I WRITE this on what is traditionally celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday (23 April): a good time to be thankful for him and to celebrate his work, although actually any time is a good time to do that. But celebrating Shakespeare doesn’t have to be mere “Bardolatry”, a cult that promotes him as a sheer and exceptional genius, towering above the rest of us mere mortals.

On the contrary, his art does not hold a mirror up to himself, like the work of some of the romantics; but, rather, as he himself says, it holds a mirror up to nature: he shows us ourselves. So, Hamlet tells the players: “. . . the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Every time we turn the spotlight on to Shakespeare, he turns it back on to us, and sometimes we flinch in that all-searching light.

But there is another and even deeper sense in which Shakespeare hands back to us and asks us to exercise the very imaginative genius for which we praise him. In the famous speech about poets in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare tells us, through his character Theseus, that “ . . . imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown. . .”

This is true on many levels; but, we might reasonably ask, whose imagination actually does this “bodying forth”? It is true that Shakespeare goes on to say that as “imagination bodies forth” these forms, “the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes”. But this is to make the poet the scribe rather than the chief and only imagination involved in this miraculous bodying forth.

When we read, or even when we watch, Shakespeare, and our minds are, as he puts it later in this scene, “transfigured so together”, that transfiguration happens only because our minds and, crucially, our imaginations are as fully engaged as Shakespeare’s. Without our active, participative imagination, we would have nothing but flat words and squiggles on a page.

Shakespeare himself makes this completely clear in the famous prologue to Henry V. If there is to be “a muse of fire”, then that fire must be kindled in us as well as in the playwright and his players: “O, for a muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention.”

If Shakespeare is to present to us, in the “cockpit” of his theatre, “the vasty fields of France”, then we are going to have to work with him, and the fire of our imagination will have to be kindled by his. The text of his play, and even the actors speaking it, would be no more than letters, or ciphers in an account book, without our “imaginary forces”:

O, pardon, since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.

Now, to work well on us and in us, to rouse the sleeping power of our imaginary forces, he has to be a great poet; but, equally, if we feel the greatness of his poetry and see so perfectly in our mind’s eye what that poetry evokes, then it is because our own poetic capacity has been aroused and is also at work. The light that we shine on the Bard illumines us as well.