William Shakespeare

Dominant Fi is not feeling on display; it is a private, bottomless compass of value that answers to no external code — and in a dramatist, it shows as the capacity to enter any human being's inner moral world and render it whole. Shakespeare's supreme gift is that he can become his villains. Shylock, the moneylender every other Elizabethan playwright would have left a cardboard grotesque, is given the speech that ends the argument forever: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” Macbeth, a man who butchers his way to a throne, is granted an interior so anguished and so beautiful that audiences grieve with the killer. Edmund the bastard, plotting to destroy his own family, is permitted a wit and a wounded logic that make his villainy comprehensible from the inside. Shakespeare never tells us how to feel about these men. He simply makes us feel what it is to be them.

This is the rarest thing in a writer: moral seriousness without verdict. The judgment is being made, constantly — it simply takes the form of perfect attention rather than sentence. He knows exactly what each figure is, and inhabits them anyway, with a sympathy too deep to need announcing. He cannot reduce anyone to a type or a sin, because his own inner life has taught him that nobody is reducible. The cruelty of Iago and the goodness of Cordelia are rendered with the same total seriousness, the same willingness to feel from within. That refusal to stand above his characters, to flatten them into examples, is Fi at its summit: the conviction, held too deep to preach, that every person is a complete world deserving to be seen from the inside.

You see the same core in the comedies and the late romances, where the impulse is not satire but forgiveness — Prospero relinquishing his revenge, the broken families of the last plays reconciled past all probability. Shakespeare's deepest movement is toward mercy, toward the felt interior life of even those who have done wrong. That is Fi: feeling met not with doctrine but with the refusal to look away.

If Fi supplies the sympathy, auxiliary Ne supplies the proliferation — the inexhaustible invention that could always conjure one more character, one more register, one more possibility. Coleridge called Shakespeare “myriad-minded,” and the word is exact. No two of his creations are pitched alike, because no two of them are alike: the same author who wrote Lear's thunder wrote Falstaff's belly-laughter, Cleopatra's infinite variety, Mercutio's nervous brilliance, the porter's drunken nonsense at the gate of hell. He moves between the high style and the low on a single page, lets a romance answer a tragedy and a dirty joke rub against a meditation on death, and never settles into one voice because settling was against the grain of the gift.

You hear Ne most plainly in the language itself — the relentless punning, the metaphors that breed more metaphors, the way a single image opens into five. Shakespeare cannot say a thing one way when he can say it three; the verse teems and overflows, generating more than any plot strictly needs, because the imagination behind it had no natural stopping point. He coined words by the thousand, bent grammar to find a sense that did not yet exist, and let his characters think out loud in branching, self-revising lines that follow possibility wherever it runs.

And like Chaucer — the other great plural poet of the English tongue, the INFP who held a whole society in his head and judged no part of it — Shakespeare leaves us unable to say what he himself believed, because the genius was precisely the multiplicity. He invents and re-voices rather than confessing; he plays every part and discloses none. The refusal to resolve, to collapse contradictory sympathies into a single thesis, is the Ne–Fi signature: the imagination keeps the possibilities open, and the heart loves them all.

Ne abstracts; Si remembers. Shakespeare invented almost none of his plots. He was a magpie, lifting his stories wholesale from older plays, from Holinshed's chronicles, from Plutarch's lives, from Italian novellas, and re-voicing them into something that had never existed before. The tertiary Si is the faculty that hoards the concrete and returns it exact — the remembered chronicle, the borrowed scene, the texture of an England he had actually walked through. His Rome and his Denmark are built from books; but his taverns, his country fairs, his sheep-shearing feasts and tavern reckonings and the small change of London life come from a memory stocked with ordinary particulars.

That is why his people never float off into allegory. He gives each one a concrete, once-seen thing — a habit of speech, a garment, a remembered detail — and through those particulars the whole figure comes alive. The grocer's son from Stratford never lost the textures of provincial English life, and he poured them into the histories and comedies as freely as he poured borrowed plots into his tragedies. The abstraction would have produced a scheme; the remembered detail produces a face. Shakespeare's genius was not invention from nothing but transformation of the remembered real.

