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Shakespeare Shakespeare by Michael Wood Basic Books, 2003 288 pp. $19.77

I will with care call the person WS, from the lead of Anthony Burgess in his novel, Nothing Like The Sun. Too many variations on his name, often in his own hand, exist to pinpoint its spelling with certainty, though it helps to know that English was in the midst of a sea change in his era, in its shifting mutations to its present state, and he seems to have used the vowels and constants, in his own name, even, that felt right.

He was above all a writer of feeling. The symphonic interchange of emotion between every variation of class and gender in his work, but especially between men and women, yields mouthfuls of magnificent poetry—an achievement in itself. We read him in this century to learn about those relationships in ways that others are unwilling or unable to describe; Freud's grasp was only of an undercurrent in WS.

People and the situations they work themselves into (always of attraction and repulsion) revolved through his mind as the planets of our system revolve around the sun. He had a nearly perfect trust in the fruitful art of the creative process he sensed in himself as the center of the universe. Stars revolved in orderly perpetuation through the seasons as kings and queens and princes and clowns and fools appeared and disappeared and then reappeared again in an endless pageant that swam through his mind and sensitive senses. He watched with the liturgical attentiveness of a spaniel, those same eyes, and then reconstructed actions as songs and translated into words the dreamlike cast of the visions and fantasies of those he observed in the most relaxed and textured containers of measured verse that have ever entered the English language.

He was an actor by trade and a wanderer, anyway in his imagination, setting his plays across the global landscape, and a bardic poet who tried to keep the range of variations he could orate under formal control. He admired Latin poets for their georgics and their agrarian acumen (the pastoral trend in him), plus the oddities of love in Ovid, and the Greeks for their insight into the tragedy of life lived on the earth with no outlet, no hope, no exit. He had an affinity for those who viewed life in such terms, as Marlowe did. Other contemporaries glimpsed the predicament as we tend to define it, but WS faced it head on, with a pacific smile of patience behind his variety of poses. It is his view of that exit, first in furtive glimpses and then fully—all this dramatized in every line of his work, including The Rape of Lucrece and the Sonnets—that allows us to live in hope and leads us to acknowledge him as the master of world literature. Other writers don't seem to sense the intersection of one's words on a page with immortality quite as he did, and his plays can be seen as variations on enacting immortality.

The psychiatrist Gerald G. May notes in the first sentence of Addiction & Grace, "After twenty years of listening to the yearnings of people's hearts, I am convinced that all human beings have an inborn desire for God. Whether we are consciously religious or not, this desire is our deepest longing and most precious treasure."

However an adherent may define the road to faith, that deep longing and treasure, once reached, gives to the inner (if not outer) edges of an otherwise humdrum everyday life a weight of glory and meaning. After more than 40 years of reading WS and enacting roles in which I had memorize his lines, I have come to believe that he, more than any writer in my native tongue, bore this inborn gravitation to God. The will or quest to know Him as fully, through others, as WS was able to do is the enigma that takes a visceral hold on us as we follow him to a play's conclusion through words.

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