Everything and Nothing

In him was no one. Behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words (which were swarming, fanciful, and excited), was only a touch of coldness, a dream undreamed by anyone. At first he thought everyone was like him, but, when he had tried to explain this inner emptiness, the blank look of a schoolmate showed him his mistake and made him realize from then on that an individual had best not differ from his species. From time to time he thought books might cure this strange ailment, and this was why he learned the small Latin and less Greek of which a contemporary was to remark. Later on he considered that in the practice of one of humanity's age-old habits he might actually find what he was looking for, and during the course of a long, hazy June afternoon he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway.

In his twenties he went to London. By instinct, so as to cover up the fact that he was nobody, he had grown skilled in the trick of making believe he was somebody. There in London he came to the profession to which he was destined - that of the actor, who plays at being someone else on a stage before an audience which plays at taking him for that other person. Stagecraft brought him singular happiness, perhaps the first he had ever known, but once the last line was spoken and the last corpse carted off, a hateful taste of the unreal came down on him. He was no longer Ferrex or Tamburlaine but went back to being nobody. So driven, he began to imagine other heroes and other tragic tales. And while in the bawdyhouses and taverns of London his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh, the spirit that inhabited him was Caesar, ignoring the soothsayer's prophecy, or Juliet, hating the lark, or Macbeth, speaking on the heath to the witches, who are also the Fates. No one was ever so many men as this man, who, like the Egyptian Proteus, could run through all of life's guises. Occasionally, he left a confession in some nook of his work, sure it would never be deciphered; Richard II says that in one person he plays many people, and with strange words Iago says, 'I am not what I am.' The underlying sameness of existing, dreaming, and acting inspired him to famous pages.

For twenty years he persisted in his wilful hallucination, but one day he was overcome by the surfeit and the horror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many star-crossed lovers who meet and part and at last melodiously die. That same day he decided to sell his theatre. Before a week was over, he had gone back to the country town of his birth, where again he discovered the trees and the river of his childhood, never linking them to those other trees and rivers - made illustrious by mythological allusions and Latin words - which his muse had celebrated. He had to be someone; he became a retired theatre owner who has made his fortune and to whom loans, lawsuits, and petty usury are amusements. In this personage, he dictated the dry testament that has come down to us, in which he deliberately avoided any trace of the emotional or the literary. Friends from London used to visit him in his retreat, and for their sake he again took up the role of poet.

The tale runs that before or after death, when he stood face to face with God, he said to Him, 'I, who in vain have been so many men, want to be one man - myself .' The voice of the Lord answered him out of the whirlwind, 'I too have no self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many men and no one.'

[1958]