Shakespeare, Whitehead,
and Quantum Mechanics
ontologies of the possible
Verbal Auxiliaries as Icons of Possibility
In "Shakespeare and the Language of Possibility," Shakespeare scholar Lynn Magnusson of the University of Toronto shows how Shakespeare's use of modal auxiliaries--may, can, will, would, ought, must, shall, should—illuminate a worlds of potentiality. To be sure, he plots and overt actions of characters reveal worlds of possibilities; but so do the words the characters us, even the small words, the words that 'help' a verb by adding a sense of the future, the modal auxiliaries. Process philosophy adds that the modal auxiliaries are small linguistic signs of a vast ontological fact: the universe is not a finished block of actuality but an ongoing process of becoming, a negotiation of actuality with possibility.
From a process perspective this negotiation is certainly apparent in human life; every moment of experience is an act of actualizing possibilities for responding to what is given to experience, through decisions, made consciously or more usually unconsciously, that cut off certain possibilities and actualize others. The decisions are what give life it concreteness and poignancy.
But decision-making, understood as actualizing possibilities, is also present animal life, cellular life, divine life, and subatomic life. Even the Great Becoming—even God—moves within the realm of the possible, and so too do the quantum events unfolding in the depths of atoms,
Thus Shakespeare's small words - the verbal auxiliaries - are invitations to view the cosmos as a whole in terms of potentiality as well as actuality: what may be as well as what is. The world of verbal auxiliaries can be actualized tragically, comically, and tragi-comically, as Shakespeare's plays make clear. But always this world is present as universal feature of the universe. There is no actuality without possibility.
“Shakespeare and the Language of Possibility”
Lynne Magnusson
Professor Lynne Magnusson of the University of Toronto delivered the 2015 Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture on April 16, opening the Folger Institute symposium, "Shakespeare’s Language." Her lecture explores how Shakespeare’s language challenged, edited, and reframed early modern conceptions of speech.
This is a lecture about how a set of small words—may, can, will, would, ought, must, shall, should—is used creatively in Shakespeare’s plays to ground situations in potentiality. Focusing especially on “shall” and “may” in JULIUS CAESAR, Magnusson explores how Shakespeare grounds his plots in imagined and contested futures. Brutus reflects that Julius Caesar “would be crowned. / How that might change his nature.” Deliberating his course of action, Brutus is driven by what “Caesar may. / Then lest he may, prevent.” Magnusson explains how these common auxiliary verbs play key roles in dramatic dialogue and in the complex mental deliberation of individual characters.
See also "Milton, Shakespeare, and the English Grammar of Possibility" by Lynn Magnussen in in Milton Studies (Volume 65, Issue 1). Click here.
Shakespeare, Whitehead,
and Quantum Mechanics
Modal verbs structure how we think about potentiality. They mark the difference between fact and possibility. Examples include:
In each case, the modal verb does not describe an event itself; it situates the event within a field of what might be, must be, or could be—the grammar of becoming rather than mere being.
May and Must
Here a word about “must,” understood as a necessary potentiality. At first glance, “may” and “must” can seem incompatible: one signals openness, the other constraint. But for Magnussen, “must” names an internal act of deliberation. It is not the negation of possibility but a specification within it. In a manner not unlike an intellectual or propositional feeling in Whitehead’s philosophy, a person senses multiple potentialities for responding to a given situation. Among them, one emerges as compelling—either on moral grounds or by virtue of the weight of the past, whose accumulated force renders a particular response experientially “inevitable.” Moreover, there can also be a kind of "necessity" in that, if one decision is made in a given circumstance, alternative decisions are necessarily eliminated or 'cut off.' The reality of multiple potentialities collapses—analogous to the collapse of a wave function in quantum mechanics—when one potentiality is actualized. What had been a manifold of “may-bes” resolves into a single “is,” not because the others were unreal, but because actuality requires determinacy.
Indeed, here there is a kind of objective necessity at hand. Different decisions may be possible in abstraction, but they are not compossible within a single concrete occasion. The structure of reality itself requires coherence. Once one possibility is actualized, others that might have been conceivable are no longer compatible with the achieved fact. The collapse, then, is not merely psychological; it reflects the metaphysical demand that an actual world be internally consistent.
Shakespeare
As Magnusson makes clear, Shakespeare’s plays reveal the modal side of human life through his use of modal auxiliaries. The small words--may, might, can, could, will, would, shall, must, should—become instruments through which interior life is staged. They make audible the field of potentiality within which characters deliberate, hesitate, resolve, and regret.
