Emily Dickinson

Drama's vitalest expression

DRAMA'S vitalest expression

Common Day

Dickinson capitalizes 'Common Day' like a character name—ordinary life gets the same typographical dignity as 'Hamlet.' She's already arguing her thesis in the formatting.

Is the Common Day
That arises, sets, about us:
Other tragedy
Perish in the recitation,
This the more exert
When the audience is scattered,
And the boxes shut.

boxes shut

Theater boxes are the private seating areas for wealthy patrons. When the performance ends, these literal boxes close—but the metaphorical boxes of the heart stay open.

to himself

Without Shakespeare's play, Hamlet would still exist—just as a private person experiencing his own dilemmas. The tragedy would be real but unrecorded.

Hamlet to himself were Hamlet
Had not Shakespeare wrote,
Though the Romeo leave no second

leave no second

'Leave no second' means 'leave no copy' or 'leave no duplicate.' Romeo's love for Juliet is unique, unrepeatable—yet Dickinson argues every real love story is equally unrepeatable.

Of his Juliet,
It were tenderer enacted
In the human heart—
Only theater recorded

Owner cannot shut

The 'Owner' is the person living the drama—you can't close your own heart the way a theater owner locks the doors. Private tragedy runs continuously.

Owner cannot shut.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Shakespeare as the Inferior Dramatist

Dickinson's central provocation: real life is better theater than theater. She picks the biggest target possible—Shakespeare, the unassailable master—and argues his tragedies are second-rate compared to what happens in 'the Common Day.' Notice she doesn't say Shakespeare is bad; she says his plays 'Perish in the recitation' while daily life continues to 'exert' its power even when no one's watching.

The poem's structure mirrors a theater performance. The first stanza is the thesis, the second stanza provides examples (Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet), and then—unexpectedly—the entire poem repeats. This is Dickinson's formal joke: like a theatrical encore, she performs the whole thing twice. But the repetition also proves her point: the poem itself is a 'recitation' that requires repeating, while the human heart's drama plays continuously without intermission.

CONTEXT Dickinson lived in theatrical poverty—Amherst, Massachusetts offered almost no professional theater. She saw Shakespeare performed maybe once or twice in her entire life. But she read the plays obsessively and quotes them throughout her letters. This poem isn't anti-Shakespeare; it's pro-obscurity. She's arguing that her own invisible life in Amherst contains as much tragedy as anything on a stage, and that your invisible life does too.

The Theater That Never Closes

The poem's key verb is 'exert'—an unusual choice. Tragedies don't usually 'exert' themselves; they move or affect or devastate. But 'exert' suggests continuous effort, like a muscle that keeps contracting. Real-life drama works harder than staged drama because it never stops performing.

Dickinson distinguishes between two kinds of recording: theatrical recording (Shakespeare's scripts, which preserve but also freeze the action) and heart recording (the 'Only theater recorded / Owner cannot shut'). The heart is both stage and archive, performer and audience. When she says 'It were tenderer enacted / In the human heart,' that 'tenderer' does double work—both 'more tender' (more gentle, more loving) and 'more truly tender' (more authentically emotional than actors can manage).

The final image—'Owner cannot shut'—captures Dickinson's existential claustrophobia. You can walk out of a theater, but you can't walk out of your own consciousness. Your private tragedies play on an infinite loop, with no curtain, no intermission, no exit. It's both the poem's triumph (your life matters as much as Hamlet's!) and its quiet horror (you're trapped in the theater of yourself forever).