Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was born in Austria into a family of considerable wealth, most of which was subsequently lost during the rise of the Nazis and the Anschluss. He spent large parts of his working life in Britain, much of it as a Professor at Cambridge University, and he took British citizenship. In his early life, he was influenced by Communism, although he rejected Marxist thought. Later, as he developed his philosophical ideas, which were mainly involved in the philosophy of reason, logic and of the mind, he moved into increasingly regressive, conservative ideas. For example, since he rejected the concept of scientific progress without accompanying moral progress, he supported stasis rather than dynamism in society.

In his philosophical notebooks kept from about 1945-50, Wittgenstein referred on a number of occasions to Shakespeare and his works, generally in a negative way. In common with many of his writings, it is possible to interpret Wittgenstein’s comments on Shakespeare in a variety of different, contradictory ways. For example, when he wrote that he found it ‘difficult’ to read Shakespeare, this has been attributed by some simply to his inability to relate easily to Elizabethan English (thereby discounting the philosopher’s undeniable intellect) while others have sought to consider what difficulty there might be – logical, moral or physical? It certainly appears to be true that Wittgenstein did not approve of what he saw as non-realistic and ‘asymmetric’ elements in Shakespeare’s plot and characters. He had, after all, spent considerable effort in identifying the nature and relationships between objective phenomena, the language used to describe those phenomena and the means of thinking about both. As a result, Shakespeare’s profligate invention of vocabulary (he invented more new words than any other person in history) was clearly incompatible with Wittgenstein’s approach and method. He saw the dramatist as an inventor and user of language rather than a true poet, since he considered that a poet must necessarily be possessed of some form of transcendent knowledge above and beyond the mundane. He did not see this attribute in Shakespeare and, therefore, dismissed the claims made of his genius.

While Wittgenstein might have been expected to challenge Shakespeare’s work on moral grounds, he does not really seem to have done so in his extant written works. Perhaps this is because he had already rejected the works as insufficiently virtuous for him to study. In any case, he was concerned, as others had been before him, that people paid such lavish tributes to Shakespeare simply because everybody else did and not because of any properly considered understanding of the works themselves.