William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is a long-dead playwright whose words reach John through a battered copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare found in Malpais. The book gives John language for feelings he could not previously define, and it becomes the measure by which he judges the World State’s entertainment and its deliberately passionless social order. Shakespeare’s importance lies not in a life recounted by the novel, but in the afterlife of his writing: it makes private emotion intelligible and reveals what a society organized around stability has had to eliminate.

The book discovered in Malpais

John encounters Shakespeare’s work around his twelfth birthday, when he finds a thick, old volume lying in his bedroom. Mice have eaten its binding; pages are loose and crumpled. Linda explains that Pope brought it from a chest in the Antelope Kiva, where it had apparently lain for hundreds of years. She regards the book as uncivilized nonsense but thinks it may serve John as reading practice, then returns to drinking mescal and falls asleep.

John opens the book at random to a passage from Hamlet. Its unfamiliar words strike him as a form of magic, at once resembling drums at summer dances, the singing of the Corn Song, and Mitsima’s ritual speech. Yet the poetry means more to him than sounds or ceremony: it seems to speak directly to his life. He associates its language with Linda, who lies asleep beside an empty cup, and with her relationship with Pope.

The play’s words give John a way to name his hatred of Pope. He has already felt that hatred, but Shakespeare’s language makes it more definite and, in John’s perception, makes Pope himself more real. Literature here does not simply decorate an emotion; it gives the emotion form and precision. The damaged book, retrieved from a ceremonial chest and dismissed by Linda, becomes John’s powerful means of interpreting the world around him.

Shakespeare in the World State

Before John arrives in London, Shakespeare is already a sign of the World State’s ignorance of its cultural past. When Linda refers to pyramids and her old black-patent bandolier, she mentions a man called Shakespeare and observes that her listeners have never heard of him. The response frames their ignorance as an effect of scientific education: a culture proud of its rational organization has made its own literary inheritance inaccessible.

The prohibition is not presented as a mere gap in schooling. Shakespeare’s writing depends on experiences the World State has systematically diminished: enduring attachments, jealousy, family bonds, grief, and conflict between desire and duty. The plays therefore remain difficult to absorb into a society that trains people to accept their assigned behavior and uses soma to blunt distress. The absence of Shakespeare is part of a broader historical and emotional exclusion.

Reading aloud and emotional conflict

In London, John reads Shakespeare aloud to Helmholtz. Helmholtz responds to the language with mounting excitement: particular images make him smile, flush, and finally tremble. He recognizes the dramatic skill as a kind of emotional engineering, even while the lovers’ intense attachment in Romeo and Juliet initially strikes him as strange. Shakespeare can reach him through the power of its language before he has fully accepted the passions that language represents.

The reading is also interrupted by Bernard, who laughs at a line and reduces it to a Solidarity Service hymn. He repeats this act of mockery at subsequent meetings, deliberately damaging the experience because he resents John and Helmholtz’s closeness. The interruptions hurt both listeners by turning a valued poetic moment into an occasion for social spite. Shakespeare’s work thus becomes a point of contrast not only between World State culture and John’s experience, but among the men gathered around it.

John’s reading of Romeo and Juliet brings that contrast into sharper focus. He imagines himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet, entering the play with intense passion. Helmholtz admires its craft, but the lovers’ distress over having a girl seems ridiculous to him. When Juliet pleads against being forced to marry Paris, however, Helmholtz’s response becomes physically restless: the scene has brought him up against feelings that his own society has trained him not to take seriously. Shakespeare’s drama makes intimate attachment and coercion legible in a world that has nearly erased their conditions.

Tragedy and the price of stability

The argument over Shakespeare becomes explicit when John insists that Othello is better than the feelies. Mustapha Mond agrees about its artistic superiority, but explains that tragedy requires social instability. The World State has arranged for people to get what they want, avoid wanting what they cannot get, and remain protected from illness, fear of death, old age, and the strong attachments that create divided loyalties. Its stability leaves no room for the conditions that make Othello’s tragedy possible.

Mond accordingly describes high art as a sacrifice made in exchange for happiness. The feelies and scent organ offer agreeable sensations, but they do not mean what a tragedy means: they are designed to please their audience rather than to give shape to conflict. Shakespeare is therefore more than an example of an old artistic tradition. His plays expose the cost of the World State’s definition of happiness, which depends on removing the dangers, losses, and emotional demands that tragedy requires.

The same distinction governs Mond’s discussion of nobility and heroism. In his account, they arise where people face wars, divided allegiances, temptations, or someone they must love and defend. The World State suppresses those occasions and offers soma to calm anger, reconcile enemies, and provide a holiday from unpleasant facts. John counters that suffering and tears are necessary to what is noble, invoking Othello as well as a story he learned among the Indians. The exchange crystallizes Shakespeare’s role in the novel: his tragedies preserve a vocabulary for the difficult emotions that a stable, soma-managed society has designed away.