Consider Hamlet. His “To be, or not to be” is not merely existential speculation; it is immersion in modal space. He weighs what he may endure, what he might escape, what he must suffer, what he could end. His tragedy lies in being suspended within possibility, unable to let “may” crystallize into decisive “will.”
Macbeth offers another profile. His early “If it were done when ’tis done…” and Lady Macbeth’s piercing analysis of what he “would” have expose the tension between desire and necessity. “Would” becomes the grammar of ambition; “must” becomes the grammar of murder. The compression of possibility into inevitability—where imagined futures harden into fatal resolve—creates the tragic arc.
Brutus in Julius Caesar deliberates over what “may” follow Caesar’s crowning. His reasoning rests not on actuality but on projected potentiality: “So Caesar may.” From that “may” emerges assassination. The catastrophe is born not from what is, but from what might be.
By contrast, Desdemona’s “What I can do I will” shows modal language in a more generous key. Her “can” acknowledges limitation; her “will” expresses self-determination. Her action unfolds within a conscious negotiation of possibility and constraint. The line appears in Othello, Act I, Scene 3, before the Venetian Senate. Asked to declare her loyalty between father and husband, Desdemona affirms her duty to Othello and asks to accompany him to Cyprus. In that public moment, her modal language holds together recognition of limits and deliberate choice.
Across comedies and tragedies alike, Shakespeare’s characters live in awareness of potentialities as well as actualities: uncertainty about outcomes, availability of options, moral obligations, imagined alternatives, projected assurances, momentary decisions which, if actualized, necessarily eliminate other options. Their speech mirrors our own lived experience. A phenomenological analysis of everyday life reveals the same structure: we do not move through a world of fixed facts alone, but through a shifting horizon of what might be, what can be, what must be, and what will be. Shakespeare’s genius is to dramatize that modal field so vividly that we recognize ourselves within it.
Whitehead
All of this makes very good sense to those of us influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead. A notable feature of Whitehead’s process philosophy is that potentiality is not unreal. It is as real, in its own way, as is actuality in its way. The difference between the two is that only actualities make decisions. Actualities actualize potentialities, not the other way around. We live and move within a field of possibilities—in what linguists call a world of modality. In developing his categories of existence.
Shakespeare’s stage makes this field audible, not only through plot and action but through language itself, especially his use of modal auxiliary verbs: may, can, will, would, ought, must, shall, and should. When a character declares, “It must be so,” we hear a mind resolving tension and closing off alternatives, compressing possibility into decision. The tragic force often lies in that compression—where “may” hardens into “must,” and openness is experienced as inevitability. And yet, as noted above, even necessity discloses possibility. To say something must occur is to acknowledge a field of alternatives and to mark one as compelled. “Must” has meaning only where more than one path is conceivable; it signals constraint within becoming, not the elimination of becoming itself.
Here is the bottom line. Through the lived speech of his characters, Shakespeare reveals that modal language is not decorative grammar. “What might be,” “what must be,” “what can be,” and “what will be” articulate a world in process, where actuality emerges from a structured horizon of real possibilities.
God
In Whitehead's philosophy, this emphasis on modality also has theological implications. God is the inclusive life of the universe—the cosmic Consciousness in whom the universe lives and moves and has its being: a fellow sufferer who understands and a cosmic poet who lures the universe toward diverse forms of life and existence, relative to what is possible in the situations at hand. As thus understood, God is modal in several senses:
Thus the modal texture of Shakespeare’s language mirrors a deeper metaphysical claim: reality itself—including divine reality—is structured by possibility. The grammar of may and must is, at bottom, the grammar of becoming.
Panexperientialism
The reality of potentiality is both human and divine. It is also, Whitehead would add, subatomic, cellular, biological, and galactic. In a process-relational view, potentiality is not confined to human deliberation or divine imagination. It belongs to the very texture of the cosmos. At the subatomic level, events unfold within probabilistic ranges; at the cellular and biological level, organisms respond creatively within inherited constraints; at the ecological and galactic level, systems evolve through contingent interactions rather than mechanical inevitability. Reality at every scale includes unrealized alternatives.
Thus human modal language--may, can, must, will—thus echoes a deeper structure. When we deliberate, hesitate, resolve, or project, we are not inventing potentiality; we are participating in it. Our grammar of possibility reflects a metaphysics of becoming that runs from quarks to consciousness.
