London, February 1602
The Globe Theatre. Shakespeare’s new play has been running since last year and the company performed it again today for what must be the hundredth time if the queues are any indication. I have seen it three times. I keep returning because something in it will not let me go.
Hamlet is about a man who cannot act because he sees too clearly. He understands the machinery. He knows what he is supposed to do. He knows what doing it will require him to become, and the knowledge stops him. The people around him mistake this paralysis for cowardice. It is not cowardice. It is something more like an excess of consciousness, a capacity to hold too many simultaneous truths, each one canceling the simplicity that action requires.
I understand this intimately. I have been understanding it for a hundred and forty years. The man who sees every side of every question does not thereby become better at choosing. He becomes better at seeing, which is not the same thing at all.
Shakespeare himself I have met twice. He is thirty-eight years old, a practical man of the theatre as much as a poet, not the mystical genius that legend will eventually make of him, but something more useful and in my experience more interesting: a craftsman of extraordinary intelligence who has completely internalized the technical requirements of his form and found a way, within those constraints, to say something that was not said before. That is the actual achievement. Not the mysticism. The craft that makes the mysticism possible. I will be back for the fourth time next week.