It's been said many times before that drama is the most objective art form, but the more reading that I do, the more I wonder: how many artists actually use it that way? Not very many, that's for sure. One of Shakespeare's greatest strengths, perhaps the characteristic that puts him in a class of one, was the fact that his writing is entirely free of any attempt at moralizing, or of the sense that he is trying to hold his life (or his thoughts) up as an example. Put another way, his agenda was not to have one. Commentators that write on Shakespeare only show the limitations of their own minds when they write of his "opinions" or "motivations". It can't be done. His work transcends human wishes. It shows life as it is, "the mirror up to nature", and allows participants to engage themselves with all its limitlessness, or as Philip Larkin put it, "the million-petaled flower of being here". Over the next few days, I'm going to post about some of the things that other famous writers have had to say about Shakespeare. Tomorrow, it's Tolstoy.