Modal verbs are small linguistic signs of a vast ontological claim: the universe is not a finished block of actuality but an ongoing negotiation of what can be.
Quantum Mechanics (Whiteheadianly interpreted)
In Whiteheadian philosophy, one physicist who has worked extensively to show the relevance of potentiality to quantum mechanics is Henry Pierce Stapp. In his essay Quantum Mechanics, Local Causality, and Process Philosophy, he draws upon Whitehead’s philosophy to propose a theory of reality in which events, not substances, are fundamental.
On this account, the basic elements of reality are actual occasions—events that bring into existence definite relationships from among a realm of genuine possibilities or potentialities inhering in prior events. Quantum phenomena thus reflect not a predetermined mechanical order but a world in which actuality emerges through the selective realization of potentiality.
The point here is not that subatomic quantum events are necessarily conscious. In Whitehead’s philosophy, consciousness is a highly specialized and comparatively rare form of experience, involving clear and distinct perception.
The point, rather, is that such events respond to what has been in light of what can be from a particular space-time standpoint. In responding, they are inwardly conditioned by a field of possibility. Each event arises within inherited constraints, yet also within a structured range of potentialities relevant to its situation. Its “decision” is not conscious deliberation but the selective realization of one possibility rather than others.
Thus even at the quantum level, actuality emerges from responsiveness to potentiality. The modal structure—what may be, what can be, what must be under given conditions—is not confined to human reflection; it is woven into the very fabric of becoming. In this sense, even the most elementary events carry within themselves a primitive “mayness” and “mustness,” a responsiveness to alternatives under constraint—not unlike the modal tensions dramatized in Shakespearean characters, though without reflective awareness.
An Ontology of May
What does it come to? My suggestion is that Shakespeare in his way, Alfred North Whitehead in his way, and quantum mechanics in its way point toward a universe in which potentiality is as real as actuality—real differently, but no less genuinely so.
They converge on a vision in which:
In Shakespeare, this vision is heard in the language of may and must, will and would. In Whitehead, it is articulated metaphysically as the interplay of eternal objects and actual occasions. In quantum mechanics, it appears as the transition from superposed possibilities to definite outcomes.
All three, in different registers—dramatic, philosophical, and scientific—suggest that reality is not a finished block of being but an ongoing negotiation of becoming. The universe is not exhausted by what is actual; it includes what can be, what might be, and what must emerge under given conditions. Potentiality is not a shadow of actuality. It is its ground and horizon. Here we have an ontology of may.
Such an ontology does not displace an ontology of actuality. As events occur, as people make decisions, potentialities are actualized and may becomes is and then was. potentiality becomes actual, present and then past.
Ideal Potentialities
Amid the vicissitudes of life, where human beings continually inhabit the grammar of modal auxiliaries--may, can, will, would, ought, must, shall, should—a deeper question emerges: Are there ultimate auxiliaries? Are there deep shoulds and cans and mays that exceed merely human preference or social convention—calls toward flourishing that are more than subjective projection?
Shakespeare does not finally answer that question. He holds up a mirror and says, in effect, “This is who we are.” His plays render the modal texture of human life with astonishing clarity: our hesitations, compulsions, ambitions, regrets, and hopes. He dramatizes the field of possibility within which we live. But he does not explicitly ground that field in a metaphysical or theological source.
Whitehead does. As Andrew M. Davis emphasizes in Mind, Value, and Cosmos, Whitehead speaks not only of potentialities in general, but of ideals—graded possibilities that function normatively. These are not arbitrary options among others. They are structured lures toward richer forms of experience.
For Whitehead, so Davis suggests, potentialities include pure potentialities and relevant potentialities, but but also ideals such as Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—possibilities that invite actualization in ways that intensify harmony and depth. In this sense, reality includes not only “what may be” but “what ought to be.” The divine life, in its primordial aspect, envisages these ideals; in its consequent aspect, feels their partial realization or tragic distortion; and in its immanent lure, presents them as beckoning possibilities within each moment of becoming.
Thus the question of ultimate auxiliaries becomes theological. Are there norms woven into the fabric of reality itself? Whitehead answers yes. The modal field is textured by ideals that invite flourishing. If Shakespeare shows us the drama of human modality, Whitehead suggests that beneath our may and must there lies a deeper, cosmic hope—sometimes approximated, sometimes blocked—a lure toward truthfulness, goodness, and beauty that calls creation forward.
