Lies Like Truth: An Exploration of Shakespearean Lies

My essay examines Shakespeare's utilization of the lie in Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. Specifically how he creates a false reality and allows his characters to interact with that false reality. I explore the first lie, which reflexively encompasses how the play is an insertion of a false reality within our own. I then analyze the various ways the characters challenge, manipulate, and exploit the lies of their world. This heavily involves the concept of “Theatrum Mundi” and many of the metaphysical strands between it. I examine Thomas Stroup’s Microcosmos for his perspective on plays before Shakespeare's era which explore similar subjects, Frances Yates’ Theatre of the World for background on the construction of English Renaissance plays, Dieter Mehl’s Elizabethan Dumb Show, and James Lee Calderwood’s Shakespearean Metadrama. These sources help to organize the macrocosm of metaphysical detail in which Shakespeare fully immerses his audience in the false-reality of the play, as well as the ways his characters attempt to overcome the false-realities that they are trapped in. The essay goes on to analyze how the characters Hamlet, Iago, and Macbeth interact with their individual realities and how these interactions are comparable. I conclude that there is an ultimate feeling of powerlessness when wrestling with reality, but that same understanding of powerlessness holds some power in its knowledge, which fulfills the complicated duality that comes with false-realities.