A debate persists whether Shakespeare’s writing was autobiographical. No author of impractical words could think otherwise. What else is art but uncoerced confession? Why spill your guts except for your guts to be exposed?

Shakespeare dons costumes, of course. “Thus play I in one person many people.” Don’t we all? Dog-pal Henry is always who he is, for he’s only one, but each dawn I must take on a character, act my part. Our characters are assembled from available scraps and modeled on familiar patterns. All sane adults are actors. What matters is our performance, how persuasive, affecting and revelatory in our roles.

Shakespeare was arguably the most various, expressive and wide-ranging performer ever. He played many characters convincingly: all were he – who else could they be? Their words came from his brain, implanted there by experience. You cannot extrude what you have not ingested: “nothing,” as Lear says, “comes from nothing.” That these versions of himself sometimes caper, weep, rage indicates their original did too: how could he exhibit states he had not experienced? Crafty and impassioned, we feel him speaking directly to us, urgently, soul to soul, through his disguises: one human, not many. Precious makers have a single subject: their insistent selves.

The task for an audience is to detect the maker inside the mask. We are being told something, but what? Words, hues, sounds are the media by which souls are transmitted, spiritual fiber-optic cable you might say. The trick of reading is decoding – then responding. The more intimate the art, the less trifling, the more importunate. Listen! Do you hear what I hear? Likely not, for every intimacy differs, but each is true. Reading, more than recreation, is re-creation – of the soul signaling across the silence. 

Consider this sonnet. Almost any of his 154 would serve, how about the second? The poet’s ostensible object here is to persuade a pretty rich boy to marry and produce an heir. But whom, we can’t help wondering, is the poet really talking to? 

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Himself, of course. He must procreate – for a writer that means write – to defy the scourge of time. Who of us hasn’t in our handsomer twenties stared into the mirror and hectored ourselves to get a move on, doing what we mean to do, while there’s still time? Mortality was Shakespeare’s almost panicky preoccupation – “I’ve wasted time and now doth time waste me!” Mine too. Seventy-five winters have besieged my brow. I ache to think what I might have made!

The perfection of this sonnet awes: how the first quatrain presents the dilemma, the second deepens it, the third envisions a resolution, and the closing couplet extols success; the images so immediate, the rhymes so natural; each individual word radiating like radium. But it’s the hurt heart that stabs across the centuries. The end is near, friend; make the most of your time.