The Elusive Mind of Shakespeare

In David Lodge’s 1984 novel Small World, the character Persse McGarrigle is writing a Master’s thesis titled ‘The Influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare’: it’s a good, Borgesian joke. In Thinking Through Shakespeare David Womersley has undertaken a study of the influence of the Enlightenment on Shakespeare. ‘It does seem’, he writes, ‘as if Shakespeare had made a careful study of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith before writing… Coriolanus and Timon of Athens.’ He is, of course, joking, but the joke brings out very clearly the bizarre nature of his enterprise.