Shakespeare drew parallels out of his own experience as a creative. His works rely on it. Fleshing out in full view on the stage the life behind his artistic process, the characters in his plays are parables of what he went through to bring them there.

The characters of loyal son and daughter of fidelity figure nakedly and crucially in the important plays, Lear and Hamlet, you name it. The Cordelias and the like portray the artist's struggle with remaining true, loyal and active to the calling. They are fleshy and real to us. As one might predict, such characters are called into doubt, either by themselves or by others. These tensions lead the actions of drama. Othello gets messed with; the drama leads down a certain road. Thousands of battles, for self-respect, for justification, for to be heard, for to use good judgement, for to be convinced, for to have courage... So was Cervantes, the Bard's contemporary, involved in portraying similar matter in the original novel in a thousand shades, blows physical and psychic, both painfully real and painfully imagined.

Along the same lines, the clowns at the edge of the dramatic action, bringing us both ridiculousness and insight. Take the gravediggers, the service sector employee of the day. Now you're a gravedigger because you can't get any other job. You aren't qualified for better, and you have to keep at it to avoid homelessness, even as you sink toward it. One could guess that Mr. Shakespeare knew what it was like to live precariously, to room in shabby inns and squalid taverns, to endure a lack of certainty and security, encountering the bizarre. Rending all the while the human condition.

"... and the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even Christen. Come, my spade! There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers. They hold up Adam's profession." Hamlet V: i, lines 26-32.

As the Bard tried to do himself. And here, perhaps-perhaps, the gravedigger's humor brings us close to the essential vitality of Shakespeare, something not lost on the low people in the theater's pit. As the stretch of a yoga pose leads the practitioner toward expanded ability to meditate, so do the events of life and all its ups and downs enable a higher perspective. Rather than eat from a tree of knowledge and claim we could know everything there is to know about the world and existence (which is how people end up wedded to the ill-suited) we gain through persevering through events, reaching calm and peace and wisdom.

So did his buddies remember him when they printed up his folio, a man of excellent good humor.