ABSTRACT
Shakespeare depicts crowd and rumour in richer detail than any playwright before him. He dramatizes the collective nature of human beings in an innovative and highly convincing way. Whoever claims that Shakespeare's works testify to a deep understanding of human nature should not only turn to the great monologues, as is routinely done, but also to the scenes I have analyzed. It is not only in Shakespeare studies that the tradition of equating ‘humanity’ with ‘individuality’ has overshadowed Aristotle's finding that before anything else man is a zoon politikon: that he cannot think ‘I’ without thinking ‘the others’; that he defines himself via others and that he is defined by them; that he finds himself surrounded by fellow humans before he can assert his own subjectivity; that isolation from others will kill him and that the observation of social rules is not a matter of choice; and that, perhaps most significantly, the others are not specific others but what Heidegger has called Man: a generic term for types of behaviour and stances commonly accepted to be the norm and attributed to anonymous others. To that extent, crowd and rumour illustrate the way in which man's collective nature is hardly a conscious fact but asserts itself in implicit assumptions about what man should do, think and say. Man strives implicitly for compliance with the ever-circulating rumour about how one must behave while attributing this rumour to the crowd constituted by ‘the others’. 1 Taking this into account by employing crowd and rumour is Shakespeare's first enormous step, and to recognize this should help readers today step out of the myth that Shakespeare was solely occupied with individuality when exploring humanity.
