The rest is silence
Ambiguous writing, ambiguous origins
Such controversy is unavoidable. Most of us, I suspect, struggle to imagine the mind that could have inspired Shakespeare's plays. I try to picture the author of King Lear getting to the end of, say,Â Act I Scene iv ("If she must teem, create her child of spleen; that it may live, and be a thwart disnatured torment to her!"), putting down his quill, scratching his armpit and wandering off in search of dinner.
The ambiguity about Shakespeare's identity is apt, for a similar ambiguity permeates the canon itself. Shakespeare has an extraordinary ability to be on both sides of every question , or, rather, somehow outside and above every question. Keats described it like this:
"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously , I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
As "negative capability" resides in the plays so, appropriately, it touches their author.
The best theory I ever heard about Shakespeare's identity came from my colleague Andrew McKie, then a leader writer, and now the Telegraph's obituarist and a
So long and thanks for all the clicks
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