Shakespeare: The Greatest Writer
November 7, 2026
Before Macbeth murders Duncan, he reaches for a dagger he can see but cannot touch. He questions the vision, draws his own weapon, and recognizes that the imagined blade points along the route he already intends to take.
The decision to kill precedes this encounter. What changes is the form in which Macbeth experiences it: his intention seems to stand before him, inviting him forward.1
The scene gives a precise reason to admire Shakespeare. Macbeth understands enough to suspect his own perception, yet that understanding does not stop him. The audience hears his reasoning while watching him approach an act he knows is terrible. Shakespeare makes thought part of the suspense. We can follow a person's mind without being able to trust what that person will do.
This is one substantial basis for calling Shakespeare a great writer. Across his drama, language helps people discover desires, justify decisions, and influence others, while the action exposes what their words cannot settle. His achievement involves the coordination of these effects: a speech develops a character, changes a relationship, and gives the audience grounds to question the speaker. The pleasure lies partly in having to revise our understanding as the scene unfolds.
Such an argument needs more than Shakespeare's reputation behind it. His international authority owes something to schooling and British imperial expansion, as well as to the work of translators and performers who have made the plays their own.2 Survival and prestige alone cannot establish literary merit. Nor would a demonstration of excellence in drama prove that poetry and fiction should be judged by the same standard. The useful question is what these plays make possible for a reader or an audience.
Macbeth's dagger offers one answer through the connection between language and the body. His questions send the actor's attention outward, toward something supposedly visible, then inward, toward the possibility of a disturbed imagination. His attempts to examine the dagger give an actor ways to make the vision present, whether or not a production shows it. When the arranged bell sounds, he calls it an invitation. A practical signal acquires the force of a summons, although the choice remains his.1
The scene's terror depends on this coexistence of awareness and determination. Macbeth has already considered his obligations to Duncan as subject, kinsman, and host. He has also recognized Duncan's virtues and the danger of teaching others to murder.3 The play gives wrongdoing an articulate consciousness. His ability to describe the crime's horror makes his approach to it more disturbing, because moral intelligence has failed to become restraint.
Hamlet's thinking takes a different course. After an actor has performed a speech about Hecuba's grief, Hamlet rebukes himself for accomplishing so little despite having his own murdered father to avenge. He has already begun arranging a performance. His speech moves through shame and imagined accusations before spelling out how a staged murder resembling his father's could test Claudius. He wants to observe his uncle's response because the Ghost's accusation may be a deception.4
The movement matters more than a label such as indecision. Hamlet converts his dissatisfaction into a means of inquiry. Yet the proposed test still depends on interpreting another person's behavior. A face observed during a performance does not explain itself. Shakespeare places the audience beside a character who wants firmer grounds for action while leaving us able to question the confidence he may place in them.
Later, in his mother's room, Hamlet hears someone behind a tapestry and thrusts his sword through it. Only afterward does he ask whether he has killed the king; the victim is Polonius.5 The contrast prevents thoughtful speech from becoming a guarantee of thoughtful conduct. We have been given access to Hamlet's reasoning, but that intimacy does not oblige us to accept his judgment. His eloquence can attract our sympathy while his behavior gives us reason to resist it.
Comedy changes the stakes without removing the difficulty of understanding another person. In Twelfth Night, Viola serves Orsino disguised as Cesario and carries his courtship to Olivia. When Olivia sends a ring after the messenger, Viola knows she left no ring behind. She works backward through the encounter and realizes that Olivia has fallen in love with her assumed identity. “I am the man” is a discovery made in speech.6
Viola can now describe the predicament: she loves Orsino, Orsino loves Olivia, and Olivia desires Cesario. Knowing this brings no immediate solution. Her disguise has allowed her to enter Orsino's service, but it also obstructs an open declaration of her feelings. Olivia's mistake is funny without making her desire trivial. Shakespeare lets the audience understand the confusion more fully than some of the people suffering from it, then makes that advantage a source of both amusement and concern.
The ending also leaves a claim on the audience's sympathy unsettled. Malvolio, deceived by a forged letter and imprisoned as supposedly mad, leaves promising revenge. Olivia acknowledges his mistreatment, and Orsino orders an attempt at reconciliation, but the play does not show that attempt succeeding.7 Festive pleasure survives alongside an injury. The audience can enjoy the comedy and still reconsider the laughter it has shared.
In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare gives spectators a more dangerous version of their advantage over the characters. Brutus explains the assassination as a defense of Roman freedom, only for a citizen to propose that Brutus become Caesar. Antony then repeatedly calls Brutus honorable while presenting reasons to doubt his account of Caesar's ambition. The repeated description becomes accusatory as its surroundings change. Its political effect depends on what listeners have just heard.8
Antony also manages time and attention. He pauses, promises the will, delays its reading, and displays the damaged cloak and body. Citizens answer one another, turning individual reactions into collective conviction. Their calls for vengeance begin before the will's bequests are read. This is persuasion built through an encounter, with objects, interruptions, and expectations doing work that a transcript of the famous opening alone would conceal.8
The following scene tests the consequences. A crowd attacks Cinna the poet because he shares a conspirator's name. He explains the mistake, but a citizen dismisses the distinction as irrelevant.9 The correction reaches its hearers and fails to protect him. By following the funeral speech with this encounter, Shakespeare carries rhetorical success beyond the speaker's moment of triumph. We see what happens when excitement makes the truth about a particular person inconvenient.
