Aura of a Genius Actor

One of Shakespeare's five great comedies.

A romantic comedy wrapped in pastoral charm.

Yet among its characters stands Jaques, the melancholy philosopher whose piercing observations and satirical wit provide much of the play's flavor.

And now Miho was beginning the most famous passage in the work.

The speech that compares all human life to a stage.

Slowly, she ignited the engine.

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages."

For acting students, Shakespeare was both heaven and hell.

Reading the scripts was heaven.

The dazzling wit.

The profound understanding of human nature.

The breathtaking beauty of the language.

But the moment they tried to speak those lines—

Oh, my God.

Hell.

The language was practically archaic.

The speeches were long.

The monologues, formed by one lengthy sentence after another, were even worse.

Unless an actor repeated the lines thousands of times and infused them with color and emotion, it ceased to be acting.

It became recitation.

There was an old joke among English learners.

One beer and your English improves.

Two beers and you can debate fluently in English.

Three beers and you become a native speaker—though nobody else can understand you.

Four beers and you lose the ability to speak entirely.

Five beers and you start speaking American English.

And six beers?

Six beers made you start speaking Shakespeare.

That was how difficult the language was.

Yet the original author of those words delivered them flawlessly.

Every syllable emerged with irresistible elegance.

"At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms."

A child.

The voice of a crying child rang out.

A baby wailing as though the entire misery of existence had gathered in the wrinkles of its tiny forehead.

Yu Myeong could feel it.

The helplessness.

The fear.

The overwhelming vulnerability.

It was as though Miho had truly become an infant.

And if Yu Myeong, sharing her senses, could feel it so vividly—

Then surely the audience could as well.

The urge to cry.

The feeling that life was frightening before it had even begun.

"Then the whining schoolboy,

With his satchel

And shining morning face,

Creeping like snail unwillingly to school."

The child grew older.

A pouting, innocent boy appeared.

Education.

The process through which beasts became people.

Learning to endure what one disliked.

Learning to do what one would rather avoid.

The line dividing humanity from instinct.

"Then the lover,

Sighing like furnace,

With a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow."

"And then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths,

And bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor,

Sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth."

When she became the lover, sweetness overflowed from every expression.

When she became the soldier, outrage flared at the slightest provocation.

The young man intoxicated by love thrust his chest proudly forward.

The middle-aged man obsessed with honor already carried the faint bend of age in his spine.

By now the audience was completely spellbound.

No one moved.

No one looked away.

"Then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances..."

"And so he plays his part.

The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank;

And his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble,

Pipes and whistles in his sound."

Middle age.

The age of authority.

The age when a person mistakes their own experience for universal truth.

"I've been through it myself."

"Trust me, I know what's right."

The arrogant certainty of maturity.

One by one, the invisible judge passed judgment on everyone watching.

I am right.

The conviction in his eyes was so stubborn that several spectators unconsciously shrank back.

Then came old age.

Clutching the little wealth that remained.

Living off memories.

Complaining endlessly.

A merciless observation of human life.

Yu Myeong suddenly felt a chill.

These words had not been written by a human judging humanity.

They had been written by something that wasn't human at all.

The astonishing precision with which Miho understood people.

Her ability to distill that understanding into satire, humor, and truth.

And above all—

The acting.

Every sentence leaped across decades.

Every line embodied an entire stage of life.

Had this been how Miho originally imagined Jaques?

When she wrote the other characters, what performances had she envisioned then?

The final line arrived.

"Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

After weathering every storm life offered,

Humans ultimately returned to childhood.

That was not the path of spirits.

Spirits gathered vitality, cultivated themselves, and sought completion.

But Miho had spent centuries living among humans.

Fascinated by lives that possessed beginnings, climaxes, and endings like perfectly written plays.

And all that understanding had coiled itself deep within these lines.

Sometimes an outsider saw more clearly than those within.

Human life.

A performance.

The performance ended.

A life had unfolded before them.

The audience stood frozen, as though they had personally lived through every stage.

And Miho simply walked away.

Leisurely.

Without a trace of attachment.

{Was it alright?}

Control of the body returned to Yu Myeong.

Only then did he raise both hands and applaud.

Once again—

He had witnessed the ultimate truth of acting.

Places crowded with tourists were always profitable.

And on rare sunny days in London, cheerful young people became especially generous.

From his usual corner on the ground, he noticed an East Asian young man taking position diagonally across the square.

Begging changed the way one saw people.

Those who lowered their eyes before the powerful often wore completely different expressions when viewed from below.

