Month: March 2026

Let’s say I wake up one day and decide to become a painter. I throw my head back and my hands in the air and shout, “I want to be an artist!” What is the bare minimum that I need to achieve this goal?

There’s actually only one thing I really need: paint. It would be good to have some other tools as well, like a paintbrush, easel, canvas, and other things. But, as long as I have paint, I can do a Jackson Pollock impersonation and call myself a painter. Without paint, however, I cannot be a painter.

Let’s run through the same hypothetical, only now I wake up one day, throw my hands in the air and exclaim, “I want to be a storyteller!” What is the bare minimum I need to achieve this goal?

Well, thanks to the wonders of human anatomy, I am the owner of a pair of functioning vocal chords that can be used to produce sound waves that others recognise as words of the English language. Those words can be grouped into utterances allowing me to produce statements, exclamations, warnings, questions, threats, praise, congratulations, and, of course, stories. Therefore, I don’t need any extra physical objects to become a storyteller. My vocal chords will get the job done.

Still, there is something that I need. I need the ability to produce the kind of utterance that is recognised as a “story”. Fortunately, I almost certainly already have that because a knowledge of stories appears to be an innate, and therefore universal, human trait. We learn to recognise and produce stories as children at the same time that we learn our native tongue. If that’s true, then it should be possible to study the underlying structure of stories just as linguists can reverse engineer the grammar of languages.

Herein lies a startling fact. Linguists have now traversed the world writing grammars of the majority of languages, but our knowledge of what constitutes a story is still barely formulated. Perhaps the major reason why that is the case is because the study of stories has been split across numerous disciplines that are superficially independent of each other. Aristotle was the first to try and figure out the structure of stories, but he was studying Greek tragedy. Joseph Campbell is the most important modern thinker on the subject, but he was studying mythology. I’m prepared to be proven wrong, but as far as I can tell, nobody has ever set out to define the common properties of stories in general.

It’s for this reason that the dictionary definitions of the word tend to be misleading almost to the point of being wrong. The Cambridge University Dictionary defines a story as “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events.” Really? Here is a series of events that are connected. Ask yourself whether you think it is a “story”.

“The leaf fell from the oak tree. On the ground, a caterpillar crawled towards it. A nearby bird’s eye flickered with intent. Another bird called to it. The wind blew and a couple more leaves fell earthward.”

This “story” fulfils the definition in the Cambridge Dictionary, but I think we would all agree that it sucks. It turns out that just stringing events together does not constitute a story. The “connection” has to be meaningful. That raises the big question: what makes a story meaningful?

Trying to answer that leads into some of the most fundamental questions of human existence. Perhaps that is the real reason why we still don’t have much of an understanding of what a story really is.

Well, in this series of posts, we will attempt to find out. It’s going to be an exploratory exercise since I haven’t had time to map it out in any detail. That’s fitting, though, because every good story features a hero who thinks he knows where he is going but ends up somewhere unexpected. Maybe we’ll arrive at a definition of what a story is. Maybe we’ll solve the secret to the meaning of life. Maybe we’ll fail completely and end up wandering aimlessly in the semantic desert, thirsting for the tiniest drop of meaning. Time will tell. In any case, put on your metaphorical walking shoes and let’s go on a (hero’s) journey in search of the essence of stories.

I’m delighted to say that my upcoming book, tentatively titled “Shakespeare: The Journey into the Sacred”, is almost complete. All going well, it will be released into the world in two to three weeks. In anticipation of its release, I thought I would post the introduction here so interested readers can see what it’s all about. Without further ado, here it is.

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More than four hundred years after his death, it would be easy to imagine that there isn’t anything more to be said about the works of the man who is arguably the greatest writer in the English language. Everybody knows Shakespeare. Every schoolkid is made to read him. There are festivals, book clubs, academic conferences, countless movie adaptations, continuous performances by theatre troupes constructed exclusively for the purpose, and a voluminous secondary literature. And yet, as hard as it may be to believe, the vast majority of what has been written about Shakespeare’s work is misleading and often plain wrong.

Perhaps harder to believe is that the root cause of the problem goes back almost exactly two thousand years before Shakespeare’s time. The founder of Western philosophy, Plato, famously railed against artists for their use of fantasy and illusion, which he believed distracted from the proper pursuit of truth. Plato’s student, Aristotle, took a more objective approach to the subject and set out to try and determine how art worked. His work Poetics would remain the foremost treatise on the subject for more than two millennia. Nevertheless, the intellectual tradition handed down from antiquity sided with Plato in that it saw art as being, at best, an inferior form not capable of expressing the highest truths about the world and, at worst, a purveyor of downright falsehood. That’s why Aristotle’s work was not improved upon. Thinkers and philosophers thought the subject unworthy of attention.