These scenes also ask something of the audience. We can admire Antony's skill and find his account compelling while recognizing the violence that follows. The play allows eloquence to exert its attraction before requiring us to reckon with its consequences. Its political intelligence lies partly in making that attraction available to scrutiny, including our own.
King Lear takes the problem of speech to a point where persuasion can achieve almost nothing. At the beginning, Lear makes his daughters' declarations of love part of a public distribution of territory. Cordelia's refusal to compete in extravagant assurances provokes him to disown her.10 His power lets him impose consequences on an answer he dislikes. It cannot make his interpretation of that answer true.
By the final scene, he holds Cordelia's dead body and repeats “never” five times. The vocabulary has narrowed, but the pressure of the language has intensified. Each repetition occupies another moment of an actor's breath and an audience's attention. It can register protest, recognition, or an exhausted effort to comprehend finality. The writing supplies the repetition; a performance must discover how its weight changes as it is spoken.11
Even here, Lear's perception remains unsettled. In the ending printed in the 1623 First Folio, which the Folger edition retains, he directs attention to Cordelia's lips. What he believes he sees can be played differently. The scene permits hope or misrecognition at the edge of death without undoing the catastrophe. Lear's suffering has not purchased a rescue for his daughter, and the audience receives no secure consolation in exchange for understanding him.11
This range helps explain the force of Shakespeare's achievement. Macbeth examines an intention he will carry out; Viola discovers an effect she never intended. Antony gives a crowd a direction, while Cinna cannot make a correction count. The differences keep the plays from becoming illustrations of one theory about human behavior. These effects are not Shakespeare's alone. The case for his greatness rests on the range and precision with which he combines them, making the audience's judgment part of the dramatic experience.
The texts themselves reach us through other people's decisions. The First Folio, published in 1623, collected thirty-six plays, eighteen of which had not previously appeared in print. Without it, plays including Macbeth and Twelfth Night might have been lost.12 King Lear also survives in differing early versions, requiring modern editors to make choices about what readers encounter.13 Preservation and interpretation belong inside an account of literary endurance.
That history complicates any easy claim that Shakespeare speaks identically to everyone. A translation must choose how to carry a joke or an ambiguity; a performance must give a pause a particular duration. Different choices can disclose different possibilities, although they still have to contend with the words and actions they inherit. Admiration becomes more interesting when it includes disagreement over what a scene permits.
For a reader, this offers a way beyond dutiful reverence. Follow a speech to the moment when its speaker learns something, persuades someone, or meets a resistance that eloquence cannot overcome. Then notice what happens next. A character may have explained himself beautifully and still leave another person with the consequences. In these plays, the people who bear those consequences remain before us, complicating our sympathy for the person who speaks most persuasively.
Sources
Play quotations and scene references follow the Folger Shakespeare Library texts. The readings of motive, dramatic effect, and possible performance are interpretations offered in this essay.
1. Macbeth, Act 2, scene 1, the dagger speech and bell; Act 1, scene 7, Macbeth's preceding commitment to the murder. Folger Shakespeare Library. Macbeth Act 2 scene 1; Macbeth Act 1 scene 7
2. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, How Did Shakespeare Get So Popular, Let's Talk Shakespeare podcast and transcript. Discussion of education, imperial dissemination, adaptation, and translation. Read the podcast transcript
3. Macbeth, Act 1, scene 7. Macbeth considers his obligations to Duncan, the king's virtues, and the consequences of violence. Folger Shakespeare Library. Macbeth Act 1 scene 7
4. Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, the actor's performance and Hamlet's concluding soliloquy. Folger Shakespeare Library. The discussion of the proposed test's limitations is the essay's interpretation. Hamlet Act 2 scene 2
5. Hamlet, Act 3, scene 4, the killing of Polonius. Folger Shakespeare Library. Hamlet Act 3 scene 4
6. Twelfth Night, Act 2, scene 2, the ring and Viola's recognition of Olivia's attraction. Folger Shakespeare Library. Twelfth Night Act 2 scene 2
7. Twelfth Night, Act 5, scene 1, Malvolio's complaint, Olivia's acknowledgment, and Orsino's instruction to seek reconciliation. Folger Shakespeare Library. Twelfth Night Act 5 scene 1
8. Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene 2, the funeral speeches and the citizens' responses. Folger Shakespeare Library. Julius Caesar Act 3 scene 2
9. Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene 3, the attack on Cinna the poet. Folger Shakespeare Library. Julius Caesar Act 3 scene 3
10. King Lear, Act 1, scene 1, the declarations of love and Cordelia's disinheritance. Folger Shakespeare Library. King Lear Act 1 scene 1
11. King Lear, Act 5, scene 3, Lear's final speeches. The Folger edition identifies the wording about Cordelia's lips as Folio material. Interpretations of delivery and perception are possibilities proposed in this essay. King Lear Act 5 scene 3; Folger introduction to the text
12. Folger Shakespeare Library, The Shakespeare First Folio. Publication in 1623, thirty-six collected plays, and eighteen plays first appearing in print. About the First Folio
13. Folger Shakespeare Library, An Introduction to This Text of King Lear. Early versions, selection of readings, modernization, and editorial stage directions. King Lear textual introduction
Also by Ardan Michael Blum
Biography of William Shakespeare.
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