Incarnate Words

“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

~ Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.I.14-17

Shakespeare’s plays are overflowing with clever language and questions about language. The plays are significantly self-referential as they not only present profound ideas about human experience, but also critique the very mode of the that presentation – that of language and performance. From Cordelia’s “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,” to Claudius’ “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” it is evident that word and reality are not always the same thing. While we can “represent the sentiment of our mind by speech,” as Melanchthon puts it, we can also misrepresent our thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Words can either reveal reality or conceal it. It requires discernment to recognize when words are distorting reality, and when they are displaying it as it truly is. This question crops up at the core of Shakespearean drama.

Words are a mysteriously meaningful and distinctly human way of expressing realities both concrete and abstract. Great poets are those with the greatest grasp on reality and the keenest use of words, and as Theseus’ words quoted above communicate, the poet incarnates abstract ideas by putting them into words that we can tangibly comprehend. Dorothy Sayers also expresses this in her Mind of the Maker, in which she discusses the creativity of the writer, who puts an idea into words. Sayers makes an analogy to the Trinity, saying that the Idea (likened to the Father) of the author is revealed through the Word, which is incarnated in the writer’s work (The Holy Spirit is represented by the compelling power of the writing.). The incarnate word “brings about an expression in temporal form of the eternal and immutable Idea,” she says.

Language is a vessel of man’s understanding of intangible, immaterial things. As such, it stands between man’s god-like quality of the intellect and his animal-like quality of a material body, which includes the tongue that speaks and the ears that hear. No wonder Hamlet, a melancholy scholar who is obsessed with words and slow to act, understands man to be “in apprehension…like a god,” while at the same time being a “quintessence of dust.” As words can aid us in the apprehension of the immaterial, we must use them with caution and accuracy, striving to represent our ideas truthfully. We had best heed the words of Hamlet, that “We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.”