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The “anti-biography” as a literary program
Je raconte son histoire mais, faute de savoir faire d'une autre façon et puisqu'il n'est pas possible de procéder d'une manière différente, je lui donne l'allure d'un conte semblable à ceux dont s'enchantent les enfants et dont, jamais, ils ne se missent. It's a fois… It's a long time coming and going, too, long and long. Pour de vrai et pour de faux, pour parler comme parlent les tout-petits. Pour de vrai ou pour de faux, nul ne saurait plus the dire désormais et, d'ailleurs, personne ne s'en soucie vraiment. Je raconte son histoire mais, bien sûr, faute de pouvoir procéder d'une autre manière et puisque l'on ne saurait faire d'une façon différente, j'y mets also un peu de la mienne. Je me faufile à l'intérieur de la fable. Lorsqu'elle parle d'un other, elle parle pourtant de moi.
I tell his story, but since I can't do it any other way, and it's impossible to do it any other way, I give it the character of a fairy tale, the kind children love and can never get enough of. Once upon a time… All of this happened elsewhere and long ago, far away and a very long time ago. True or false, to use the words of little ones. Whether true or false, no one can say anymore, and besides, no one really cares. I tell his story, but since I can't do it any other way, and it's impossible to do it any other way, I naturally add a little of my own story as well. I slip into the fable. If it speaks of someone else, it's actually speaking of me.
In Philippe Forest's work Shakespeare: Quelqu'un, all the world and people (Flammarion, 2025) does not present us with a conventional biographical project. Rather, it is a literary-critical and simultaneously poetic endeavor that understands the notorious uncertainty of historical facts not as a deficiency, but as a productive prerequisite. Forest takes the absence of reliable biographical data as the starting point for a far-reaching meditation on the nature of literature, on authorship, identity, and the relationship between life and work. Shakespeare appears not as a historically tangible individual, but as a void, a mirror or resonating chamber in which both all of humanity and the biographer himself are reflected.
Forest is not writing a book over Shakespeare in the traditional sense. He writes rather through the power of Through Shakespeare – and simultaneously through himself. The analysis of his work as an independent literary project reveals how closely poetic imagination, literary theory, and personal experience are intertwined.
Central to Forest's approach is the concept of "anti-biography." Starting from the observation that we know "everything and almost nothing" about Shakespeare, Forest posits that this author's life is accessible only as fable, as narrative, and thus as a literary construct. Every attempt to construct a coherent biographical portrait from the sparse documents inevitably produces fiction. Instead of concealing this fact, Forest makes it the very subject of his book.
From this perspective, Shakespeare appears radically devoid of identity. Forest takes up a famous dictum by William Hazlitt, later varied by Jorge Luis Borges: Shakespeare resembled every human being—with the sole distinguishing feature that he resembled every human being. He was somebody, everyone, and ultimately nobody. For Forest, this lack of identity is not a deficiency, but rather the condition of possibility for Shakespeare's genius. Precisely because Shakespeare possessed no fixed, definable inner self, he was able to inscribe himself into the countless voices, passions, and conflicts of his characters. His work thus becomes the stage for a radical empathy that is only possible from within emptiness.
Forest consistently understands every Shakespeare biography as a veiled autobiography of its author. His own book is no exception. Forest permeates his approach to Shakespeare with memories of the libraries of his childhood, of the "magic circles" of books in which the promise of a different, more intense reality was evident from an early age. The gaps in the historical record are filled not with facts, but with the truth of fiction. In clear reference to Marcel Proust, literature appears as the "only true form of life," as the space in which experience first takes shape.
Basic themes of a thinker on existence
In Forest's interpretation, Shakespeare emerges as a political poet whose work primarily illustrates the futility of power and the cruelty of what Jan Kott calls the "great mechanism" of history. In the history plays, Forest sees not a mere chronicle of heroes, but an endless wheel of fortune on which rulers are merely actors playing a role until they are violently deposed from the "empty throne." Political disorder is thus always a reflection of cosmic instability: when the order of the state falters, the elements within it also fall apart. Forest emphasizes that Shakespeare's political vision remains profoundly skeptical, as it understands history as "a fairy tale told by a fool," in which regicide is both the cause and the consequence of a lasting chaos that ultimately silences all human ambition.
