Shakespeare’s theatre is a philosophical practice.
Not an academic one. A living one — rooted in the body, in the voice, in the room where the story is told and received. Attending a Shakespearean tale is a spiritual exercise: one, ever unique, transformative experience. A technology of the self.
Sure, Shakespeare was not a philosopher. Indeed, he was an actor — a man of the people, speaking to the people, from the boards of the Globe. Craftsmen, thieves, gentlemen from across the river. A living experience of human smell.
What he left behind is not a system of thought. It is something more ungovernable: an ahead-of-time Spinozan ethics, speaking the language of characters — a parade of moral icons whose actions give rise to thought, and whose stories settle in the innermost world of those who attend them. One shaking story at a time.
Tropes join the audience in troops. Love, power, revenge, fate, madness, camouflage, dreams — none of these end with the curtains. They live on, in the stage of our innermost world, as models to thrive to, and to be reproduced in real life.
This is why a not occasional attendance of Shakespearean plots turns them into Shakespearean Tales — every time, in different times, those meet the will of the actual attenders. An authorial instinct is at play. A second nature. And action is, literally, the touchstone — both on stage, and off.
The chronicles collected here are a portfolio of encounters — a journaling of the progression, and expansion, of a perspective on life. One of the many habits of a rounded life. A Shakespearean one. Each story landing back at you, on a biographical trajectory.
Mirroring souls, we are all groundlings, staring at the scene where a parade of protagonists stare back at us — in the never ending reflection that is the magic of theatre.
Psst… Interested in building your own personal experience of the Bard? And refresh your English as you do so? Come to the ``Shakespearean Nights“!
Shakespearean Tales 