Jorge Luis Borges
First published in El hacedor, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960
In an anthology of the same name. Translated by Eliot Weinberger, John M. Fein, and, James E. Irby.
New York: New Directions, 1999
In Everything and Nothing, opposites entail each other. The struggle and the union of extremes is a prevalent theme in Borges’ work and in this short story he teases out the metaphysics of what it means to be Shakespeare by equating the playwright with God. Or does God equate himself with the spirit of Shakespeare? At once the essential necessity and nihilism of creativity are invoked, alongside an examination of what it is to be human/actor/writer through the complicated construction of the self, recalling As You Like It’s ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’. Ultimately, Borges brilliantly manages to bend the end of the dichotomy of everything and nothing together; making Shakespeare nobody and everybody. —VL