SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Theory of Mythology,” in Classical Mythology in Twentieth-Century Thought and Literature, edited by Wendell M. Aycock and Theodore M. Klein, Texas Tech Press, 1980, pp. 107-24.

In the following essay, Girard endeavors to reconstruct Shakespeare's view of mythology, and claims that Shakespeare employed myth to dramatize an essential “mimetic crisis” in human culture.

Lévi-Strauss primarily operates with one principle, his principle of binary differentiation. There is a great deal of material, however, that will not respond to the binary differentiation treatment. Unlike many of his followers, Lévi-Strauss realizes this failure. In the last chapter of L'Homme nu, he implicitly acknowledges it, but in the case of ritual only. Instead of differentiating properly, as it should, ritual tries, he claims, to retrieve an “undifferentiated immediacy.”

The notion of “undifferentiated” certainly describes part of what goes on in rituals all over the world—promiscuous sexual encounters, for...