Shakespeare’s thinking…

…this book excited me because it confirmed my own thinking on his thinking. I approach Shakespeare’s writing primarily from a linguistic starting point, and only then from a literary stand point. Obviously we cannot know how he spoke what he wrote, but he tells us he might easily have spoken what he wrote.

‘for if i should despair I should grow mad,
and in my madness might speak ill of thee,’ Sonnet 140.9-10

I for one, will not deny him his voice, mad or otherwise. This man organised his thoughts, or what he wrote, into the forms that were available in the literary culture of his time. This is where form meets content, and these two in Shakespeare always inform one another, creating more content.

The most important forms for us and him are his lyrical verse poems in long narrative and sonnet forms, and his plays in the genres of Tragedy, History, and Comedy, ending with Tragi-comedy and Romance.

So far, well-known facts reproduced in every schoolbook worth its salt on Sh. But how did he turn the salt of the sweat of his brow to that of his salary? What is it that makes him stand out? Why is he still so highly regarded?

Yes, we know he is a cultural artefact and has much to thank the British Empire for, but that has happened since his death. (See Gary Taylor’s book, ‘Re-inventing Shakespeare’). Our concern here is what drove him as a writer to write in the way that he did. What makes him unique?

I defer now to some points made in Philip Davis’ book:
(any comments I make or add will be in parentheses)

where he defines ‘the crucial evolutionary component in Sh.

It is not a character that speaks, but a life-force. The template is activated by means of dramatic testing. A performative process of thought consonant with the implicit world view from which it derives.

Shakespearean thinking since Shakespeare has reproduced a static model for the paradigm of the dramatically thinking poet. Sh disputes in enthymemes not syllogisms, i.e. the implication is all, not the express stating. It is non-linear, traversing multiple space-times simultaneously. This type of thinking was old-fashioned even by the middle of the 17thC.

Sh’s performative shape is the circle not the line. He feels out the originating places by creating spatial situations, thoughts come out of this. It is always more than he or anyone can control. His first want is drama in language. His characters are half-created and half-generated by the thoughts that happen as they think, speak and act their parts.

Each character feels the maximum of his/herself, but cannot reach the whole. Fullness is his first principle of spaces between mind and space and imagination, where the image is constantly in a state of flux.

These spaces are the ‘it’, the non-human, pre-human, which gradually forms the whole. The play itself thinks through the actual process of forming itself. There is a constant constraint where resistance and mutation, change and limitation, tiny spaces and taut pressures, make a productive conflict.’

due to time constraints, I will be true to the rest of what he has to say.
It’s just that I’ll save it for another rainy day.