Shakespearean Metaphysics * Shakespeare's Double Helix

Abstract

The Ambitious project of the Shakespeare NOW series is to bridge the gap between ‘scholarly thinking and a public audience’ and ‘public audience and scholarly thinking’. Scholars are encouraged to write in a way accessible to a general readership and readers to rise to the challenge and not be afraid of new ideas and the adventure they offer. There are other bridges the series is ambitious to cross: ‘formal, political or theoretical boundaries’ – history and philosophy, theory, and performance. There have been many, often rather crude, attempts over the years to uncover what Shakespeare ‘really thinks’. Michael Witmore makes no such claims but in Shakespearean Metaphysics he adopts a sophisticated method of uncovering the implicit intellectual position of Shakespeare's plays by exploring their underlying metaphysics in conjunction with the ideas of A. N. Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza. Witmore argues that the drama is a site in which by definition the great metaphysical questions about the ultimate constitution of reality and of human beings' relation to that reality are inevitably asked, and that Shakespeare's drama seems particularly drawn to such questions: Unlike his philosopher counterparts who did their work with syllogisms and concepts, however, Shakespeare did his metaphysical work with actors, sounds, spaces and things. He used the specific resources of the theatre – that is its physical limitations; its reliance on sound, speech and gesture; its indebtedness in performance to the passage of chronological time –to say equally specific things about the relatedness of beings in the world and their mutual participation in some larger, constantly changing whole (p. 6).