For the greatest writer in the language, Shakespeare was remarkably indifferent to his own legacy. He published no collected edition. He wrote no manifesto, founded no school, left behind no doctrine or system of dramatic theory. He did not even seem to care whether his plays survived in print: roughly half of them existed only in promptbooks and players' memories at his death, and would have been lost entirely had others not gathered them. The First Folio of 1623 — the book that saved Hamlet and Macbeth and The Tempest for the world — was assembled seven years after he died, by two fellow actors who loved him. It was their labor, not his.

This is inferior Te: the drive to systematize, to close, to organize one's work into a finished and defended structure was simply not the strongest thing in him. He was, in his working life, a thoroughly practical man of the theatre — a sharer in his company, a shrewd investor, a buyer of the second-largest house in Stratford — and he could manage the business of a playhouse capably enough. But the impulse to fix his own achievement, to build the monument and guard the canon, ran against his dominant gifts. The Ne kept generating new plays; the Fi kept finding new souls to inhabit; and the man who could become anyone never got around to defining himself. Posterity had to do for him what he would not do for himself.

The Fair Youth — INFP Longing

Beyond the plays, Shakespeare's sonnets give the closest thing we have to his own voice — and what they reveal is unmistakably INFP. The first 126 are addressed to a young man, often called the “Fair Youth,” and they are saturated with a longing that has the exact texture of Fi idealization: an intense, private valuing of the beloved that turns him into something almost sacred, the dwelling-place of all the poet's worth. The feeling is not delivered as a vision pressed on the world; it is hoarded, turned over, elaborated inward, the way an INFP cherishes what it loves in secret. And Ne does the elaborating — the same image of the youth refracted through season after season, conceit after conceit, the imagination spinning a hundred angles on a single devotion.

The likeliest candidates for the Youth were two very different young noblemen — and they may answer to two different kinds of attraction. Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, reads as a kindred spirit: an ENFP, a warm, sparkling, outward version of Shakespeare's own inward fire, a mind leading with the same Ne and Fi and playing in the same country of possibility — a mirror, not a foil. William Herbert, the later Youth and dedicatee of the First Folio, reads instead as the complement: an ENFJ, the radiant, beloved muse whose outward Fe warmth commands the very devotion the sonnets pour out — the extraverted-feeling counterpart that completes an introverted-feeling poet. Either way the pull is the same: the NF temperament recognizing itself, whether in its likeness or its opposite.

By contrast, his marriage to Anne Hathaway, an ISFJ, was the anchor rather than the spark. Anne held the Stratford home together through the long London years — a Si-rooted world of continuity, household, and the trusted ordinary — while her husband's Ne-roaming spirit ranged across the whole imagined human comedy. The domestic life she kept was real and sustaining, a place to return to; but it was warm and particular, not the country his imagination traveled. His verse went out to the youth because that was where the kindred imagination lay.

And what he wanted for the youth was not to instruct him or to deliver him a truth, but simply to keep him — to hold his particular, beloved person against time and decay, to make the verse outlast the flesh so that this one specific human being would not be lost. That is Fi's fierce private valuing married to Ne's power of elaboration: not a prophet immortalizing a vision, but a lover refusing to let a single irreplaceable person disappear.

Why INFP Over INFJ

The distinction worth holding onto is this. There is a kind of great poet whose power is concentration — one vision, burning, pressed on the world until it yields; that is the INFJ. And there is the opposite kind, whose power is dispersal — a sympathy so wide and an imagination so plural that the self seems to vanish into the crowd it has dreamed up. Shakespeare is the supreme instance of the second, the twin of Chaucer and the very figure for whom negative capability was named. He did not stand above his characters with a truth to tell them. He became them, one after another, and let them speak.