Motivation in Shakespeare’s Choice of Materials

Summary

The field of study which I propose for consideration has to do with Shakespeare’s plots in two aspects, the general and the detailed. When he utters the familiar lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name,

he gives a perfect description of the most fundamental operation of the human mind. As the possessor of one of the greatest minds on record, he is at the same time describing his own transcendent skill.

There is usually to be discovered in Shakespeare's plays a form or pattern, sometimes easily identified, sometimes not; sometimes apparently consciously developed, sometimes seemingly almost accidental. These are "the forms of things unknown". The power of determining forms, that is, of regarding as irrelevant all attending circumstances except a certain conceptual form that controls the complex of events, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind, and in the recognition of significant form in any configuration presented to experience Shakespeare excelled.