Everything in Nothing

So, I've been rather enamored recently with the various concepts of nothing that arise in Shakespeare. William, of course, means for us to read much into his time's pronunciation of the word and its connotation of hearsay and gossip, but I think he also is trying to address something much deeper and more profound.

The classic miracle, for instance, is the ability to create something of nothing. Genesis, transubstantiation, and, most importantly, our own imaginative faculty, are all miraculous examples of the Shakespearean concept of nothing. Goddard's criticism argues that within NOTHING is the idea of the actual and the possible, the "two constituents of the imagination" "In this realm," says Goddard, "are all the deeds that were not done when the other choice was made, all the roads that were not traveled when the other fork was taken, all the life that did not come into existence when its seeds failed to germinate."

It's as if Shakespeare asks the questions of Descartes--what is real? What is fact? Can I trust my senses? If not, what do I trust?--and comes to a unique and profoundly mythological conclusion. "It matters not," Shakespeare says, for "the poet's pen...gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." Our ability to trust our senses and our world is inconsequential, for we can live in a world of pure creativity through imagination.

And, indeed, imagination seems to be Shakespeare's most powerfully moving character. Lear's exhortation that "nothing will come of nothing" rings true in Shakespeare's grand sense, for encapsulated in the concept of nothing is the entire realm of possibility. For Cordelia, Goddard says, "her whole spiritual inheritance came from nothing."

"Nothing" then seems to be a stand in for the creative faculty of the imagination.