its tensions through scenic contrast and counterplot; exploited its pathos or humor. We can also see how he breathed life into conventional types, turning them into multifaceted characters. Each speaks in a diction, rhythm, and syntax as individuating as DNA. In a blind test, few could mistake Prince Hal's language for Cleopatra's, even when Hal speaks of love and Cleopatra of war.

Shakespeare's characters also enter the stage trailing the lives they had been leading before. They act out of a richness of experience of which the play captures only a part. We glimpse that experience through the characters' memories. When a broken-hearted Ophelia recalls how splendid Hamlet was before madness gripped him, she shows us a young man startlingly unlike the tormented prince we see. In Mistress Quickly's report that Falstaff "babbl'd of green fields" on his deathbed, we discover that a lovable rascal who attended the tavern, not the church, sought final comfort in the Twenty-third Psalm. Such moments, as surprising as they are moving, help to give the characters their lifelike solidity and texture.

One of the happy facts of literary history is that Shakespeare was rewarded in his lifetime for the brilliance of his gifts, both as a playwright and as a theatrical manager. His company became the first in the land because he gave people from every quarter of his adopted city thirty-eight excellent reasons to walk across London Bridge or ferry across the Thames, pay their pennies, and spend an afternoon at his theater. Surely these loyal playgoers responded, just as we do, to Shakespeare's power to summon laughter and tears, to the beauty of his language, and to the generous imagination with which he explored human lives and the drama of their living.

This editorial comment has been produced and distributed by The Objectivist Center. If you would like to reproduce or publish this piece, you may do so provided you include the biographical information found on this page.
For more information, please contact The Objectivist Center.

If you are distributing electronically, the following text must be included after the selection:

Copyright, The Objectivist Center. For more information, please visit www.ObjectivistCenter.org.