The  Third  Law

Shakespeare is to the written word what Newton was to mathematical physics – so why shouldn't he have laws named after him?

            The First Law states,  If there is one perfect way to say something, Shakespeare will have found it.  As we saw in playing with Solid Flesh/ Sullied Flesh, the First Law comes in handy for choosing among readings of the three texts of Hamlet at the micro level. It can be helpful in deciding on the rightness of a particular word or phrase in a disputed passage. It is especially fun to apply when there has been a fashion war among academics and scholars at the expense of common sense or respect for the beauty of the poetry.

            The First Law supports interpretations based on analysis of the intrinsic workings of the text, internal evidence woven into the poetry. It's pretty easy to accept the First Law because Shakespeare proves it to you over and over again by striking off the one perfect way to say a thing. Try it out:  is there anywhere in Hamlet a passage you can improve?

            But even if you accept the First Law, you may balk at the working metaphor embodied in the Second Law:  Any problem in Shakespeare's text or dramaturgy can ultimately be traced to a universal problem of humankind. This is pretty sweeping -- "any problem" and "universal" and "humankind." (You are smart to be skeptical, given references to "strange attractors" and probability and chaos theory.) The implication of the Second Law is that what we called "original sin" – the self-made suffering of people – mysteriously reaches into the text of a poem or play and disturbs it. Can you suspend disbelief and imagine that the tragic flaws that confuse our lives can also confound a text?

            Validation of the Second Law will have to wait for some examples to prime the pump of intuition. It also hinges on the Third Law of Shakespeare:  Whatever is a Truth in Shakespeare will be found to have an opposite – and that opposite will also be true. 

             But doesn't the truth of something imply the exclusion of what's not true? How can a truth and its opposite co-exist in a poem? Wilde defined art as where truth can coexist with its antithesis. We get further help from Keats in a famous letter to his brothers in which he defines Shakespeare as having the greatest negative capability of any poet in history. This is hard, this negative capability, and vexing – it refers to Shakespeare's capacity to contain so many conflicting ideas, yet hold them harmoniously. It's a term that Keats coins just for this special attribute. He was a great poet himself and when he wrote this letter, he knew he had not long to live, so he must be taken seriously. 

            Keats said truth is beauty. But the opposite of a truth in art isn't ugly. It is that the thing and its opposite are both true and both beautiful. The Third Law has its analogs in myriads of examples in great art – and some from philosophy and historiography. That philosopher of the mind, Sigmund Freud, had his own version of the Third Law. (Even if sometimes he chose not to see a particular truth – and its opposite – in his own self analysis.)

            We are such stuff as dreams are made on. Freud used several examples to show the unconscious doesn't have the word no in its vocabulary.* This seems wrong if you take the narrow view, there are dreams that seem to contain negation. But Freud never let mere logic do his thinking for him – not where that great dream factory, the unconscious, is concerned. This idea of no "no" in the unconscious is a good way to convey its paradox: Whatever is true in a dream, its opposite is also true. Whatever is wished in a dream is also un-wished. The unconscious can't say no – not at any rate without also saying yes.