kenneth burke: "shakespeare found many ingenious ways to make it seem that his greatest plays unfolded of themselves, like a destiny rather than by a technical expert’s scheming. . . . he spontaneously knew how to translate some typical tension or conflict of his society into terms of variously interrelated personalities—and his function as a dramatist was to let that whole complexity act itself out, by endowing each personality with the appropriate ideas, images, attitudes, actions, situations, relationships, and fatality. the true essence of his “beliefs” was thus embodied in the vision of that complexity itself. . . . perhaps in this sense shakespeare never wrote the ideal shakespearean play; but again and again he came close to it. . . . he was the sort of craftsman who, if we believed such-and-such, could make a great play out of such beliefs, and could as easily have made a great play out of the opposite beliefs, if those others were what moved us. for what he believed in above all was the glory of his trade itself, which is to say, the great humaneness of the word . . . so masterfully embodied in shakespeare’s blithe dramaturgic schemings." "kenneth burke on shakespeare"