Seeing Ourselves in the Mirror

The question of whether we can attribute any sort of quantifiable truth to Shakespeare’s work is, of course, an extremely difficult one to answer, but one that is intrinsic to the study of Shakespeare. When reading the plays we cannot help but notice that often a certain speech sticks out, seeming to burst the bounds of the play and flood out into our perception of the world around us. No matter how many times we might remind ourselves that Polonius, the hypocritical old fool, is the character that tells us "to thine own self be true," the power of the statement sticks in our minds. And regardless of how hard we may try not to attribute certain "truisms" to Shakespeare himself, the sheer volume of plays, characters, situations, and moments that speak to our fundamental human situation makes it nearly impossible for us not to seek some specific truth that Shakespeare may have left for us. But I would suggest that Shakespeare did not give us any single TRUTH, or even a set of them, but rather that he taught us how to find truth. Shakespeare’s fundamental contribution to our understanding of our own human condition is a method for seeking truth, a process by which we can find or make meaning.

Shakespeare clearly was much too careful, much too understanding, to attempt to set down any one truth. At no point can we say that he himself said anything that could be considered his truth, and yet, by examining the ways in which his plays talk to each other, as though they were themselves characters in a greater play, we should be able to understand the process of making meaning that Shakespeare imparts to us. Hamlet, in his speech to the players (III.ii.20-24), says that "the purpose of playing…both at first and now, was and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." The art of playmaking is the art of holding a mirror up to nature, to look at that which is around us and in us, attempting to re-present it in a form that we can draw meaning from. And yet Shakespeare clearly understands that the symbolic representation, the play, cannot concretely express any single definable truth; in other words, the metaphor can point to what it represents but it cannot explain what it represents. The play does not equal what it portrays, it approximates. But because the play does not attempt to express a quantitative or qualitative statement of truth, the approximation is closer to the truth the play explores; the very ambiguity of the play’s meaning mirrors the ambiguity inherent in life, and thereby can more accurately represent what truth may be found in life.

In order to adequately explain the way in which the preceding statement works, we must attempt to understand the mechanics of a Shakespearean play. We must ask how Shakespeare’s plays can express any kind of truth when all he gives us are different characters with different views interacting with each other? My answer is that his plays express meaning through the very fact that "no character can be taken as his mouthpiece." Because all Shakespeare gives us are spotlighted portions of human nature (the play), we are forced to look deeper than any single character to find meaning. So although it is tempting for us to attribute certain powerful speeches and statements to Shakespeare himself, at no point can we pin any character down to speaking for Shakespeare himself. In order to find truth, if there is any to be found, we must read between the lines, peer into the cracks, attempt to gain our understanding not from any one character or situation, but from the interaction of characters, situations, and even plays themselves. And because we cannot take any of these characters as a town crier of truth, we can hardly accept at face value the statements that they make, no matter how enticing those statements may be.

Therefore we must look not only at those statements that stick in our minds, but also at those characters that make them and the situations in which they are made. Perhaps the easiest place to start would be with Polonius. He tells Laertes "This above all—to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man. (Hamlet I.iii.78-80) Yet he says this to Laertes at the end of a long string of proverbial admonitions that Polonius himself does not follow. Polonius cannot "take each man’s censure" nor can he "reserve [his] judgement." (Hamlet I.iii.69) Polonius is a hypocrite, hardly true to himself, much less anyone else. So how can we take Polonius’ "wisdom" seriously as any sort of truism? The very fact that Shakespeare put those words in Polonius’ mouth gives us a clear indication that we must be wary about accepting the statement. Does this, however, make the statement less true? No. But it does lead us to be careful about accepting, unquestioned, the statement, and it anchors the statement into the fabric of the play, giving us insight into Polonius’ character as well as into the type of world that is created in Hamlet. And, of course, the play seems to provide us reason to accept the statement later when we see that Polonius dies for his failure to "reck his own rede." In short, we have learned that a statement may be true, though it comes from a hypocrite, and we must be prepared for a deeper look into the world of the play in order to validate those statements that ring true with us on first reading.

