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No one has been more explosively anti-Bard than Shaw: "What a crew they are—these Saturday-to-Monday athletic stockbroker Orlandos, these villains, fools, clowns, drunkards, cowards, intriguers, fighters, lovers, patriots, hypochondriacs who mistake themselves (and are mistaken by the author) for philosophers and princes." And yet, like most other critics, Shaw had to concede: "I am bound to add I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespeare . . . The imaginary scenes and people he has created become more real for us than our actual life."
No single philosophy dominates the plays. The closest thing to it may be Shakespeare's conviction that the social order must be restored—a kind of Fortinbras complex ("The election lights on Fortinbras") in which the corpse-encumbered stage is tidied up in Act V, Scene 5. In terms of the intriguing concept developed in Sir Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox ("The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing"), William Shakespeare is the prince of foxes. The hedgehogs are the great systematic thinkers, and, since life is not systematic, they are also the great excluders. The great men of feeling, of whom Shakespeare was the greatest, are the great includers. That may be why men turn to Shakespeare, as they seem to. in especially troubled times.
Life Is Time's Fool. There is a rough parallel between Shakespeare's day and the present. The Elizabethan view of man was being threatened by a triple revolution. Copernicus had challenged the earth-centered universe, Montaigne had skeptically consigned man to the lowest rung of the animal kingdom, and Machiavelli had argued that statecraft was a matter of the basest self-interest, devoid of moral principle. Modern man has seen Einstein throw a curve into the cosmos, Freud lift the lid on the cauldron of the unconscious, and Marx upturn continents with the doctrine of dialectical material ism in which the end justifies the means.
What does Shakespeare say to an era that feels that the times are out of joint? He does not renounce the world or wallow in self-pity. He is the poet of this-worldliness; he celebrates love, food, drink, music, friendship, conversation, and the changing, changeless beauties of Nature. Though life is time's fool, Shakespeare posits the ideal of the mature man ("Ripeness is all") who distills his experiences into common sense and uncommon wisdom.
Yet man is also a "quintessence of dust," and "men must endure their going forth even as their coming hither." Shakespeare's tragic hero is called upon to face the unfaceable. Critic Walter Kaufmann has noted that the tragic hero, as Shakespeare conceived him, fits Aristotle's description of the "great-souled man" ("He claims much and deserves much"). One reason why the Willy Lomans, the Blanche DuBoises and the poor, driven people of O'Neill are pseudo-tragic and fail to exalt an audience is because they are small-souled. They claim little and deserve