No one was in him; behind his countenance (that even through the bad paintings of the epoch resembled no other) and behind his words, which were copious, fantastic, and agitated, there was not more than a bit of cold, a dream not dreamt by anyone. At first, he believed that everyone was like him, but the subtle alienation of a companion to whom he had started to explain that emptiness revealed to him his error and left him feeling, forever, that an individual should not differ from the species. One time he thought that in books he would find remedy for his illness and so he learned the "little bit of Latin and less Greek" that a contemporary would speak of. Afterwards he considered that in the exercise of an elemental rite of humanity he could well find what he was looking for and he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway during a long June siesta. At twentysomething he went to London. Instinctively, he had already exercised the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that his condition of no one would not be discovered; in London he finds his destined profession, that of the actor, that in a scene, he plays at being another, before a congregation of people that play at taking him for that other. Histrionic tasks taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first that he knew; but once the last verse had been applauded and the last corpse retired from the stage, the hateful taste of unreality fell over him again. He stopped being Ferrex or Tamburlaine and returned to being no one. Vexed, he took to imagining other heros and other tragic fables. Thus, while the body fulfilled its bodily destiny in London bawdyhouses and taverns, the soul that inhabited it was Caesar, who did not heed the augur's warning, and Juliet, who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the paramo with the witches who are also the Fates. No one was so many men like that man, who in likeness to the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the appearances of being. Sometimes, he left a confession in some corner of his work, certain that they would not decipher it; Richard affirms that in his one person, he plays the part of many, and Iago says with curious words "I am not what I am." The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and representing inspired in him famous passages.
20 years he persisted in that directed hallucination, but one morning he was overtaken by the surfeit and horror of being so many kings that die by the sword and so many ill-fated lovers that converge, diverge, and melodically agonize. That same day he resolved the sale of his theatre. Within a week he had returned to his native village, where he regained the trees and rivers of his childhood, and did not secure them to those other ones that his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin voices. He had to be someone; a retired impresario who had made his fortune and was now interested in loans, litigations, and interest payments. In that character he dictated the jejune testament that we know, from which he deliberately excluded all pathetic or literary strokes. His London friends used to visit his retreat, and he reprised for them the role of poet.
History adds that, before or after dying, he felt himself facing God and he told him: "I, who so many men have been in vain, want to be one man, and myself." The voice of God answered him from within a cyclone: "I too am not; I dreamt the world like you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms of my dreams was you, who like me are so many someones and no one."
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