As a poet of love, Shakespeare, in Forest's portrayal, creates an image that lies between "gentleness" (kindnessForest describes love in Shakespeare's work as oscillating between the brilliance of genius and the dark brutality of desire. He portrays love not as an idyllic state, but as a "war of the sexes" in which the bed becomes a battlefield and passion often turns into mistrust or jealousy. While the sonnets in Forest's analysis appear on the one hand as "sweet" private poetry, they simultaneously reveal an almost raw truth about desire, which, as a "waste in shame," consumes the mind. A central literary motif for Forest is the subversion of identity: through travesty and the reversal of gender roles in the comedies, love becomes a space of masquerade in which the "I," in its longing for the other, loses its own fixed boundaries. Thus, for Forest, love becomes a "dissonant harmony" that, while momentarily concealing the nothingness of existence, ultimately remains as fleeting as a dream.
Besides the dimensions of politics and love, Philippe Forest identifies further fundamental core themes in Shakespeare's work that are inextricably linked to his specific understanding of theatre. These motifs form, as it were, the metaphysical foundation of the dramas and explain why Shakespeare appears to Forest less as an author of stories than as a thinker of existence.
A central motif is the paradox of identity, which Forest describes as the "phantom of identity." Closely following Jorge Luis Borges and William Hazlitt, he develops the thesis that Shakespeare could be "everything"—that is, create an almost unlimited variety of characters, voices, and perspectives—precisely because he himself was, at his core, "nobody." For Shakespeare, the self is not a stable core, but an illusion, a mirage that continually dissolves within the literary space. Identity appears as a mask that lasts only for the duration of a scene and is discarded or destroyed in the next moment. The theater thus becomes the site where the illusion of the self is both revealed and simultaneously undermined.
Closely linked to this dissolution of identity is what Forest calls the metaphysics of nothingness. Shakespeare's work repeatedly revolves around the experience of emptiness, around the word "rien," which becomes the key concept for its interpretation. The world and everything it produces—power, love, fame, even life itself—ultimately appears as nothingness. Yet, for Shakespeare, this realization does not lead to a cold nihilism. Rather, from the confrontation with emptiness arises a heightened, "magnified" poetry. The silence that lurks at the core of things is not repressed but poetically explored. It is precisely from the awareness of nothingness that language gains its intensity.
From a religious perspective, Forest reads Shakespeare's poetry as an expression of a radical, even "superlative skepticism." The plays reflect the existential dismay of a person who senses that the heavens above are empty. God is silent, his servants prove unreliable, and there is no transcendent authority that could give ultimate meaning to the suffering or chaos of the world. This emptiness of heaven forces humanity back upon itself—and upon the theater as the only place where truth, even if only as an illusion, can be experienced.
Another fundamental motif is the fleeting nature of time. Shakespeare describes it as an "unheard and noiseless foot" that destroys everything it encounters. Time gradually robs life of everything that made it precious: youth, love, power, hope. Forest interprets this temporality not merely as a melancholic theme, but as the fundamental structure of the dramas. Everything that appears on stage is, from the very beginning, marked by its eventual disappearance.
Theatre as the truth of the world
Against this backdrop, it becomes clear why, for Shakespeare—and for Forest's interpretation—the theater is far more than a place of entertainment. It is the truth of the world itself. Precisely because it openly employs illusion, dissimulation, and masquerade, it can express a truth that cannot be revealed in any other way.
Forest here invokes the old formula "Totus mundus agit histrionem": the whole world is playing theater. If the world itself is a stage, then theater is the only medium that articulates this truth. It doesn't reveal the illusion by destroying it, but by doubling it. On stage, it becomes visible that even so-called real life consists of roles, scripts, and performances.