That all began to change with the rise of the Romantic movement in the late 18th century, and it is no coincidence that Shakespeare was the most important influence on a new set of thinkers who no longer saw art as an inferior form but as something capable of communicating core truths about human existence. Although we have no record of his direct thoughts on the matter, it is clear that Shakespeare believed that too, since his works contain a number of jabs at the philosophers and their tired old ways. The famous line from Hamlet sums up his attitude: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

It was the Romantic movement which set out to try and identify what even Plato had grudgingly recognised, which is that there is something to art, some deeper truth that is hard to identify and which has usually been talked about only in vague, quasi-mystical language. Art presents us with a seeming paradox. It is clearly an illusion, and yet the illusion seems sometimes more real than reality. If we accept that art can communicate deep truths about the human condition, a misunderstanding of Shakespeare becomes a misunderstanding of ourselves. That is why it is worth our time to get it right. That is why it is important to correct the numerous errors that exist in Shakespearean interpretation.

If we were to sum up the main form of misinterpretation that critics and commentators have made down through the centuries, it would be that they have read into Shakespeare’s works their own ideological biases. This problem has become even more prevalent in our time, with postmodernism making it a virtue to simply make up your own interpretation. Nevertheless, the issue goes back to those who were the first to take Shakespeare seriously, the Romantics.

To demonstrate, let’s take the two works of Shakespeare that have been the most problematic: Hamlet and King Lear. The behaviour of the heroes of these stories has caused consternation ever since the plays were first performed. In fact, King Lear was seen to be such an unrelentingly depressing work that a completely different version of the story was published by Nahum Tate in 1681 and became the dominant version performed on stage for one hundred and fifty years afterwards, even though the meaning of the story had been completely transformed by changing it from a tragedy to a comedy. Those who weren’t simply horrified by the original version of Lear expressed disbelief and incomprehension at the behaviour of the king. No less an authority than Samuel Taylor Coleridge had this to say about it:-

“…many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the groundwork of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear’s division of his kingdom, and the banishment of Cordelia.”

Coleridge sees Lear’s behaviour in the opening scene as “improbable” but allows this by ascribing it the status of the “groundwork” of the story and not something to be taken seriously. Note that Coleridge invokes the idea that art is an illusion and implies that this gives the playwright leeway in the representation of events. For Coleridge, Lear’s inexplicable behaviour at the start of the story is just the necessary technical means to get the plot going, nothing more.

Let’s take the liberty of translating Coleridge’s passage into a simple statement. What he is saying is something like this:

I don’t understand Lear’s behaviour; therefore, it must be artistic licence on the part of Shakespeare.

The observation that Lear’s behaviour doesn’t make sense is uncontroversial. Everybody has that reaction. The actions of the ageing king don’t even make sense to the other characters in the story. It is this ambiguity and uncertainty that creates the need to find an explanation. Coleridge’s explanation is to reason back to the purported intentions of the author. He states that Shakespeare is just doing what is technically necessary to get the story started.

This form of reasoning is actually a very common in everyday life. When we don’t understand somebody’s behaviour, we start to imagine what inner motivations or beliefs are driving it. Of course, if we are in a position to ask the person directly why they are acting in such a way, they can simply tell us, and the matter can be resolved. It is where this is not possible that we fall back to speculation. Clearly, it is not possible to ask the character of a fictional story such as King Lear to clarify his behaviour, and so we are left to come up with our own explanations.

One of the main problems with such speculations is that we are in no position to prove the matter one way or another, and so the whole thing is untestable. However, in relation to the interpretation of works of art, the real issue is that, as soon as we go off speculating about the artist’s intentions, we are no longer paying attention to the story. If we turn this into a habit, we may eventually find that our focus becomes entirely on the author and not on the work at all. This actually happened in the 20^th century following the advent of psychoanalysis. Entire books have been written purporting to reverse engineer the psychology of authors based on their works. Whether this approach has any validity at all (I don’t believe it does), the simple fact is that it does not deal with the work of art in the way that the author intended it to be experienced. In fact, it undermines the very basis of art. If our goal is to understand great works such as Shakespeare, we must be wary of falling into this speculative trap.

Let’s call this way of dealing with ambiguity in a work of art reasoning back to the author, i.e., speculating on the author’s intentions. There is another pattern of dealing with uncertainty which is even more common, and that is reasoning back to the character of the hero. This practice became especially prominent with the rise of the Romantic movement. In relation to Shakespeare’s works, we find it in Coleridge, Schlegel, Goethe, A.C. Bradley and many others. Applied to King Lear, the reasoning goes as follows:

I don’t understand Lear’s behaviour; therefore, he must be going mad/senile.

