Steiner reported that Hamlet and Macbeth, carried across the threshold by exact clairvoyance, keep acting in the spiritual world while naturalistic characters freeze into wooden dolls.
Shakespeare's Characters in the Spiritual World in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reported finding, delivered in the lecture Shakespeare and the New Ideals at Stratford-on-Avon on 23 April 1922 and published in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy (GA 304), that a person trained in exact clairvoyance can carry the inner experience of Hamlet or Macbeth across the threshold of the body, where Shakespeare's figures remain alive and continue to act. The figures of modern naturalistic poets, taken over the same way, behave like wooden dolls and undergo a kind of freezing. The bearer of the observation is the whole soul, the schooled powers of thinking, feeling, and willing working consciously outside the physical body. Steiner read the contrast as evidence that Shakespeare created from the dreamlike-conscious current of the ancient Mysteries rather than from intellect. Actors and critics who treat Hamlet as a living person are, on this view, responding to that surviving life.
Shakespeare's Characters in the Spiritual World names one of the most striking claims Steiner ever made about literature: dramatic figures carry different amounts of life, and the difference shows itself once a schooled observer steps outside the physical body. At the 1922 Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-on-Avon he told his audience that Hamlet keeps acting beyond the threshold, while the figures of naturalistic poets stiffen and chill.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we compare what we take over from Shakespeare with what we have in the spiritual world from these poets, we discover the remarkable fact that Shakespeare’s characters live! When we take them over into the spiritual world, they act. They act differently, but they bring their life here into the spiritual world. Whereas, if we take over the characters created by a modern naturalistic poet into the spiritual world, they really behave more like dolls than human beings! They have no life in them at all, no movement! Shakespeare’s men and women keep their life and character. But the characters of many other poets, derived from naturalism, are just like wooden dolls in the spiritual world! They go through a kind of freezing process!
What it Means Today
Seventy-six years after Steiner spoke at Stratford, the Yale critic Harold Bloom published Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead Books, 1998), a book-length case that Shakespeare's characters are the fullest representations of personality in all literature. Bloom held no esoteric commitments, yet his central observations rhyme with Steiner's clairvoyant report to an uncanny degree. Hamlet and Falstaff, Bloom argued, overhear themselves speak and change on the strength of what they hear; they appear to grow between the acts, and generations of readers experience them as more alive than most living acquaintances. Later literature, in Bloom's judgment, inherits personality from Shakespeare rather than matching him, and the stage figures of lesser traditions stay bounded by their scripts. Steiner, from the far side of the threshold, reported the same asymmetry as a fact of spiritual observation: some figures keep acting, others freeze.
Thalira synthesis: Bloom's reading chair and Steiner's exact clairvoyance are two instruments registering one objective property, the quantity of life a creator breathes into a figure, which survives its text and can be tested either by four centuries of audiences or by a consciousness trained to carry Hamlet across the threshold. The practical invitation is Steiner's own: inhabit a character with the whole of thinking, feeling, and willing, not with critical intellect, and notice which figures continue to move when the book is closed.
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