Shakespeare’s wisdom is that he does not moralize or construct an overarching metaphysical scheme to guarantee these norms. He does not offer an ontology in any formal sense; his ontology is implicit and dramatic and linguistic, not theorized.
He is sublunary in spirit, holding up a mirror to nature rather than offering a translunary cosmology by which nature and human life are interpreted in a comprehensive but open-ended way. We need both: the mirrors and the metaphysics, the sublunary and the translunary. Sublunary spirits (under the moon) show us what life is like, tragic and comic and otherwise; and translunary spirits (above the moon) offer integrative visions. Shakespeare is sublunary; Whitehead is translunary. Both are sensitive to the world of the possible.
- may – It may rain tomorrow. (A real but uncertain potentiality.)
- might – She might change her mind. (A more remote or tentative potentiality.)
- can – He can swim. (An ability; a grounded potentiality.)
- could – We could leave now. (An available but unrealized potentiality.)
- must – You must go. (A necessary potentiality; constraint shaping what will occur.)
- should – You should apologize. (A morally inflected potentiality.)
- ought to – We ought to help. (An ethical potentiality.)
- will – I will finish this. (A self-determined potentiality moving toward actuality.)
- would – I would go if I could. (A conditional or imagined potentiality.)
- shall – We shall overcome. (A projected or assured potentiality.)
In each case, the modal verb does not describe an event itself; it situates the event within a field of what might be, must be, or could be—the grammar of becoming rather than mere being.
May and Must
Here a word about “must,” understood as a necessary potentiality. At first glance, “may” and “must” can seem incompatible: one signals openness, the other constraint. But for Magnussen, “must” names an internal act of deliberation. It is not the negation of possibility but a specification within it. In a manner not unlike an intellectual or propositional feeling in Whitehead’s philosophy, a person senses multiple potentialities for responding to a given situation. Among them, one emerges as compelling—either on moral grounds or by virtue of the weight of the past, whose accumulated force renders a particular response experientially “inevitable.” Moreover, there can also be a kind of "necessity" in that, if one decision is made in a given circumstance, alternative decisions are necessarily eliminated or 'cut off.' The reality of multiple potentialities collapses—analogous to the collapse of a wave function in quantum mechanics—when one potentiality is actualized. What had been a manifold of “may-bes” resolves into a single “is,” not because the others were unreal, but because actuality requires determinacy.
Indeed, here there is a kind of objective necessity at hand. Different decisions may be possible in abstraction, but they are not compossible within a single concrete occasion. The structure of reality itself requires coherence. Once one possibility is actualized, others that might have been conceivable are no longer compatible with the achieved fact. The collapse, then, is not merely psychological; it reflects the metaphysical demand that an actual world be internally consistent.
Shakespeare
As Magnusson makes clear, Shakespeare’s plays reveal the modal side of human life through his use of modal auxiliaries. The small words--may, might, can, could, will, would, shall, must, should—become instruments through which interior life is staged. They make audible the field of potentiality within which characters deliberate, hesitate, resolve, and regret.
Consider Hamlet. His “To be, or not to be” is not merely existential speculation; it is immersion in modal space. He weighs what he may endure, what he might escape, what he must suffer, what he could end. His tragedy lies in being suspended within possibility, unable to let “may” crystallize into decisive “will.”
Macbeth offers another profile. His early “If it were done when ’tis done…” and Lady Macbeth’s piercing analysis of what he “would” have expose the tension between desire and necessity. “Would” becomes the grammar of ambition; “must” becomes the grammar of murder. The compression of possibility into inevitability—where imagined futures harden into fatal resolve—creates the tragic arc.
Brutus in Julius Caesar deliberates over what “may” follow Caesar’s crowning. His reasoning rests not on actuality but on projected potentiality: “So Caesar may.” From that “may” emerges assassination. The catastrophe is born not from what is, but from what might be.
By contrast, Desdemona’s “What I can do I will” shows modal language in a more generous key. Her “can” acknowledges limitation; her “will” expresses self-determination. Her action unfolds within a conscious negotiation of possibility and constraint. The line appears in Othello, Act I, Scene 3, before the Venetian Senate. Asked to declare her loyalty between father and husband, Desdemona affirms her duty to Othello and asks to accompany him to Cyprus. In that public moment, her modal language holds together recognition of limits and deliberate choice.