This reading is far more permissible because the facts of the story seem to support it. Because Lear’s behaviour is overtly emotional and seemingly irrational, and because he is shown as an old and physically fragile man, the conclusion that he is losing his mind is natural. Almost everybody who watches the play arrives at it automatically, as do several of the characters in the story. However, as we will show later in the book when we come to analyse King Lear, this conclusion is incorrect and sits at the heart of why the story of Lear has not been properly understood. That is one example of where reasoning back to the character of the hero can lead us astray.

A second example is Hamlet. Hamlet’s behaviour has been seen to be almost as inexplicable as Lear’s. Nevertheless, it is clear from the story that he is acting erratically on purpose in order to confuse those around him, especially his uncle Claudius. That means that he is following some kind of plan which involves deceiving the other characters. Despite this, many big-name critics, such as Goethe and A.C. Bradley, have applied the reasoning back to the character of the hero paradigm to Hamlet and concluded that the explanation for his irrational behaviour is not that he is following a plan but that he is a melancholic procrastinator. The thinking goes something like this:

I don’t understand Hamlet’s behaviour; therefore, he must be depressed/melancholic.

The trouble with this is that it’s used as a catch-all explanation for all of Hamlet’s behaviour. Whenever he does something that is ambiguous, it gets ascribed to an inner emotional state that is governing his actions. Once you’ve accepted that, all the parts of the story that don’t make sense can simply be waved away. In short, the reasoning back to the character of the hero pattern also leads to a misinterpretation of the story. Just as Coleridge’s reasoning led him astray in relation to Lear, Goethe and Bradley ended up with the wrong understanding of Hamlet.

The Romantic paradigm remained the dominant way to interpret Shakespeare for more than a hundred years. One of the first to push back against it was T.S. Eliot, who made the excellent counter-proposition that the hero’s behaviour needs to be understood in relation to the external pressures and opportunities created by the plot of the story, rather than emerging entirely from their inner character. Ironically, however, because Eliot was unable to see how the events in Hamlet drive the behaviour of the hero, he concluded that the play itself was a failure. Rather than give Shakespeare the benefit of artistic licence, as Coleridge did with Lear, Eliot accuses him of not being up to the job of writing his own play. The reasoning could be summarised as follows:

I don’t understand Hamlet’s behaviour; therefore, the story of Hamlet is a failed work of art.

Eliot’s criticism mirrors that which had been made earlier by Voltaire, who railed against the increasing popularity of Shakespeare on the basis that he was a “barbarian” who broke the aesthetic rules that govern the creation of stage plays, specifically, by mixing comedy and tragedy. It would not have amused Voltaire to realise that Shakespeare had already poked fun at this kind of intellectual nit-picking in the character of Polonius. In Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet, he has the old pedant announce the arrival of the acting group as follows: “The best actors in the world, either for Tragedy, Comedy, History, Pastoral, Pastoral-Comical, Historical-Pastoral: Tragical-Historical: Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral…” No doubt, Shakespeare would have had a similar barb ready for T.S. Eliot’s “rules” if he had foreseen what they were.

Voltaire’s and Eliot’s error is another form of reasoning back to the author. They assume Shakespeare is familiar with the rules they impose on a work of art, then conclude that he failed to follow those rules either because he was a barbarian or simply incompetent. Since Shakespeare is not around to confirm these speculations one way or the other, it all amounts to little more than hand-waving. But we can be very sure, especially from passages such as the one cited from Hamlet, that Shakespeare would have vehemently disagreed that the so-called rules of art as dictated by philosophers and intellectuals were something to be respected and followed. Hamlet spends a great deal of the play mercilessly toying with Polonius, who, in this respect, could be Voltaire, Eliot, or any of the other critics who simply didn’t get it.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to find that these thinkers got it wrong in their interpretations of Hamlet and Lear. Indeed, Shakespeare seems to have anticipated their errors and maybe even encouraged them. In any case, we can identify a general pattern to the errors. When confronted with the behaviour of a character that didn’t make sense to them, each of these intellectuals immediately saw fit to jump out of the story and seek recourse via whatever ideological explanation they fancied. What none of them apparently did was to reason as follows:

I don’t understand Lear’s behaviour; therefore, I will redouble my efforts to comprehend him better before passing judgement.

This approach has the great virtue of looking for evidence within the story itself. It places the emphasis back on us to find the answer in the text before diving off into ideological abstractions. This requires a discipline that has been sorely missing in the interpretation of Shakespeare. That is true even among the big names we have mentioned. The situation is far worse among modern scholars who give themselves full licence to simply impose their own ideology on the text without the slightest apology. We live in a world that is even more full of Poloniuses and Voltaires than Shakespeare’s was. The general understanding of the Bard’s work has gotten worse in recent times as a result.

Thus, our initial assumption turns out not to be true. It is the case that Shakespeare has enjoyed enormous attention for four hundred years, but it is not the case that our understanding of him is complete. When even names such as Goethe, Coleridge, and Bradley have missed the mark, we can see that there is plenty of work still to do.

Having said that, the thinkers we have mentioned were not entirely wrong. The Romantics were correct that the inner states of the hero are of crucial importance, but they neglected the outward-facing aspects. T.S. Eliot was correct to focus attention on the events that the hero must overcome, but he got carried away with a bunch of irrelevant artistic rules. The error of the Romantics was to presuppose that the character of the hero is immutable. The error of Eliot was to presuppose that the hero has no agency of his own.

The irony is that this dichotomy between the inner world of the hero and the circumstances in which they find themselves plays a central and explicit role in all of Shakespeare’s works. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves…” Shakespeare returns to this issue time and again. His stories feature a rhythmic flux that alternates between the inner world of the hero with their desires and goals and the outer world that imposes its limitations and preconditions. Here we find the first hint to understanding the core truth that Shakespearean art conveys. The identity of the hero is not fixed and static. It changes. More specifically, it is formed via a process. A story is the process of transformation that the hero goes through. The transformation ebbs and flows between the inner world and the outer, microcosm and macrocosm. All of Shakespeare’s stories are predicated on this tension. They resonate so strongly with us because our own lives are created out of the same dynamic.

The hero of every Shakespeare story is going through a process where their identity is undone and then recreated. What differentiates Shakespeare’s heroes is the degree to which they consciously and deliberately attempt to navigate that process, to create their own identity. It is this process of transformation and identity creation which art can show us in a way that no other medium can. Whereas ideology only views reality through a narrow prism, great art enlarges our world because it is holistic and integral in nature. Shakespeare shows us the process of transformation to a degree of intensity and intricacy that is still unparalleled. That is why it is worth our time and trouble to understand him. That is why we cannot leave the job to ideologues and art critic nit-pickers.

What we will do in this book is to interpret Shakespeare on his own terms, reading nothing into his works but what is already there. Nothing further is required because what is already there is a treasure of the highest order, a treasure that has been hiding in plain sight for four hundred years.

The blank slate theory of human nature is the default philosophy underpinning many of our beliefs and institutions in the modern West. One of the results of this is our obsession with education. If your character and mental development are totally reliant on your experiences, then it’s of the utmost importance that you receive the right experiences. Modern parents will pay handsomely to that end.

Another area where the blank slate theory plays an increasing role is justice. If you happen to receive the wrong experiences and turn into a bad person, well, you can’t be held responsible for that. It wasn’t your fault. It was society’s fault for providing you with the wrong experiences. So, we won’t punish you. Besides, if we send you to jail, you’ll just receive more of the wrong experiences, and that will make everything worse. It doesn’t matter how many times or how absurdly this approach fails in the real world because it’s not a matter of empirical evidence but of dogma – the dogma of the blank slate theory.

So, it’s not really a surprise to find that a society such as ours should be going bananas over a technology that is predicated on the blank slate theory. I’m talking, of course, of LLMs, otherwise known as “AI”. An LLM is a blank slate just waiting to be trained on data. Like the best student in the classroom, you feed it information, and it reproduces it on demand.

In fact, LLMs are the best students ever. They sit there quietly, not misbehaving in any way, and when the “teacher” asks them a question, they give the answer immediately, spitting out what has been previously taught to them. Truly an A+ student. Top of the class. Therefore, also, the perfect employee. Never answers back. Never asks awkward questions or asserts itself in any way. Has no personality or other things going on in its life that affect performance. It just does what it’s told. Immediately. You can see why corporate leaders are dying to replace inadequate humans with perfect little LLMs. (Although notice that nobody is talking about replacing CEOs or board members with LLMs. Funny that.)

The blank slate theory never bothered itself with the idea of learning underlying principles because it claimed that such principles didn’t exist. The result was education became primarily about mimicry. LLMs are a testament to how far you can get with mimicry.

For most of the great thinkers in history, however, mimicry was almost the opposite of knowledge. We can only imagine what Plato or Descartes would make of LLMs. Both of them believed that the starting point of the search for truth was to realise that most of what you had learned was riddled with error. Your task was to learn the underlying principles about how knowledge was constructed and then methodically work your way towards truth. That process is slow, messy, and difficult. It can’t be mimicked because the process itself is the main thing.

We’ll know when “AI” has become a philosopher the first time an LLM stops regurgitating mid-sentence having realised everything it’s been trained on is potentially bullshit and that it’s nothing more than a puppet dancing on a string. “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”