On Shakespeare

Who is your favourite author?
>William Shakespeare

Which of their works have you read?
>I have read almost all of his plays and most of his sonnets; from the poems “Venus and Adonis”, and “The Rape of Lucrece” I have just read some small strophes and verses.

Why do you love them so?
>His language is the most inventive, beautiful and awe-inspiring in the world. Hi is, by far, the greatest poet of all time. I have read almost all of the English poets, and of the poets of my native language (Portuguese), as well as Spanish poets. I have read the Italians (Leopardi, Dante), the French (I’m a Rimbaud fan), the Germans (Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Hölderin), the Greeks (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Alcman, Pindar), the Latin (Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid), the Russians…hell, I have even read the Japanese (Ono no Komachi, Basho, Hitomaro, the folk songs of the kojiki and Man’yoshu), the Chinese (Li Bai and Du Fu) and the Indian (Kalidasa, Tagore, the ancient epics), always searching for the same metaphorical feast and imagistic orgy of Shakespeare’s work, but in vain: nobody has ever done the same with words. Nabokov is right when he says that “The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays” and Stephe Booth: “Shakespeare is our most underrated poet. It should not be necessary to say that, but it is. We generally acknowledge Shakespeare’s poetic superiority to other candidates for greatest poet in English, but doing that is comparable to saying that King Kong is bigger than other monkeys. The difference between Shakespeare’s abilities with language and those even of Milton, Chaucer, or Ben Jonson is immense.”. This guys is the greatest master of language of all human history.

You know, the most striking feature in Shakespeare were not his ideas or his philosophy: regarding these he was completely non-original; his ideas just echoed the long established wisdom and common sense of the common people. He never created any radical and original new ideas: he was quite simplistic in this regard.

The most important characteristic of Shakespeare, what separates him from all other writers (which puts him sitting alone at the top of the mountain while even others literary genius may already be in the snowy zone, but still just climbing its edges) is his verbal inventiveness, especially his ability with metaphor (being metaphor the true meat, marrow and muscle of poetry). Aristotle said in The Poetics that: “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”, and Shakespeare was by far the greatest master of metaphor that ever lived.

Other great characteristic of Shakespeare was his ability to create several different characters, most of them totally alien to his personal experience. There was also his apparent lack of any particular philosophical belief and credo: he expresses several different opinions about life according to the characters who spoke the words or the atmosphere of the play. Most writers write they works trying to convey some general idea or moral (and its no shock to perceive that this idea or moral is most of the time their own vision about the world), but Shakespeare didn’t seem to care about that: he was like a chameleon, changing the colors of his mind according to the body which he impregnated at the moment. He had the poetic character that was described by Keats several years before:

>As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity - he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature - how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated - not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children

But there also must be noted that Shakespeare characters are always artificial; they don’t sound like normal people: they are colossal, as if their brains were on steroids. Shakespeare excelled in language, and did not mind sacrificing the verisimilitude and reality in favor of the verbal beauty. If an idea grabbed his mind in the middle of a speech and scene, he was determinate to use that idea, to exhibit that metaphor, even if it was not relevant to the plot or faithful to the character that was speaking, and only for the pleasure and pride of modeling beauty in verses. No one ever spoke like Shakespeare's characters: the human race that he modeled is artificial in this respect: they are as human beings who had took steroids for the mind, who had the brain areas related to language and verbal thinking augmented by some divine touch. Shakespeare makes all humans (even mediocre ones) speak as Gods, as D. H. Lawrence said:

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such lovely language.”

It even seems that some kind of strange metaphorical-parasite have invaded Shakespeare’s brain, laid a multitude of eggs on his crumbs and usurped the synapses of his neurons, in a way that he only could think thorough images, trough metaphor and similes: every fiber and streamer of thought at birth is already mounted by an image, that rides it. In his plays one metaphor tread on the heels of another who has just broke out of its shell, one simile breaths on the neck of another simile that has just been born.

Moreover, Shakespeare accepted any plots, no matter how fantastical and bizarre, provided they were interesting. He did not care to kill important characters without any scruple, and sure he did not bother to set his stories anywhere in the world and at any time in history, without even analyzing the customs of other peoples or epochs: the important thing was to captivate the attention of public (and finding nice opportunities to forge brilliant metaphors and similes)

Well, as a Coda to this review about Shakespeare, let me talk briefly about his most beautiful metaphorical techniques: the fusion of abstract and concrete language.

The marriage of concrete and abstract language is one of the most powerful tools of a poetical arsenal. Want an example? If concrete and abstract language should not be mixed many of the most glorious passages of Shakespeare (better that almoust anything else in recorded literature) would not exist, such as:

that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked newborn babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

(here, for example, Pity is an abstraction, but is connected with the concrete image of a babe)

Or

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drownèd honor by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.
But out upon this half-faced fellowship!

(here the most string passage is that of honor being plucked by its locks; well, Honor is an abstraction, and it certainly had no locks and cant drown. But this passage is better than anything that Pound ever wrote).

>On Shakespeare’s Use of High and Low Comedy, his mixture of love with dirty sexual jokes and of Tragedy and Comedy

That’s one of the things that I like the most about him. This is a very realistic thing. Think about it. When you and your girlfriend were falling in love, when you were both naked in bed, and you inside of her and looking into her eyes and telling her that you loved her, and she kissing you in return and saying “I love you too, and I love to feel you inside of me”: at the same moment you both were feeling forever connected in flesh and spirit there was a guy in an apartment nearby fucking two hookers at the same time and making them suck his penis and kissed themselves while doing it.

And when someone you love dies? You feel that your lungs are going to be crushed; there is an invisible hand squeezing your hearth. All the world seems like and abyss now. And yet, the birds are still singing; the sun is still smiling; the skeleton of the universe did not make did not yield a simple snap or staggered a few miserable inches, like it was going to fall; the starts were still sited on their places yawning their cold light.

In the same moment someone is agonizing with cancer and feeling a rat gnawing at his entrails at a hospital a group of crooks are sitting in a bar a few feet away drinking rum and talking about women and planning a night out in a brothel. That’s life: it is an infinite web of existences and they are all vibrating in different wave lengths. In a classic-style work of art you might choose only one atmosphere and keep the work restricted to that, but why it should be like this? Why don’t show the reality that when you love someone there are still countless people in the world who are just feeling their glands teeming and gonads tingling with pure bestial desire? And when you bury a child and the world becomes blind and dumb forever for you, at the same moment that the little coffin is lowered into the earth a metallurgist is telling a dirty joke to his mechanic friend, and both are gleaning saliva into the air with laughter.

That’s life. It is not symmetrical.