At the start of this year, I threw out an invitation to readers to join in an online study group on Shakespeare. At the time, I had come to realise that my own understanding of the Bard had been wrong, which took me down the path that led to my most recent book, released in April.
The study groups had a small number of participants, but the experience was invaluable to me because I came to realise that what I had to communicate was larger than a specific Shakespeare work, it was a new approach to interpretation altogether. Since then, I’ve come to realise the larger intellectual ramifications of that. There’s a reason why hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) was massively raised in importance in the early 19th century. More on that in future posts.
As a result of all these realisations, I came up with the idea of running an online course aimed at exploring both the work of Shakespeare and communicating the approach to interpretation that I believe unlocks the true meaning of his plays. I’m delighted to say that I now have that course ready to go. I’ll be conducting it through Substack under the name “Think Shakespeare”. An overview of the concept can be found here.
The first course will begin on November 2. As an introduction to the material, I’ll be presenting a series of essays over the next eight weeks where I explain the larger theoretical and historical background and why I think studying Shakespeare is not just worth it to enhance our appreciation of his works but has wider implications for how we think about the world.
These introductory posts will be published at the Think Shakespeare Substack and I’ll be cross-posting them on this blog. Here is the first one entitled “Shakespeare as Storyteller”.
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If you look up Shakespeare’s biography in an officially recognised source, you will see him described as a “poet”, “playwright”, or “dramatist”. The first of these epithets relates to the Bard’s poetic abilities. The latter two relate to the plays that he wrote for the theatre. Most people would consider these titles uncontroversial, but, as Shakespeare warns us in Romeo and Juliet, names are powerful and dangerous things, capable even of destroying the love between a Montague and a Capulet. We must learn to look beyond the names to the deeper meanings.
A name you won’t find applied to Shakespeare in any official publication is that of “storyteller”. That would only be used in an informal setting, and even then, it is highly improbable that anybody would think of it because there is no official role of storyteller in our culture. Again, most people would see no problem here. But our supposition at Think Shakespeare is that the absence of the concept of a storyteller is part of a larger blindspot in Western culture, and it is that blindspot that is holding back our understanding of the Bard.
The truth is, we still don’t understand Shakespeare’s works. That is not just my subjective opinion. Arguably the two greatest Shakespeare commentators, A.C. Bradley and Harold Bloom, both expressed dissatisfaction with their accounts. Bradley was a professor of poetry. Bloom was a literary critic. Their specialities matched them to Shakespeare’s usual titles of “poet” and “playwright”, but I would argue that, although both men made advances in our understanding, they were held back by their scholarly straitjackets.
We are Capulets, and Shakespeare is a Montague. If we are going to genuinely connect with him, we must do as Juliet does and see beyond the names that have been assigned to him. But we have a dual task of re-evaluation because we must also re-learn the concept of “story”. As every philosopher has always known, it is the most ubiquitous concepts that are the hardest to see afresh.
Our task is twofold. First, we need to be clear about what a story is. Then, we apply that understanding to Shakespeare. We’ll begin with stories.
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Let’s say I wake up one day and decide I want to be an artistic painter. What is the one material I need? Everybody would agree that I need paint. In fact, paint is the minimum requirement to become a painter. Yes, a paint brush, a palette, and an easel would be very useful. A beret would help you look the part. A surly attitude mixed with an aura of dismissive superiority would round out the archetype nicely. But, really, paint is the one necessary ingredient. No paint, no painter.
If we ask the question, ‘What is needed to become a storyteller?’ some people might rush to the conclusion that the answer is ‘a story’. But that’s not right. The question we asked was about the materials required to create the end product, not the product itself. A painting is the end product made by a painter. In order to make it, they need paint. A story is the end product produced by a storyteller, but what materials are needed to make a story?
It turns out that the reason we don’t have a generic “storyteller” role in our culture is because we conceptualise storytellers based on the medium in which they work, and there are multiple different mediums in which to tell a story. We call Shakespeare a “dramatist” or “playwright” because he wrote stories to be performed in a theatre. We call somebody who writes stories for the page an “author”. We call somebody who writes stories for opera a “librettist”. A person who writes stories for film is called a “screenwriter”.
Those who have read Plato will recognise the nature of the problem. Almost every Platonic dialogue begins with Socrates asking the other characters for a definition and them replying with overly specific examples. We can imagine Socrates asking “what is a story?” and being told it’s a novel, or a film, or a libretto. He would calmly point out that these are all accidental properties of stories. The rest of the dialogue would then reveal the essential properties.
There’s a very good reason why Plato never wrote such a dialogue, however, and that is because the philosopher railed against the poets and playwrights, calling them “imitators”. Book 10 of The Republic is a famous diatribe that has been so influential in Western thought that, for more than two millennia afterwards, no scholar worth their salt paid the slightest attention to the question of artistic stories.
