174 Ideals in the Modern World
with Antonio’s bitter anti- Semitism. “I never knew so young a
body with so old a head” is a line one has heard as a birthday toast.
But it’s said of Portia, who will soon initiate the scapegoating of
Shylock.
In Shakespeare, characters generally speak because they are
trying to get something. They want to enhance their images, im-
prove their lots, speed their designs. Most are pragmatists to the
tips of their fi ngers. To quote them is to join with them in their plans
and strategies, the plans and strategies of their Self hoods— there is
little creditable Soul in Shakespeare— whether one likes it or not.
When we quote them, we import their desires into our speech.
Shakespeare’s plays are ripe with subtext. You can almost always
translate an utterance into an unspoken but highly pressing desire.
The characters speak to get what they want. When you quote them,
you become party to their desire. They speak strategically— join
them and their plan fuses itself with yours. The harsh joke is that
the speakers sound wise. Because of Shakespeare’s brilliantly
authoritative style, they sound like they speak of the universe as it is.
But really they are doing no more than what Boswell accused
Johnson of doing, talking for victory, talking to get their ways.
To this rule there is a salient exception. In Hamlet— the poet’s
greatest creation— one often encounters the free play of intellect.
At times he thinks pragmatically. He thinks in stratagems and
(as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, among others, discover) he can
be adept. But he can also think in quest of the Truth. He ponders
matters— suicide, heaven, love, revenge—in the soliloquies, not just
for the sake of his own plans and not just to fi nd out what is good in
the way of belief for him. He ponders these matters to explore what
might be true for others, true perhaps for all men at all times.
Hamlet’s speech on suicide in the third act is one of the greatest
meditations on that subject the world will ever hear. And its con-
tent can apply to all women and men, not merely to the speaker: