What we See and Don't See

It is true that Shakespeare has a unique form of seeing things in order to get the audience to wonder. Samuel Coleridge chooses to try to figure out what Shakespeare tries to do as he writes the plays. In his passage, he directs his attention to the difference between the real world, and the world that is being done in the play. He chooses to think that Shakespeare not only tries to put his audience into the world, but to put them in the shoes of one of the characters.

Now, Coleridge argues that Hamlet is an exception to this due to the continual talk. Hamlet has several talks to himself in front of the audience where he will talk about his position, and will allow the audience to make their own judgements on how he should think. The most famous of them all is "To be or not to be" (III.i.) where he question whether he should live or die in this situation. It is particularly strong since most of the audience have experienced this sort of feeling where they have considered the idea to say goodbye to life and just die. Now, since this play is easily misinterpreted, Shakespeare could very well be calling the audience a crowd of crazy people. Since there is a very high chance that Hamlet may be crazy, and having this talk that is so similar to one that most of the audience has experienced, he begins to actually question the meaning of being crazy.

That is where Coleridge's theory of balance between the real world and the world of the play comes in. Shakespeare drags in the audience to the shoes of one of the characters by giving them something they can apply to their own lives and experience a little of that "crazy" Hamlet already has flowing in his veins. Though people will argue that this sort of thing has been done before, the fact remains that never has any sort of writer come in to give real life experiences so vividly as William Shakespeare.