That is why we still have no good definition of a story. It is also why modern academia persists with the error of studying the medium and not the essence. Thus, we have scholarly disciplines dedicated to literature, film studies, opera, poetry, and even theology. What we do not have is any discipline concerned with stories.
A quite incredible fact follows from this: we still do not know the essence of a story. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a story as “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events”. That is misleading at best. The real reason we don’t call Shakespeare a “storyteller” is because we couldn’t define what the title would mean anyway.
Fortunately, in defining the problem we have also laid out the path to the solution. The true essence of a story cannot lie in the properties of the medium in which a story is transmitted. The essential properties must be found in what is common to all kinds of stories, including theatre plays, novels, short stories, fairy tales, films, operas, tales, epics, sagas, legends, yarns, fables, or any of the other countless words we have that all mean the same thing.
As it turns out, the Cambridge Dictionary definition points in the direction of the correct answer. A story is “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events”. What connects the events of a story?
The answer to this was given in the middle of the 20th century by a scholar who was studying a specific kind of story, the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell coined the phrase “the hero’s journey” and outlined a structure that every story follows based on an extensive cross-cultural survey. What he came to realise was that what connects the events in a “myth” is that they all lead to the transformation of the hero.
Because Campbell was working in the field of mythology, and because he was strongly influenced by Jungian psychology, his perspective was too focused and narrow. Nevertheless, he had stumbled on the answer to our question: what is the essence of a story? All we must do is generalise his insight appropriately.
What connects the events in a story? They all describe the transformation of the hero. That transformation is not limited to psychology, as Campbell believed. It refers to the hero’s entire identity. Therefore, the essence of a story is that it describes the transformation of the hero’s identity.
Note that this definition is inherently abstract, and that is what has made it so difficult to discover. This is especially true because the concepts of “transformation” and “identity” are themselves complex and therefore what looks at first glance to be a straightforward definition hides a great deal more. We will explore that in future posts.
For now, let’s now apply our definition to Shakespeare and see what it can tell us.
We mentioned earlier that both Bradley and Bloom were dissatisfied with their understanding of the Bard. But we can be more specific about the nature of that dissatisfaction. What has been misunderstood in Shakespeare are his heroes. In particular, King Lear and Hamlet have caused special trouble. T.S. Eliot went so far as to say that Hamlet was a failed work of art because he couldn’t understand the behaviour of the hero. Lear’s behaviour has been excused on the basis that he is a senile old man losing his mind. Hamlet’s behaviour has been chalked up to “depression” or “melancholy”.
Consider how surprising this is. Shakespeare’s works are intimate character portraits, and yet, we haven’t understood those characters. It is easy to see why books of philosophy or theology, with their opaque abstractions and mangled prose, have been misunderstood. But how can we explain our failure to understand the human characters in the works of arguably the greatest dramatist in history?
The situation is even more strange when we consider that most of Shakespeare’s plays are entirely about one or two heroes. The stories of Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth are exclusively about the titular character. Even when the hero is not on stage, the action revolves around them. The Bard’s works are not sprawling epics with a huge cast of characters and countless subplots. They are tightly woven narratives about a single individual. Yet we have failed to understand that individual.
Our failure to understand Shakespeare comes from our failure to understand stories because the true definition of a story is that it is about the transformation of the hero. We cannot understand the hero of a story unless we understand the transformation that they are going through. That has been the fatal flaw in Shakespeare interpretation. It has been made worse because the scholarly departments of poetry, literature, and mythology each have their own preoccupations that only distract from the true meaning. By interpreting Shakespeare as a teller of stories, we attack the problem at its source.
That is the approach we will be taking in this Substack. We will treat Shakespeare as a storyteller and thereby focus our attention on the core meaning of his works, not the mediums in which they are expressed. Shakespeare was originally performed in theatre. It wasn’t until the early 19th century that he began to be widely read. At that point, his works became “literature”. But nobody would say that a stage version of Hamlet means something different to the written version. The true meaning of the work lies in the story. If we want to find it, that is where we must look. That is what we will be doing in Think Shakespeare.
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Although these introductory essays are theoretical in nature, Think Shakespeare is not a Substack based around essays or blog posts. It is a practical course designed to teach the skills of interpretation required to understand the Bard’s works. It won’t tell you what to think about Shakespeare. It will teach you how to think about Shakespeare.
Courses will consist of a weekly guided overview, practical exercises, and an ongoing group chat. More details on how the courses will run can be found here.
The first ten-week course will commence on November 2, 2026. We will deep dive into Henry IV Part 1. For the rest of the first year, we will read Henry IV Part 2, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra.
Course material will be limited to subscribers only. Subscription options can be found here.