Like a banknote whose printed face changed depending on the angle from which it was examined.

Human faces looked far more honest from underneath.

"Ladies and gentlemen gathered here today, fortunate beyond measure..."

Nick looked up.

The man appeared ordinary at first glance.

But there was something unusual in the way he gazed toward the sky.

The straightness of his posture.

The effortless way he seized attention from passing strangers.

Not an ordinary person.

Someone whose profession was captivating others.

"At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms."

Every Englishman knew Shakespeare.

Even a beggar.

The moment the famous line left the man's mouth, it ceased to be acting.

It became truth.

He became a child.

An impossibly innocent child.

Then, in the next instant, his face twisted into demonic frustration and he burst into tears.

Suddenly Nick felt younger too.

As though he wanted nothing more than to bury himself in his mother's arms and cry.

"Then the whining schoolboy,

With his satchel..."

Ten years passed in a single sentence.

Nick had hated school too.

There were always too many rules.

Too many things he wasn't allowed to do.

He had often dragged himself there like a snail.

Eventually he had run away.

He rejected the education meant to transform beasts into people.

And now he lived crawling on all fours.

Yet perhaps because he was a beast, he instinctively understood.

That wasn't human acting.

It was divine.

For more than ten minutes, the performer recited stages of life.

At each stage, he embodied that life physically.

Knowledge.

Love.

Honor.

Authority.

Money.

The universal values pursued by humanity.

The performance condensed them all.

It was so overwhelming that breathing itself felt difficult.

Clink.

A passerby tossed a coin into Nick's cup.

Nick never looked down.

His eyes remained fixed on the actor.

The donor frowned at the beggar who failed to show proper gratitude.

"Th... thank you..."

Nick bowed deeply.

Hot tears streamed down his face.

The donor awkwardly shrugged and continued on.

And as the young performer vanished while the audience remained trapped in breathless silence—

Nick continued bowing.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Today, he had seen a god.

Not to perform.

To teach.

After Shakespeare, she had stopped growing attached to humans.

Occasionally, when the urge to act became unbearable, she exchanged possession for small prices.

But she no longer expected anything from people.

That was why, when she first met Yu Myeong, her goal had been conquest rather than coexistence.

"The ability to use languages for performance only."

In exchange for:

"Unlimited possession over several months."

She had asked whether that sounded fair.

Yu Myeong probably believed the language ability was the better deal.

In reality, the possession rights were vastly more valuable.

So valuable that the Spirit Realm's laws of fair exchange should never have allowed the contract.

The only reason the contract was accepted was because Yu Myeong also benefited from being possessed.

No—

Because when she desired possession, she had simultaneously desired to help him.

Because she wanted to show a human actor already standing near the pinnacle of his craft a goal beyond his current horizon.

Because she wanted to lead him there.

It was appropriate compensation for the man who had willingly offered his body.

That was true fairness.

"Seeing it again, it's unbelievable. I didn't know Jaques could be played like that."

{I've learned a lot.}

"Haha. How could anyone learn acting on that level? I can only admire it."

{You can learn it.}

Yu Myeong's expression stiffened.

{I showed it to you so you could learn.}

"......"

{Are you going to say what William said? 'Stop interfering, you monster'?}

She delivered the wound like a joke.

But Yu Myeong could only look pained.

{When I act, I don't use any supernatural abilities. Therefore it can be learned.}

Her voice softened.

{That doesn't mean you'll ever perform it exactly as I do. But if William had accepted my advice while writing The Tempest, wouldn't the play have become better?}

{And the next work would have been better still.}

{And eventually, wouldn't he have reached the point where he could create works worthy of being remembered in theater history entirely on his own?}

Humans were fascinating.

Yet fragile.

And finite.

No matter how attached one became, they aged and withered quickly.

The performance spirit had learned that lesson through Shakespeare.

She had decided to enjoy humans without giving them her heart.

Yet—

"Do you know what the ant said?"

"Because I like acting."

She remembered the words of her mother, Hwa Ho.

A strange human.

Weaker than anyone.

Yet possessing a will stronger than steel.

A human capable of pitying someone hundreds or thousands of times stronger than himself.

She had watched him because he amused her.

Somewhere along the way, she had grown attached.

And while she hesitated because of that attachment—

He had grown.

Without her noticing.

So she taught him.

{First lesson. Control.}

"......"

{Pull each audience member into your world. Turn them into grass, trees, scenery. Make them part of the reality you're showing them.}

Yu Myeong's eyes began to shine.

It was the performance spirit's first lesson.