« There
was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the
period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and
emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone.
At first he thought everyone was like him, but the puzzled look on a friend’s
face when he remarked on that emptiness told him he was mistaken and convinced
him forever that an individual must not differ from his species. Occasionally
he thought he would find in books the cure for his ill, and so he learned the
small Latin and less Greek of which a contemporary was to speak. Later he
thought that in the exercise of an elemental human rite he might well find what
he sought, and he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June
afternoon. At twenty-odd he went to London. Instinctively, he had already
trained himself in the habit of pretending that he was someone, so it would not
be discovered that he was no one. In London he hit upon the profession to which
he was predestined, that of the actor, who plays on stage at being someone
else. His playacting taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first he had
known; but when the last line was applauded and the last corpse removed from
the stage, the hated sense of unreality came over him again. He ceased to be
Ferrex or Tamburlaine and again became a nobody. Trapped, he fell to imagining
other heroes and other tragic tales. Thus, while in London’s bawdyhouses and
taverns his body fulfilled its destiny as body, the soul that dwelled in it was
Caesar, failing to heed the augurer’s admonition, and Juliet, detesting the
lark, and Macbeth, conversing on the heath with the witches, who are also the
fates. Nobody was ever as many men as that man, who like the Egyptian Proteus
managed to exhaust all the possible shapes of being. At times he slipped into
some corner of his work a confession, certain that it would not be deciphered;
Richard affirms that in his single person he plays many parts, and Iago says
with strange words, « I am not what I am. » His passages on the
fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting are famous.
Twenty
years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was
overcome by the surfeit and the horror of being so many kings who die by the
sword and so many unhappy lovers who converge, diverge, and melodiously
agonize. That same day he disposed of his theater. Before a week was out he had
returned to the village of his birth, where he recovered the trees and the river
of his childhood; and he did not bind them to those others his muse had
celebrated, those made illustrious by mythological allusions and Latin phrases.
He had to be someone; he became a retired impresario who has made his fortune
and who interests himself in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. In this
character he dictated the arid final will and testament that we know,
deliberately excluding from it every trace of emotion and of literature.
Friends from London used to visit his retreat, and for them he would take on
again the role of poet.
The
story goes that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he
said: « I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man:
myself. » The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: « Neither am I
one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and
among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons – and
none. » »
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