Rethinking Shakespeare

We single out and honor Shakespeare for his representation of the inner lives of his characters, for his delineation of their thoughts and feelings. What is significant about Shakespeare, however, is not what he shows us about consciousness but rather what he chooses not to show: he excludes, omits, evades, and avoids the representation of inner life. When we examine his writing attentively, we perceive that, for example, in Julius Caesar, and even more so in Hamlet, Shakespeare is not giving us a language for interiority; he is instead dramatizing the fact that there is no language for it.