The French philosopher and literary theorist Jacques Derrida (b.1930) has emerged as one of the more important and interesting contemporary critics of Shakespeare, although his contribution is not always recognised. This is perhaps because it has only started to become apparent later in his life, after his seminal works were published (notably in 1967) when he defined the new field of deconstructionism.

Born in the former French colony of Algeria as a Jew, Derrida was forced to confront the exclusionary nature of society early and often in his life. Although he has subsequently entered the mainstream of French philosophical and academic life, it is nevertheless possible to discern within his work the notion of self as outsider or the distance between the object itself and the naming of that object. This has been at the heart of his intellectual development, more especially after he rejected his previous admiration for and engagement with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and instead devoted his attention to the work of Edmund Husserl and the attempt to define the basis of reality, which is the substance of the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics. In his treatments of Husserl, particularly in his The Origin of Geometry (published in 1962), he began to outline his ideas concerning the connections between thought, voice and language. To simplify his extensive writings into a sentence, Derrida considers thought to be authentic (or as authentic as can be), voice (or emotional outburst, perhaps) to be close to thought but language one step removed. There is, in other words, an inevitable gap between what we think and how we express that thought and it becomes the role of the literary critic, therefore, to identify the nature of that gap and, if possible, to render in language the original thought. This is accomplished through the process of deconstructionism.

When it comes to Shakespeare, therefore, Derrida’s often expressed admiration is modulated by his understanding of the thought-voice-language gaps in the writings of the bard and, importantly, in the ways that the dramatic works are staged. When he proclaims, therefore, ‘I know everything is in Shakespeare; everything and the rest,” he indicates that not only is human experience and the nature of society and history explored in great depth by the language of Shakespeare’s plays but, also, the impossible-to-express-fully thoughts of humanity are also contained by means of the emotional outbursts in a way that is similar to the action of what T.S. Eliot called the ‘objective correlative.’ Philosophers and literary theorists, among others, are still working on many of the implications and much of the substance of this line of thought.