Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-24-2008
Abstract
I speak of Shakespeare as a critical—and voracious—reader and writer of humans and their texts, and so of human culture. And in the publication of such readings before a live audience (effectively a classroom, but without the authority of judgment—of test and grade), he becomes a teacher in the mode of Socrates, a skillful questioner; but unlike Socrates, not trying to guide his audience to a particular answer. He teaches critical thinking in the guise of entertainment, not because that’s his “program” but because that is how his mind works. Shakespeare offers illuminating cultural critique without succumbing to ideology, practicing what Hamlet preaches to the players at Elsinore when he identifies the purpose of drama as presenting a “mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (Hamlet 3.2.20-22). This image of drama as a mirror identifies not merely a reflection of what is present, but an analytical lens which both magnifies and clarifies human experience—in the case of Hamlet, the Elizabethan culture of revenge. And so, as Norman Rabkin has shown, Shakespeare will often offer competing—even contradictory—truths without taking sides; he leaves it to us to work things out. While we may be spectators to the action, we must participate—even if only internally—in the dialogue and debate offered in a play like Macbeth, where Macbeth’s famous soliloquy suggesting nihilism and Malcolm’s assertion of divine providence are both put to question in the action of the play. Shakespeare “does not give us the truth, but instead he gives the audience a heightened awareness of many possible truths, and of the complexities of the arguments” (Peter Saccio, lecture on King Lear).
But this is intellectual work that many intellectual heroes might provide; what sets Shakespeare apart for me is his use of the imagination to do intellectual work, to engage deeply both mind and heart, reason and emotion.
Recommended Citation
Smith, Samuel, "To See the World Feelingly: Shakespeare as Intellectual Hero" (2008). Language, Literature & Writing Educator Scholarship. 9.
https://mosaic.messiah.edu/langlitwrit_ed/9
Comments
Given as a Presidential Scholar’s Lecture, Messiah College, April 24, 2008