This truth is also expressed in Shakespeare's radical break with the classical rules of drama. The Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action hardly interest him. His plays span decades, jump between countries and continents, and blend the tragic with the comic, the sublime with the bawdy. Contemporaries often perceived this freedom as barbaric or lawless. For Forest, however, this very formlessness is an expression of a profound understanding of the world: the world itself does not follow pure, harmonious laws.
This concept of theater is symbolically encapsulated in the image of the Globe Theatre as a "wooden O." This seemingly primitive, confined space is capable, through the sheer power of imagination, of conjuring entire empires, battlefields, or even the cosmos itself. In the Globe, the macrocosmic and the microcosmic merge: the smallest stage becomes a model of the world, the world itself a stage.
A key technique Shakespeare uses to deepen this insight is theatre within theatre. In plays such as Hamlet or Ein Sommernachtstraum He stages performances within performances to expose reality as pure illusion. If a play within a play produces truth, it is only because it lays bare the mechanism of illusion. Reality does not appear as the opposite of fiction, but as another of its manifestations.
Added to this is the collective and ephemeral nature of theater in Shakespeare's time. It was a relatively new art form, without a fixed canon, without the aura of a finished work. Texts often circulated without the author's knowledge, altered, supplemented, or rewritten by actors. Authorship was an unstable, shared process. For Forest, this very precariousness is a key to understanding Shakespeare: Theater exists only in the moment of its performance and disappears immediately afterward.
In this sense, Forest understands Shakespeare's theater as a form of exorcism. The demons that dominate human life—ambition, violence, jealousy, madness—are summoned onto the stage to be symbolically banished. It is understood that they cannot be permanently exorcised. But for the duration of the performance, they become visible, nameable, and therefore bearable.
Shakespeare's theatre, as Forest might suggest, can be imagined as a prism. It captures the diffuse, chaotic light of human existence and refracts it into countless colors, characters, and voices. In the end, however, it reminds us that this light comes from darkness – and that it returns to it as soon as the curtain falls.
Intertextuality as a medium of knowledge
Methodologically, Forest's text is characterized by a dense intertextuality. Other authors function not merely as references or evidence, but as actual interlocutors through whom Shakespeare first becomes visible. The book thus forms a literary echo chamber in which voices from different centuries overlap.
The influence of Jorge Luis Borges is particularly formative. Forest adopts from him not only the formula of identitylessness, but also the metaphysical conception of the author as a dreamer who is himself dreamed. For Borges—and in Forest's continuation—Shakespeare is a figure who ultimately becomes part of a larger fiction whose creator remains elusive. Authorship thus loses its sovereign status and becomes an effect of the text.
James Joyce also plays a central role: In reference to Ulysses And Joyce's interpretation of Shakespeare reads Forest Shakespeare's work as a processing of private traumas, especially the early death of Hamnet, Shakespeare's son. According to Joyce, Shakespeare speaks in Hamlet Not through the grieving prince, but through the ghost of the father – as if, beyond time and death, he wanted to speak to his lost child. Forest takes up this idea and integrates it into his own conception of literature as a site of belated, never-ending mourning.
Stendhal provides Forest with another key image: that of frescoes on a wall whose plaster has fallen away. Just as one must imaginatively fill in the missing parts of a fresco to glimpse the whole, so too is our knowledge of Shakespeare's life fragmentary. Here, imagination is not an arbitrary addition, but a necessary condition for understanding.
Finally, Forest openly admits to mimesis and plagiarism. For him, writing about Shakespeare means imitating, indeed appropriating, Shakespeare's words, motifs, and gestures. Yet he sees in this a profound fidelity to the subject. Shakespeare himself obtained his material secondhand—from Plutarch, Ovid, or Holinshed. Originality does not consist of inventing from nothing, but in the constant reworking of forms and voices.
