Epilogue

The object of this book is far too simple to require extra explanations. It has been our purpose to demonstrate that Shakespeare's work offers a multitude of happenings and characters that threw light in advance over most concepts, matters, and methods of modern psychology in all their variety. There are, of course, as many other passages left out, that are worthy of being confronted with the data of recent psychology, but reviewing them all would have produced a book too specialized, while ours was meant to be an easily readable essay whereby the readers of William Shakespeare's theatre could see for themselves how he illustrates a phrase often used, but barely understood in its scientific sense.

However, we could not help inform our readers about the results of some of our own researches, published in magazines that are less available or just occasionally resorted to, because such results are bound, in our opinion, to open a new way towards the understanding of the human being.

Although it was our intention to avoid using too spurious a vocabulary, even if imposed by the progress of investigation (and we do not think that the limits of a graceful patience have been trespassed), if we have still intruded upon the good nature of those who have honoured our pages by reading them, we most sincerely and regretfully ask their forgivance and draw their attention and understanding to the contents, irrespective of its many repetitions of new and difficult nouns. Once again, these analyses of "dychotomic-antonymical thinking" are meant to throw light upon (or, at this time, to mark the limits of, as in map-drawing) man's despicable capacity to wear masks, that is, to lie. Such a purpose justifies the means. And it so happens that the English bard was the most brilliant observer of the lie that creeps like a venomous lizzard among the ruins of noble thoughts, pushing aside the plaster and whitewash that Renaissance men used to conceal their eagerness to prevail.

Understanding that Shakespeare was a great psychologist is within everybody's reach. Stating it is now commonplace. Proving it is a game - a pleasant one, indeed, but still a game. Shakespeare's reading implies more. His characters' world is our world. Understanding his heroes means understanding ourselves. Understanding ourselves means understanding our fellow human beings, it means understanding the whole world, it means coming closer to one another, it means recognizing, both in our friend and our foe, the same human principle that underlines and melts together Hamlet and Falstaff, Julius Caesar, Desdemona, Timon, Viola, Richard III and so many other make and female characters. For the individuals carry both good and evil within themselves and will is their gardener, as Iago might put it. William Shakespeare's work , if read with the eyes of reason and of the soul, not seeking entertainment (what a barbarism!), represents one of the most important roads towards the integration in this general equilibrium. Understanding, choice-making, experiencing are key-words for the secret contact with the shakespearian writings. And endless pondering, in the dynamic and transformational meaning of the term; an illumination, an inner communion with the truth stripped of the apparels of parable; a descent to the ever-fresh sources of reality, of the striving for genuineness, of mistake, of the thirst for quietness, and of the urge towards singularity and monstruousness - this is what a reading of Shakespeare is all about. His playwriting is the bridge we have to cross in order to solve the problems tormenting us. It is the key of leisure, of delight, of knowledge, and of the act (the first three being but aspects of the fourth).

At a time when exoticism triumphed both in fact and in the letters, when his contemporaries indulged in the dreams of Tamerlane's titanic adventures or in the real and ruthless escapes via the ocean waves towards the recently discovered Western horizon, to William Shakespeare exoticism meant the place of exile of the noble Prospero, that had to be rationalized at any costs; the same was compulsory for the less educated Robinson Crusoe or Somerset Maugham's bureaucrat hero, identified by the moralist Nicolae Steinhardt, a passionate lover of inner freedom, with the novelist-doctor himself ("Exoticism worked against the grain for him: the distances helped refresh the starting-point, and strengthen it. But is it not true for Ulysses as well? Is wandering always meant to end up circularly?" ). The English playwright is not interested in geography; in Italy, however, he is - not as a country among others, but as a province of a human space that bred the Renaissance, as a noble native place of the greatest secular and Western experts in the human soul. Denmark ? A neighbour of England 's. On the other hand, when it comes to the geography of the human psychic - what a delight! This is what the magus in The Tempest was striving to master. The rest was an unfortunate mishappening that interrupted his studies, just like the one that made Kant leave his home town only once during his lifetime. Shakespeare left us with a profound, scholarly message, displayed on a stunningly vertical plane: he deals not with the adventure, but with its echoes and significance.

Shakespeare is the peak whence we may embrace the distances. He is the secret place where we come across ourselves.

N. Steinhardt, Între viata si carti ( Between Life and Books ), Bucharest , Cartea Româneasca Publishing House, 1976.



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