Everything and Nothing

An essay on Shakespeare by Jorge Luis Borges

There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were flowing, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone. At first he thought everyone was like him, but the puzzled look on a friend's face when he remarked on that emptiness told him he was mistaken and convinced him forever that an individual must not differ from his species.

Occasionally he thought he would find in books the cure for his ill, and so he learned the small Latin and less Greek of which a contemporary was to speak. Later he thought that in the exercise of a basic human ritual he might well find what he sought, and he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon.

At twenty-odd he went to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself in the habit of pretending that he was someone, so it would not be discovered that he was no one. In London he hit upon the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who plays on stage at being someone else. His playacting taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first he had known; but when the last line was applauded and the last corpse removed from the stage, the hated sense of unreality came over him again. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamburlaine and again became no one at all.

Trapped, he fell to imagining other heroes and other tragic tales. Thus, while in London's bawdyhouses and taverns his body fulfilled its destiny as body, the soul that dwelled in it was Caesar, failing to heed the soothsayer's warning, and Juliet, detesting the lark, and Macbeth, conversing on the heath with the witches, who are also the fates. Nobody was ever as many men as that man, who like the Egyptian Proteus managed to exhaust all the possible shapes of being. At times he slipped into some corner of his work a confession, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard swears that in his single person he plays many parts, and Iago says with strange words, "I am not what I am." His passages on the fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting are famous.  ("To be or not to be," indeed... -PF)

Twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was overcome by the excess and the horror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many unhappy lovers who come together, fall apart, then despair in lines shaking with beauty. That same day he cast off his theater. Before a week was out he had returned to the village of his birth, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood; and he let them simply exist, free from all the mythological allusions and Latin phrases his imagination had wrapped them with before.

He had to be someone; he became a retired impresario who has made his fortune and who interests himself in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. In this character he dictated the barren final will and testament that we know, deliberately wringing from it every drop of emotion and literature. Friends from London used to visit his retreat, and for them he would don the mantle of poet.

  History records that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he asked: "I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself." The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: "But I, too, am not one self; I dream the world as you dreamed your work, dear Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none."