The Visionary Shakespeare
psychoanalytic, racial, and humanist visions. In two of the papers I have particularly referred to the visions as belonging to the “vision of nature” and the “vision of power.” For me, in fact, all the Shakespearean visions do “see into the life of things,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase, and do find the eternal nature or recurrent history of life. Theoretically speaking, a vision is not a whim or a short-lived dream. It is a view developed through a long time of experience in the writer’s heart and head. Therefore, every vision is prone to appear not in a single work but in more than one work of the same author if the author has produced a succession of works. Thus, as each Shakespearean vision is supposedly a vision accompanying Shakespeare throughout a long time, not to say all, of his life, the vision should appear in more than one work of Shakespeare’s. Indeed, if we check Shakespeare’s oeuvre carefully, we can find that his visions do appear over and over. However, in discussing each Shakespearean vision, I think it necessary to focus on one work or just a few works, where the vision is most manifest. Hence, I hope it is understood that Shakespeare’s ironic vision of life is to be found not just in Romeo and Juliet, though the vision is seen in the spotlight of that one work. Likewise, Shakespeare’s deconstructionist vision is to be found not just in Henry IV, his semiotic vision not just in Macbeth, his psychoanalytic vision not just in Hamlet, his racial vision not just in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, his vision of nature not just in King Lear, and his vision of power not just in The Tempest. When I chose to focus on a certain vision in the spotlight of one single play or a few plays, I was aware that the vision could be seen elsewhere in Shakespeare. It was only for the sake of facilitating discussion that I seemed to connect a certain vision restrictively to a single work or a few works. In discussing Shakespeare’s various visions, I know I need to provide sufficient evidence for each point I want to make. In the effort 2