The Shakespeare Enigma, or, Not What It Seems

A letter from me , to a friend, who is my Hero.
I am still not really posting much at this stage, but had to write this today.
PS I didn't name my blog after this, I came across it by accident when I googled my blog name in one day.

"One of the fascinating things about the Shakespeare plays is that they are full of enigmas and situations that are not what they at first appear to be - at least, not to the characters in each play.

Take, for instance, Much Ado About Nothing,

Much Ado About Nothing shows how easily men can be duped and made to believe something that is completely wrong, and leading to actions by them that are absolutely wrong, by a simple trick of deception. The prince of Aragon, Don Pedro, together with his friend Claudio and Leonarto, governor of Messina, are totally convinced that Leonarto's daughter, Hero, has been unfaithful on her wedding night. They viciously accuse her in church, at a crucial moment in the wedding ceremony. Hero, struck to the heart, faints. The friar, Francis, who sees clearly that Hero is almost certainly innocent of the charges, proposes that it be put abroad that Hero has died, so as to generate remorse in the hearts of the 'blind' and unkind men. This second but benign trick also works. The men show true remorse and do penance. The play's finale 'resurrects' Hero and, once again, all is revealed and resolved in a way that expresses a far greater love and appreciation than ever existed before.

The principal comedies about twins, The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, also use the idea of seeming death and therefore loss to create a resolution and transmutation of the previously existing state of affairs.

The Tempest portrays the loving couple, Ferdinand and Miranda, helped by Prospero, as privy to seeing the truth - even to the seeing of spirits summoned by Prospero to entertain them. By contrast, the three 'men of sin' see the island as an inhospitable desert, and the good spirit Ariel as a harpie, and the king's son, Ferdinand, as lost to them, drowned in the tempestuous sea. But all is not what it seems, and at the end of the play all is revealed as it really is, with no one harmed and evil desires and thoughts largely redeemed and forgiven. Prospero is then able to throw off his disguise and reveal who he really is, and be restored to his rightful place in the world that had been usurped by his younger brother.

Even in the tragedies, the end result of all mistaken identity is some kind of resolution, in which love and compassion is evoked from various hearts, some of which before were stony, others already generous.

In King Lear the proud old king is deceived by his eldest two daughters, and is blind to the love of his youngest daughter, Cordelia. His mad passion of anger as well as pride causes him to make some disastrous judgements and decisions, leading to some terrible consequences.
His councillor, Gloucester, is likewise deceived, but in this instance by his ill-meaning bastard son, Edmund. Banishment, torture, murder and war follow, but Cordelia's love for her father, Edgar's love for his father, and Kent and the fool's love for their king, awaken Lear's love and clear Gloucester's inner sight. Edgar, importantly, is able to successfully give his love and assistance in the disguise of poor, mad Tom. Like the professional fools of the plays, he pretends to be other than he really is. Jaques, in As You Like It, longs to be such a motley-clad fool, so as to 'cleanse the foul body of th'infected world'.

In all these cases the truth is, at first, concealed, and only revealed at the end of each play. The effect of each concealment, disguise or trick, in which pseudonyms are used, and the subsequent revealing of the truth, is to enable an almost magical resolution of a situation that was previously inharmonious, unenlightened and, in some cases, almost unbearable. The process is what the ancients would call 'alchemy', and the author Shakespeare shows himself a master of its art."

Francis Bacon Research Trust - Essay