Across comedies and tragedies alike, Shakespeare’s characters live in awareness of potentialities as well as actualities: uncertainty about outcomes, availability of options, moral obligations, imagined alternatives, projected assurances, momentary decisions which, if actualized, necessarily eliminate other options. Their speech mirrors our own lived experience. A phenomenological analysis of everyday life reveals the same structure: we do not move through a world of fixed facts alone, but through a shifting horizon of what might be, what can be, what must be, and what will be. Shakespeare’s genius is to dramatize that modal field so vividly that we recognize ourselves within it.
Whitehead
All of this makes very good sense to those of us influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead. A notable feature of Whitehead’s process philosophy is that potentiality is not unreal. It is as real, in its own way, as is actuality in its way. The difference between the two is that only actualities make decisions. Actualities actualize potentialities, not the other way around. We live and move within a field of possibilities—in what linguists call a world of modality. In developing his categories of existence.
Shakespeare’s stage makes this field audible, not only through plot and action but through language itself, especially his use of modal auxiliary verbs: may, can, will, would, ought, must, shall, and should. When a character declares, “It must be so,” we hear a mind resolving tension and closing off alternatives, compressing possibility into decision. The tragic force often lies in that compression—where “may” hardens into “must,” and openness is experienced as inevitability. And yet, as noted above, even necessity discloses possibility. To say something must occur is to acknowledge a field of alternatives and to mark one as compelled. “Must” has meaning only where more than one path is conceivable; it signals constraint within becoming, not the elimination of becoming itself.
Here is the bottom line. Through the lived speech of his characters, Shakespeare reveals that modal language is not decorative grammar. “What might be,” “what must be,” “what can be,” and “what will be” articulate a world in process, where actuality emerges from a structured horizon of real possibilities.
God
In Whitehead's philosophy, this emphasis on modality also has theological implications. God is the inclusive life of the universe—the cosmic Consciousness in whom the universe lives and moves and has its being: a fellow sufferer who understands and a cosmic poet who lures the universe toward diverse forms of life and existence, relative to what is possible in the situations at hand. As thus understood, God is modal in several senses:
- In the primordial nature, God envisages eternal objects—pure potentialities for the determination of matters of fact.
- In the consequent nature, God prehends what has become actual while retaining awareness of unrealized alternatives—what could have been but was not.
- As the indwelling lure, God presents possibilities for realization within each moment of becoming—what can be, though not yet actual.
- With respect to the future, God knows it as genuinely open: a realm of real alternatives, not a fixed outcome.
Thus the modal texture of Shakespeare’s language mirrors a deeper metaphysical claim: reality itself—including divine reality—is structured by possibility. The grammar of may and must is, at bottom, the grammar of becoming.
Panexperientialism
The reality of potentiality is both human and divine. It is also, Whitehead would add, subatomic, cellular, biological, and galactic. In a process-relational view, potentiality is not confined to human deliberation or divine imagination. It belongs to the very texture of the cosmos. At the subatomic level, events unfold within probabilistic ranges; at the cellular and biological level, organisms respond creatively within inherited constraints; at the ecological and galactic level, systems evolve through contingent interactions rather than mechanical inevitability. Reality at every scale includes unrealized alternatives.
Thus human modal language--may, can, must, will—thus echoes a deeper structure. When we deliberate, hesitate, resolve, or project, we are not inventing potentiality; we are participating in it. Our grammar of possibility reflects a metaphysics of becoming that runs from quarks to consciousness.
Modal verbs are small linguistic signs of a vast ontological claim: the universe is not a finished block of actuality but an ongoing negotiation of what can be.
Quantum Mechanics (Whiteheadianly interpreted)
In Whiteheadian philosophy, one physicist who has worked extensively to show the relevance of potentiality to quantum mechanics is Henry Pierce Stapp. In his essay Quantum Mechanics, Local Causality, and Process Philosophy, he draws upon Whitehead’s philosophy to propose a theory of reality in which events, not substances, are fundamental.
On this account, the basic elements of reality are actual occasions—events that bring into existence definite relationships from among a realm of genuine possibilities or potentialities inhering in prior events. Quantum phenomena thus reflect not a predetermined mechanical order but a world in which actuality emerges through the selective realization of potentiality.
The point here is not that subatomic quantum events are necessarily conscious. In Whitehead’s philosophy, consciousness is a highly specialized and comparatively rare form of experience, involving clear and distinct perception.
The point, rather, is that such events respond to what has been in light of what can be from a particular space-time standpoint. In responding, they are inwardly conditioned by a field of possibility. Each event arises within inherited constraints, yet also within a structured range of potentialities relevant to its situation. Its “decision” is not conscious deliberation but the selective realization of one possibility rather than others.
