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An essence of poetic art, we are told, is ambiguity (3). There will, for example, never be a definitive theatrical interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. To produce such a play, each director chooses among innumerable possibilities and creates a vision of what the protagonist signifies to him. Each version is but one aspect of a character that can never be wholly defined much less comprehended. As he searches for the play's meaning—'As Shakespeare must truly have intended it to be'—each interpreter believes he will find the clues Shakespeare surely must have given for an astute interpreter to discover. The last notable interpretation will be the definitive production—until the next. In the process, Shakespeare, who is as indefinable as life itself, will have suffered an artificial limitation; and so it proves that the poet's art transcends any interpretation be it on a stage or in an essay like this. The story of the play is the play itself.
To modern critical estimation, ambiguity in art is directly proportional to its enduring value (keeping in mind that what is idiosyncracy in one generation may be universality in the next). Coriolanus may well be judged a lesser work than many others of the plays because the central character is less imbued with multiplicity and equivocation of motivation than, for example, Hamlet. Men like Coriolanus are deficient in the richness of their personalities. Stereotyped inhibitions, reaction-formations, and the smell of death give their humanity a two-dimensional quality. This is not a defect of the playwright's art but a defect of nature in the hero. While less enigmatic, this