Of course, that is not to say that Hamlet is necessarily fundamentally about being true to oneself. Although we may take that "truth" away from the play, the more fundamental and important thing we learn is to seek to validate what truth we find. And it seems to me that Shakespeare weaves this balance into the majority of the plays. Often the truisms that speak to us the most come from an outsider character, one that we are not necessarily inclined to trust or believe. When Jaques in As You Like It tells us that "all the world’s a stage…" (II.vii.139-166), the strength of the statement is moderated by the fact that the other characters view him as a dour, pessimistic grouch and we tend to do the same. Once again we must look beyond the statement to the situation and the mouth it comes out of. We may later validate the truth of the statement, but we have been forced to validate it, thereby making it more valuable to us because we have challenged it and found it to stand up to the test.

Of course, we must be careful about saying that each play merely teaches us to challenge our own beliefs and the beliefs of others. Clearly, the plays tend to deal with many different subjects, but I think that it is important to remember that we must question what we find in Shakespeare, and that Shakespeare himself weaves the need to question into every one of his plays. And the way in which he causes us to question characters mirrors the larger themes of the play and the way in which we must question the plays themselves. For instance, I would suggest that Macbeth is fundamentally about failure to temper one’s nature with reason. As Miles pointed out in seminar, Macbeth thinks very carefully about the consequences of killing Duncan; he realizes the finality of the actions that he is contemplating. But after he commits the act, his reason becomes cloudy, even ineffectual, and Macbeth must release himself to the necessities of the path that he has chosen. Macbeth moves farther from questioning into pure reactionism: "From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand." (IV.i.162-164) Macbeth falls prey to uncontrolled nature, or as Macduff says: "Boundless intemperance / In nature is a tyranny." (IV.iii.67-68) In short, Macbeth falls prey to his own failure to balance his reason and his ambition. We might say that Macbeth is about the inability to balance the varying forces that exert themselves on one’s life, and that by allowing those forces to fall out of balance one can be torn apart.

We can begin to see then, that by spotlighting this particular facet of human nature Shakespeare has given us an idea of the solution for the problem that Macbeth deals with. We see that the play suggests that the varying and opposite forces that play into one’s experience must somehow be kept in balance. However, Shakespeare does not show Macbeth actually learning this within the play. We must draw our conclusion not from anything overtly internal to the workings of the play, but rather from our perspective on the play as a whole and from the interactions of the characters in the play. In other words, Shakespeare has led us to put our own truth into the play in order to make meaning out of what we have witnessed, but he does not give us the answer. In short, Shakespeare has taught us to look for meaning, to question, but he has not given us the answer.

Shakespeare consistently shows us the necessity for a balancing act, like the cyclical nature of the holiday, or festivity, in the comedies, and he shows us some resolution of the particular problems that the characters in those plays have, but he never suggests that the problems have been finally solved. For instance, in Twelfth Night, Malvolio leaves the play with the threat that he will "be revenged on the pack of [them]." (V.i.374) Although the threat seems silly in relation to his power as a character in the play, if we see him as a representation of the force of ordered society (as I suggested in my previous essay on Twelfth Night) then we can understand that he actually will be revenged on them. As the festivity ends, we know that the characters must once again return to the everyday world, and must attempt to carry the resolution that festivity provides with the necessities of the ordered world. In other words, we see once again that the resolution of the problem of the play lies not in any specific answer to the question of the play, but rather in the balancing of the forces within the play, and that the balancing act is a continuous activity.

We can now begin to say how and why Shakespeare cannot give us any specific truth. He cannot impart to us any quantifiable answer because there isn’t one. In any given situation fundamental to the human condition, there is no one statement or truth that can provide the perfect and final answer to that situation. However, each situation can be resolved, momentarily at the very least, by an attempt to understand the situation, through questioning, and the attempt to reconcile or balance the forces that have caused the problem in the first place. Shakespeare did not, would not, could not give us an answer that would fit every situation, but by dramatizing certain situations, he could point us toward a method for finding our own answers for our own situations.

I’d like to conclude with a quote from The Tempest:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
           (IV.i.148-158)

Micah Krabill
Composed for the course "Shakespeare's Truth"
May 27, 1999

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