Biographical gaps as poetic focal points
The so-called "lost years" between 1585 and 1592, for which no documents exist, play a particularly important role. Forest interprets these years not merely as a gap in research, but as a symbolic "hidden life," comparable to the silent years of Jesus Christ. It is precisely this vacuum that enables the artist's initiation; it marks the point at which life transforms into literature.
Forest also offers a new interpretation of the famous will stipulating the "second-best bed." Against legalistic or psychological interpretations, he reads this gesture as a sign of a late, melancholic return to the private sphere. The bed appears not as a loveless relic, but as an intimate space for a "second marriage" in old age, a quiet echo of a shared life beyond public roles.
In the Stories Forest again recognizes a political philosophy of nothingness. Power proves to be a theatrical illusion, kings mere actors for a limited time. The wheel of fortune turns ceaselessly until all voices fall silent in the grave. History appears here—entirely in the spirit of Macbeth – like a fairy tale full of noise and rage that ultimately means nothing. But this "nothing" is not empty, but full of existential insight.
Forest also pays particular attention to gender roles in Elizabethan theater. Because female roles were played by young men, a complex multiplication of masks arises: a man plays a woman disguised as a man. This theatrical layering underscores Forest's central thesis that the self in literary space is always another—or indeed, no one.
The network of sonnets
In Philippe Forest's study of Shakespeare, the sonnets occupy a special place, as they—unlike the plays—were long considered the only place where the poet revealed his "true self." Published in 1609, the sonnets are often read in literary history as a kind of "biographical key."
Forest points out that Shakespeare probably only published his poems (such as his plays) during his lifetime Venus and AdonisForest attributed lasting value to Shakespeare's plays as printed works, while viewing them more as ephemeral, utilitarian texts. The sonnets, however, which Forest calls "sonnets sucrés" (sugar-sweet sonnets), were originally intended for a small, private readership. They were published in 1609, probably without the author's knowledge or against his wishes. During Shakespeare's lifetime and throughout the 17th century, they received little attention; Nicholas Rowe first vaguely mentioned them in 1709, and Edmond Malone included them in a collected edition for the first time in 1790.
Forest describes the sonnets as a lyrical tapestry woven between three figures: the poet himself, a handsome young nobleman (“ange blond”), and the infamous “Dark Lady.” The young man is urged by the poet to marry and father children in order to preserve his beauty for posterity. The identity of the dedicatee, “WH,” remains one of the greatest mysteries of world literature. Forest suggests Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, or William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, as possible candidates. According to Forest, an almost novelistic drama of desire, jealousy, and infidelity unfolds between these three characters.
A central motif is poetry's ability to immortalize beauty. Forest quotes the famous lines that the beloved lives as long as human beings can breathe and eyes can see. At the same time, Shakespeare addresses sexual desire in an often blunt, almost crude manner. Forest emphasizes that the poet describes lust as an expenditure of spirit in a "desert of shame," masterfully playing with the double meanings of words like "spirit" (mind/sperm) or "hell" (hell/female sex).
Forest cautions against naively equating the "I" of the sonnets with the historical figure of Shakespeare. For him, Shakespeare's poetry is as much theater as his dramas: the lyrical "I" is a mask, a role the author assumes. Even when the poet claims to be writing "truthfully" about love, he remains a manipulator of language. Forest therefore sees the sonnets less as an "intimate diary" (as the Romantics saw them) and more as a reflection on the multiplicity of identities.
In modern scholarship, the sonnets are often celebrated as a pioneering work for LGBTQ+ themes because they articulate passionate affection for a man. However, Forest notes that terms like "homosexuality" are anachronistic for the Renaissance. He interprets the sonnets more as a space where gender roles are blurred—for example, the young man is addressed as the "Master-Mistress" of desire. Forest doubts, however, that physical intimacy actually occurred between the actor Shakespeare and a lord, as the social class barriers of the time likely outweighed any moral concerns.
Forest views the sonnets as a hall of mirrors made of verse: one looks into them and believes one can see the author's face in the depths, only to find that one is merely looking at another artfully constructed mask that tells us something about the universal nature of human desire, but almost nothing about the private facts of the man from Stratford.
