It is almost impossible to know anything for certain about Shakespeare from his plays. He methodically withheld any clear indication of his identities and beliefs. As such, one of the few facts that we have about Shakespeare is that he did indeed methodically withhold any clear indication of his identities and beliefs from his plays. This is the foundational observation about Shakespeare from which we must build an account of this man and his writings. What can we say about someone who chooses to pursue the very public life of a playwright but refuses to reveal anything about himself?

It seems entirely likely that Shakespeare experienced bouts of what we now call “depression”: he was a writer, given to speculative thought on the beyond, drawn to the dark and unsettling aspects of life, and did not often volunteer information about himself. Depressives often feel a deep divide between the way the world ought to be and the way that it actually is. This divide between desire and truth gives life and energy to Shakespeare's plays.

In an age of dogmatism, Shakespeare was a skeptic, like the famous skeptic Michele de Montaigne. Yet Montaigne told his readers everything about himself: “I am myself the matter of my book,” he famously said. Shakespeare told his readers nothing about himself: “You are yourselves the matter of my plays,” he effectively says.

Shakespeare expressed his skepticism in specifically literary ways, as a mode and as a genre. As a mode - which is to say, as an attitude an author holds toward the material represented in his or her text - Shakespeare's skepticism manifests as irony. As a genre - that is, as a set of formal features, conventions, characters, and plot lines - Shakespeare's skepticism surfaces as tragicomedy.

Like Socrates, Shakespeare was an ironist. That is, he feigned ignorance on certain matters, especially moral questions, as a way to draw his interlocutors (us in the audience) into a dialogue, one which he may be guiding to a certain ethical insight, but also one in which he abstains from directly articulating and privileging any position.

Like Socrates, Shakespeare was a dramatist, but he was also a moral philosopher, one whose moral philosophy both determined and was determined by his decision to express himself almost exclusively in drama. That is, Shakespeare's irony - which was probably no more than a habit or disposition at the time in his life when he was choosing his career path - made playwriting a particularly appealing activity, just as his decision to become a playwright led him to develop and enhance his ironic attitude toward knowledge.

It is not the case, I think, that all we have of Shakespeare is what he dramatized. Rather, it seems more likely that Shakespeare dramatized everything: philosophy, religion, politics, family, love.

Shakespeare's favorite move to make when adapting his sources for the stage was to cut out information from the source that privileged or validated a certain interpretation of a questionable issue.

As a rule, Shakespeare was more interested in the question than the answer.

Shakespeare 's drama is mimetic, not in the sense that it's an accurate representation of reality - it's not - but in the sense that the interpretation of Shakespeare's drama presents the same problems as the interpretation of life. In other words, the experience of Shakespeare imitates the experience of life, even though the two things being experienced, Shakespeare and life, are actually quite different. How did Shakespeare accomplish this artistic achievement, this imitation of the experience of life?

In life, the most basic unit of being is the situation. In Shakespeare, and in drama more genuinely, the most basic unit is the scene, which works exactly like the situation.

Shakespeare's drama runs on the concept of exceptionality. In the Renaissance, the King or Queen was an exception, someone exempt from law, since the will of the sovereign was the law. The sovereign also had the power to declare a state of exception, one in which law was suspended. Excused. Achieved.

Shakespeare was a humanist. He put the human being at the center of his universe – not God, not nature, not self, not society, not even language, but the human being in all its creatureliness and inconstancy.

The twin commitments of Shakespeare's thought and work were doubt and love. Hamlet writing to Ophelia is Shakespeare to us:

Doubt thou the stars are fire,

Doubt that the sun doth move,

Doubt truth to be a liar,

But never doubt I love.

Doubt makes action impossible; love makes action inevitable.

Shakespeare used drama to do ethics. That statement requires a lot of qualification, and even more demonstration. 

Shakespeare has become the most popular writer in the Western world because his irony appeals to modern liberals. That is, Shakespeare's technique of feigning ignorance on certain moral judgments and positions turns the responsibility of determining the answers to those questions over to his audiences, which those audiences enjoy because (as modern liberals) we like having the freedom to make up our own minds about matters of truth and virtue: in life, and so in Shakespeare.

In Shakespeare studies, what is is right.

What is remarkable about Shakespeare is the uniformity and consistency of his artistic work. He wrote almost exclusively in drama, and he filtered all of his plays through the genres of comedy, tragedy, history, and romance.

Shakespeare's tragedies are funny and his comedies are serious; that is, his tragedies are actually satires, and his comedies are actually romances.

Shakespeare encourages an imaginative engagement with the other, one that cultivates a capacity for empathy.

We can say of Shakespeare what he says of Falstaff: he is not only witty himself, but the cause that wit is in other men and women.

Like the quintessentially English morality that created a common-law jurisprudence, Shakespeare's art is alive: particular, mutable, and constantly renewed in performance. I mean it is dramatic: drama is the art form that is closest to life.

It is as phenomena that we address Shakespeare, and it is as phenomena that Shakesoeare addressed life. That is, Shakespeare attended to knocked the essence of things but the experience of things. Experience is the foundation of Shakespeare representation of human being: to be human is to experience things.

We treat Shakespeare's text as we treat the Bible, and we treat Shakespeare as we treat God. What would it mean to say that Shakespeare has attained the status of religious truth?

Shakespeare was a dramatist, but he was also a moral philosopher. Shakespeare's choice of drama, the only literary kind (not verse, not prose) that acts

In Shakespeare’s works, there are four coherent genres: comedy, tragedy, history, romance. But, in reality, most of Shakespeare’s works are tragicomedies.

For everything that exists in Shakespeare’s texts and everything that we experience when we read or see them, we must ask, Did Shakespeare mean for it to be this way? If so, then Shakespeare is an evil genius. If not, then he is an idiot savant.

Some Questions:

Why is Shakespeare the most popular artist in English/Western history? It is a statement that gets us almost nowhere, but it is, I think, a historical fact that Shakespeare is popular in multiple and different groups and cultures for multiple and different reasons. For example, Shakespeare is popular in China because China underwent a modernization (read as westernization) movement in the mid twentieth century, and Shakespeare had already been selected as the cultural representative of the West. Shakespeare became popular in the modern west because, as the British Empire gained footing on global power, it needed a cultural representative to symbolize its morals and values, and Shakespeare was selected because the ideals of individuality and liberty which the British Empire trumpeted are reflected in the Shakespearean experience, which leaves much of its meaning open to different interpretations by different readers and audiences.

Shakespeare is not universal, but Shakespeare is versatile. That is, Shakespeare is not good and true for all people in all places in all times, but his drama does have a tendency, much more than other writers from his age or others, to speak to diverse cultures in different times.

Because Shakespeare is popular in different groups for different reasons, his art explodes the traditional philosophical distinction between universality and particularity. His work is only universal so far as it is particular. That peculiar feature may indeed be the explanation for Shakespeare’s popularity in the modern world, which is increasingly displaying what some philosophers have called a universal particularism: the notion that all our universals (truth, God, nature, science, etc.) are in fact situated within and constructed by particular people in particular social and cultural settings which therefore influence the creation and content of the constructed universal.

What, beyond popularity, lends Shakespeare to retellings and adaptations?