Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 139
views. Read the plays as closely as you like, Keats suggests (and
virtually all critics have concurred), and you still will never know
what he thinks about any consequential subject: about religion,
monarchy, marriage, love, honor, what have you. Shakespeare pre-
serves sublime neutrality. He stands above his creatures, aloof as a
god, staring down into the universe that he’s made.
But suppose that matters are actually rather diff erent. Suppose
Shakespeare does have a worldview and a strong one. Suppose that
his work, subtle as it is, brilliant as it is, is replete with values.
Imagine that Shakespeare has designs upon us. But. But suppose
that we cannot readily perceive those values because they are so
much our own. We’ve become enclosed within them. We have,
without quite knowing it, adopted most of Shakespeare’s vision
of experience. (This is a very real sense in which Shakespeare has
created the human.) What he fears and dismisses, we too fear and
wish to dismiss. The world he renders is the world we live in— and
he admits the reality of no other world. As bad as that world may
be, it brings a sort of comfort to believe that it is the only possi ble
world and that to ask for something more or something diff erent out
of life would be vain. Shakespeare seems to believe nothing because
most of us, on some level below articulation, believe rather precisely
what he did. Shakespeare’s beliefs, we might even say, have be-
come our assumptions. He has created the most power ful literary
my thol ogy that the Western world has ever seen.
How does Shakespeare gather his amazing energy? Close to forty
plays, then long poems, sonnets, collaborations, a career as an actor
and a businessman: where does the vitality come from? It is not
possi ble to say with certainty. But one might speculate that beyond
his unparalleled inborn powers, the poet taps a broad collective
force. He writes so much and so well in part because he writes with
the concentrated energy of a world- transforming movement. He
expresses—in a sense he is— the power of a rising middle class, a