The resolution in nothingness: conclusion and epilogue
S'il ya malgré tout un dernier mot à l'œuvre de Shakespeare, sans doute faut-il le trouver dans les paroles d'adieu que Prospero prononce et qui expriment l'inquiétude de son âme. Mais, bien sur, il ne s'agit pas vraiment d'un dernier mot duquel on puisse tirer quelque édifiante valeur que ce soit puisqu'il ne possède aucune signification positive. The témoigne seulement de l'effarement de l'esprit et du cœur devant ce "rien" qui, lui-même, ne dit de la vie que sa vérité vide et qui en appeale à une parole de pardon, this parole de pardon en laquelle, au fond, consiste toute littérature. […] The poet is comparable to magic. Comme lui, il use de ses enchantements afin de régler certainement an antique querelle with the world. The tire depuis les coulisses les ficelles au bout desquelles s'agitent à sa guise des marionnettes, il met en scène selon sa phantasie le spectacle qu'il donne, il mène l'histoire jusqu'au dénouement qu'il a voulu pour elle.
If there is indeed a final word to be said about Shakespeare's work, it is undoubtedly found in Prospero's parting words, which express the unrest of his soul. But of course, these are not truly a final word from which any edifying value can be derived, since they have no positive meaning whatsoever. They merely testify to the dismay of mind and heart in the face of this "nothingness," which itself only expresses the empty truth of life and calls for a word of forgiveness, that word of forgiveness in which all literature ultimately consists. [...] The poet is comparable to a magician. Like him, he uses his magical powers to settle an old dispute with the world. Behind the scenes, he pulls the strings by which the puppets move at his will, stages the drama according to his imagination, and leads the story to the end he desires.
The ending of Forest's book can be read as a return to silence, as a movement towards "Rien," towards nothingness. Forest links the end of Shakespeare's artistic career with the end of his own writing and with the finiteness of human existence itself.
Shakespeare appears here in the guise of Prospero from The stormThe breaking of the magic wand symbolizes the renunciation of literary power, the acknowledgment of one's own art of illusion. Literature recognizes its own fragility: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our short life is wrapped in a long sleep."
Nothingness thus becomes the ultimate truth of the theater as well as the world. Forest describes existence as a procession that leaves no trace. What remains is silence—yet this silence is filled with grace. Literature ultimately appears as a "speaking in the dark," a lullaby that accompanies us to sleep or to death.
The concluding Borges quote, in which God reveals to Shakespeare that he too is no one and that the world has only been a dream, seals this dissolution. Author, God, and reader merge in a shared experience of nothingness.
Forest's interpretation of Shakespeare can thus be seen as a plea for a literature of gentleness, of kindnessRead. For Forest, acknowledging one's own insignificance is not despair, but a form of liberation. Literature dispenses with ultimate answers and releases the reader into a productive solitude.
Philippe Forest clarifies that he has never written directly for the theater. He describes his connection to drama instead as a "platonic passion" and metaphorically conceives of each of his books as a kind of "stage made of paper" on which a narrative voice guides the reader through the darkness. While he does weave theatrical motifs into his work, as in his novel, these are not the primary focus. Pi Ying Xi: Theater d'ombresHowever, he sees himself exclusively as an author of novels and essays.
In this work, Forest reveals himself as an artist who understands literature not as an archive of established facts, but as a space of existential reflection, in which the self disappears behind the work of the other and yet simultaneously becomes tangible within it. By adopting Shakespeare's lack of identity as a model for his own work, he shows himself as an author who seeks truth in fiction and in "creative counterpoint," openly "mimicking" and "plagiarizing" Shakespeare's words to emphasize the continuity of the literary dream across centuries. Forest defines his role less as that of an omniscient biographer and more as that of a melancholic "tourist" in the world of signs, whose art ultimately culminates in a gesture of gentleness and a humble retreat into silence.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
