An A–ZHow have writers overcome the dangers Plato highlights that
would close literature down? Shakespeare is a pivotal fi gure in
this. Stephen Greenblatt, in his book Will in the World, puts his
fi nger on a key moment. He explains how, in Hamlet, the play-
wright discovered a new device for portraying interiority on the
stage. It not only elicited a passionate response in audiences.
With it, he could sustain, throughout the course of a whole
play, the sense in which we are unknown to ourselves.
Greenblatt calls this device opacity. It is not a deliberate
obfuscation, for that would only create a frustratingly baffl ing
piece of work. Rather, it is a persistent refusal of the rationales,
motivations and ethical justifi cations that the playwright typ-
ically built into the morality tales of his day, and which real
people have deployed to understand their own lives before and
since. Shakespeare, I would say, has before him the Socratic
conviction of knowing mostly of his ignorance. His genius is
to know how to turn that ignorance over and over again in the
characters, images, echoes and plots of his plays. The reason
why this opacity works so astonishingly well on stage is that
it refl ects our own inability to know ourselves. Greenblatt adds
the speculation that Shakespeare’s discovery of this device was
intimately connected to the agnostic character of his own life –
‘his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal
of easy consolations’.
King Lear is the most striking example of opacity. As soon as
the story begins it does not make sense. Lear asks his daughters
how much they love him, so that he can divide his kingdom
accordingly. Not only is the kingdom already divided but the
question itself is meaningless. Lear’s own unfathomable needs
are exposed. When Cordelia replies, ‘Nothing’, it fi lls him with
dread, a fear that grows to the tragic climax of the play. Why
does he go mad? Perhaps because he is giving up the crown.
Perhaps because he is old. We never know for sure because there
is no sure reason to be had.
The refusal to settle things is common in many great works
of literature. The result is, of course, not always tragic. Proust’s