Sometime around 1600, a playwright working in the most popular entertainment medium of his day sat down and wrote a scene in which a Danish prince, holding a skull, meditates on the nature of death, identity, and the unbearable weight of consciousness with a philosophical precision that would not be matched in formal academic philosophy for another century. Hamlet's soliloquies were not composed for university seminars. They were written for a paying audience standing in the yard of the Globe Theatre, many of them illiterate, most of them there for the spectacle and the blood. That Shakespeare could simultaneously satisfy that crowd and produce some of the most searching philosophical thinking in the English language is the central miracle of his achievement, and it has provoked a question that four centuries of scholars have not exhausted: how did he know so much, and how did he find a form capacious enough to hold it? The answers, it turns out, require us to take Shakespeare seriously not merely as a poet and dramatist but as a thinker, a philosopher without a system who understood the human condition with a depth that most philosophers with systems have rarely matched.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) has been claimed by so many disciplines and so many ideologies that the genuinely philosophical dimensions of his work have sometimes been obscured by the sheer volume of everything else being said about him. Yet the evidence is everywhere in the plays: in Hamlet's epistemological vertigo, in Iago's proto-Nietzschean manipulation of moral categories, in Lear's shattering confrontation with the indifference of the cosmos, in Prospero's meditation on the relationship between art, power, and relinquishment. These are not merely dramatic situations dressed in philosophical language. They are sustained engagements with questions about consciousness, free will, moral responsibility, the nature of evil, and the possibility of knowledge that place Shakespeare in direct conversation with the greatest thinkers of Western philosophy, a conversation he was conducting, remarkably, before most of them had written a word.
What makes Shakespeare's philosophical achievement so difficult to categorize is precisely what makes it so remarkable: it is inseparable from the dramatic form that carries it. The ideas do not exist apart from the characters who embody them, and the characters do not exist apart from the specific human pressures, desires, and contradictions that make them simultaneously universal and irreducibly individual. Shakespeare does not argue for positions; he inhabits them, giving each perspective its fullest possible voice and declining to resolve the tensions that result into a tidy system. That refusal of systematic closure is not a limitation but a philosophical strength, a recognition that the questions worth asking about human existence are precisely those that resist the comfort of final answers.
To explore the full philosophical depth of Shakespeare's achievement, we turn to Colin McGinn, Distinguished Professor at the University of Miami and one of the most rigorous and wide-ranging philosophical minds of his generation. Educated at Oxford and the author of seventeen books, including The Making of a Philosopher and Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays, McGinn brings to Shakespeare both a professional philosopher's analytical precision and a genuine literary sensibility, reading the plays not as illustrations of ideas that could be stated more clearly elsewhere but as philosophical achievements in their own right. A regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the London Review of Books, and formerly of the faculties of Oxford, University College London, and Rutgers, McGinn is that rare thinker equally at home in the seminar room and on the page of public intellectual life. In this interview, he reflects on what Shakespeare actually understood about the human mind, why the plays continue to pose questions that philosophy has not yet answered, and how a dramatist dead for four centuries manages, with every production and every careful reading, to remain our most searching contemporary.
Charles Carlini: William Shakespeare is considered to this day to be the greatest writer in the English language. In his own time, aside from being a playwright, an actor, and a businessman, was he also considered to be a great thinker?
Colin McGinn: We don't really know what people thought about Shakespeare in his own time. He was a very deep man, but he was thought of more in terms of being a playwright than a philosopher.
Shakespeare also made the Greek tradition available to people in a more digestible form and kept those themes alive in his plays. The fact that he belonged to the intellectual tradition, and not just the theatrical one, made those themes come alive in his plays.
CC: Since he left no diaries or letters revealing his personal views, do we infer his philosophical leanings from his plays only?
CM: I look at those ideas not necessarily as his personal views, but the themes that permeated his thinking and were embedded in his plays. His characters speak deeply about what it means to be human. As I point out in my book, most of those who analyze Shakespeare's works are literary scholars and historians. It is most unusual for a trained philosopher to give his insight.
CC: What themes prevalent in Shakespeare's work were you particularly interested in?
CM: There are several recurring themes in his plays: knowledge, self, causality, skepticism, and evil. For example, what is evil? Where does it come from? What are the limits of human knowledge? Shakespeare was interested in those kinds of subjects and expertly weaved them into his plays.
CC: Which of Shakespeare's works did you analyze for your book, and what philosophical leanings did you discern from them?
CM: I chose six of his plays: Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest, and analyzed all of them in depth. Every aspect of the world and human nature was represented in these plays. Hamlet, for example, is the most philosophical of Shakespeare's plays as it presents very puzzling and contradictory characters, as well as mysterious aspects of the human character.
In Othello, we glean problems of the mind; nobody knows what other people's true thoughts or intentions are.
In King Lear, we see causality—why do people do what they do?
In The Tempest, the power of language; people are too easily swayed by it.
CC: Who among his contemporaries was Shakespeare influenced or inspired by?
CM: In my book, I show the profound influence of (the French scholar) Michel de Montaigne on Shakespeare by citing the spiritual and literary affinities between them. Montaigne's book of essays is one of the few books scholars can confirm Shakespeare had in his library, and Montaigne's essay “On Cannibals” was a direct source for The Tempest.
CC: Were Shakespeare's ideas considered mainstream or unconventional in Elizabethan times? And do we know whether he was religious?
CM: I wouldn't say that Shakespeare was “unconventional,” but he was certainly intellectually very progressive. And I don't believe he was religious. He can be described as a Catholic who kept his mouth shut. Being an open atheist was not an option at that time. King Lear, for example, is very secular.
CC: Was Shakespeare a visionary?
CM: One fact I raise in my book is that the period in which Shakespeare wrote preceded the Scientific Revolution. Very little of what we now take for granted—such as astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology—was understood at that time. The laws of mechanics were unknown, disease was a mystery, genetics was unheard of. Intelligent people believed in witchcraft, ghosts, fairies, astrology, and all the rest. Eclipses were greeted with alarmed superstition. The conception of the world as a set of intelligible law-governed causes was at most a distant dream.
So I think that if William Shakespeare were alive today, he would be very pleased with the state of progress and technology because he had anticipated it.
CC: What, in your view, was Shakespeare's genius?
CM: The answer to this question is in my book: Shakespeare's genius should be seen in his submission to nature. He didn't impose his own vision on reality; he let reality impose itself on his vision. He told us how the world looks from the perspective of itself. And the world never looked the same again.
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