Shakespeare, William

English playwright and poet, 1564-1616, author of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar and some thirty other plays, as well as sonnets and narrative poems

Fishburn and Hughes: "England's greatest poet and playwright, author of more than 35 plays; also, an actor. The Shape of the Sword; CF 141: Borges tends to use Shakespeare's name as a symbol of all humanity, the creator whose identity (not unlike that of God himself) is dispersed in his multiple creation. He quotes Coleridge, for whom Shakespeare is a 'literary variation of Spinoza's infinite God'; Hazlitt, who said that Shakespeare resembled all men but in himself was nobody; and Hugo, who compared the poet to the ocean, the seed bed of all forms of life (Other Inq. 148). He later repeats this concept in an essay entitled 'Everything and nothing' (CF 319 ). Deutsches Requiem: Borges's reference to 'the immense Germanic name' of Shakespeare stems from the fact that, with the interpretative work of Lessing in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth-century translations of August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Shakespeare became one of the most influential forces in the forging of the new German aesthetics of the anti-classicist and anti-rationalist Sturm und Drang literary movement. He was admired for the individuality and restlessness of his characters and the grandeur of their ambitions and uncontrollable passions. One of the last fictions by Borges (1980/1983) is called ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’." (180)