Thus even at the quantum level, actuality emerges from responsiveness to potentiality. The modal structure—what may be, what can be, what must be under given conditions—is not confined to human reflection; it is woven into the very fabric of becoming. In this sense, even the most elementary events carry within themselves a primitive “mayness” and “mustness,” a responsiveness to alternatives under constraint—not unlike the modal tensions dramatized in Shakespearean characters, though without reflective awareness.
An Ontology of May
What does it come to? My suggestion is that Shakespeare in his way, Alfred North Whitehead in his way, and quantum mechanics in its way point toward a universe in which potentiality is as real as actuality—real differently, but no less genuinely so.
They converge on a vision in which:
- The present is never merely a fact but a selection from a field of possibilities.
- The future is not already actual somewhere, waiting to unfold, but is open and structured by alternatives.
- Necessity is not the negation of possibility but its constraint within given conditions.
- Freedom is not absolute independence but creative response within limits.
- Decision—whether human, dramatic, or quantum—is the realization of one potential rather than others.
- Tragedy and hope alike arise from the tension between what is and what might have been.
- Even at the most basic levels of nature, events emerge not from mechanical inevitability alone but from probabilistic ranges and conditioned possibilities.
In Shakespeare, this vision is heard in the language of may and must, will and would. In Whitehead, it is articulated metaphysically as the interplay of eternal objects and actual occasions. In quantum mechanics, it appears as the transition from superposed possibilities to definite outcomes.
All three, in different registers—dramatic, philosophical, and scientific—suggest that reality is not a finished block of being but an ongoing negotiation of becoming. The universe is not exhausted by what is actual; it includes what can be, what might be, and what must emerge under given conditions. Potentiality is not a shadow of actuality. It is its ground and horizon. Here we have an ontology of may.
Such an ontology does not displace an ontology of actuality. As events occur, as people make decisions, potentialities are actualized and may becomes is and then was. potentiality becomes actual, present and then past.
Ideal Potentialities
Amid the vicissitudes of life, where human beings continually inhabit the grammar of modal auxiliaries--may, can, will, would, ought, must, shall, should—a deeper question emerges: Are there ultimate auxiliaries? Are there deep shoulds and cans and mays that exceed merely human preference or social convention—calls toward flourishing that are more than subjective projection?
Shakespeare does not finally answer that question. He holds up a mirror and says, in effect, “This is who we are.” His plays render the modal texture of human life with astonishing clarity: our hesitations, compulsions, ambitions, regrets, and hopes. He dramatizes the field of possibility within which we live. But he does not explicitly ground that field in a metaphysical or theological source.
Whitehead does. As Andrew M. Davis emphasizes in Mind, Value, and Cosmos, Whitehead speaks not only of potentialities in general, but of ideals—graded possibilities that function normatively. These are not arbitrary options among others. They are structured lures toward richer forms of experience.
For Whitehead, so Davis suggests, potentialities include pure potentialities and relevant potentialities, but but also ideals such as Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—possibilities that invite actualization in ways that intensify harmony and depth. In this sense, reality includes not only “what may be” but “what ought to be.” The divine life, in its primordial aspect, envisages these ideals; in its consequent aspect, feels their partial realization or tragic distortion; and in its immanent lure, presents them as beckoning possibilities within each moment of becoming.
Thus the question of ultimate auxiliaries becomes theological. Are there norms woven into the fabric of reality itself? Whitehead answers yes. The modal field is textured by ideals that invite flourishing. If Shakespeare shows us the drama of human modality, Whitehead suggests that beneath our may and must there lies a deeper, cosmic hope—sometimes approximated, sometimes blocked—a lure toward truthfulness, goodness, and beauty that calls creation forward.
Shakespeare’s wisdom is that he does not moralize or construct an overarching metaphysical scheme to guarantee these norms. He does not offer an ontology in any formal sense; his ontology is implicit and dramatic and linguistic, not theorized.
He is sublunary in spirit, holding up a mirror to nature rather than offering a translunary cosmology by which nature and human life are interpreted in a comprehensive but open-ended way. We need both: the mirrors and the metaphysics, the sublunary and the translunary. Sublunary spirits (under the moon) show us what life is like, tragic and comic and otherwise; and translunary spirits (above the moon) offer integrative visions. Shakespeare is sublunary; Whitehead is translunary. Both are sensitive to the world of the possible.