‘And since you know you cannot see yourself, so well as by reflection, I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself, that of yourself which you yet know not of.”
William Shakespeare’s “glass”, what he called his “mind’s eye”, was his mirror on the world. It allowed him, through the artifice of extraordinary intuition and stagecraft, to know us better than we know ourselves.
Dead for 400 years, he still speaks to us unerringly with universal truths about all our contradictions and complexities, human frailty, weakness and venality. About high politics and "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself", and the most trivial and often most profound aspects of personal relationships. Above all, an exploration of psychology and the unconscious that was years ahead of his time. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves”.
No-one did it, has done it, better.
"The play's the thing". It's not just that the play reveals truths, but Shakespeare understood that life is a play. "When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools," and, sure, "life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more."
That ambiguity about reality and illusion is central. "Are you sure
That we are awake? It seems to me
That yet we sleep, we dream.”
And all wrapped up in a prose that is simply sublime, often heart wrenching, that has given so many words and expressions to the English language that a short paean like this can never do him justice.
Just savour Juliet’s:
“Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun”.
And a motto for all of us: "While you live tell truth and shame the devil".
* This article was amended on Monday April 25th, 2016