The semantics of counterfactuals are tricky. Willard Van Orman Quine came up with a cute example. He asks which of the following sentences is true:
1) If Julius Caesar had commanded the American forces in Korea, he would have used the atomic bomb.
Seems true, right? Julius was a pretty brutal guy. He would have totally used nukes to win a war if he had them.
But on the other hand consider:
2) If Julius Caesar had commanded the American forces in Korea, he would have used catapults.
Also seems true. Julius was an ancient Roman and catapults were what they used.
Quine’s point was there’s no answer to this question – it depends what we are interested in, Caesar’s ruthlessness or his Roman-ness. Because he was a ruthless Roman.
A version of this insight is offered by Steve O’Donnell in the Letterman Top 10 book “Top Ten Things Lincoln Would Say if He Were Alive Today” One is “How stands the union?” Another is “Eegah! Iron bird!”
Utter skepticism about counterfactuals leads you to “If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a trolley car.” In other words don’t bother me about what would have been if things were different, because they ain’t. But this attitude is as brutal as the Caesar from sentence one because we use counterfactuals all the time. If I had not let the door open, Fluffy would still be alive. That’s a good thing to reflect on – if we acquire a new kitty, I will be more careful about shutting the door. Counterfactuals help us think through what is wrong with conservatism because conservatives look up to intellectual ancestors who were themselves not conservatives. If Maimonides were alive today, he would not read ancient religious text. Real Maimonides was an expert on the most advanced thought of his day. If he were alive today, he’d be a quantum physicist. And when people say If you want to know what you would have done in the past when fascism came in, look at what you’re doing now, and you have your answer, they are using counterfactuals to make a serious moral point.
Picture of Nobody by Philip Owens, published in 1936 and republished by McNally Editions in 2026, asks what Shakespeare would be like if he were alive in the world of 1936. As in Quine’s example, his novel reveals what he is interested in by how he frames the counterfactual. In Owens’ work Shakespeare is poor, hiding from his landlord (Falstaff!) because he can’t pay his rent, hoping his publisher will take him seriously as he writes “Venus and Adonis.”
Shakespere (Owens’ spelling) starts the novel listening to the rush of the underground shaking the room where he shivers.
Once more the floor trembled. The trains were supplying something that worked through no standard meter at all, men and women on tap to a few square miles of office… He could hear, it seemed to him, the rustling of an enormous forest, a storm of shillings dropping into slots, a gigantic purring of dials. [p. 6]
Owens spins his counterfactual because he is interested in how the artist is a beautiful suffering creature who is ignored by the vulgarity of industrial, capitalist, urban civilization.
If Shakespeare were alive today, says Owens, he would be ignored, a sensitive nobody, crushed under the wheels of the heartless machine of modern industry. That is what he cares about.
It’s a fine thing to care about. Unfortunately, Shakespeare is about the worst famous writer from the past to use to make this point. He was a brutal successful capitalist in the entertainment industry of his time, making a killing hoarding grain during a famine, an owner of his own intellectual property and the theater that made it, savvy about flattering the dictatorial monarchs who reigned. If Shakespeare were alive in the ‘30s he’d be a successful movie or theater producer and not be bed rotting, waiting for somebody to take him seriously. The real Shakespeare was a shark. If Owens had picked Keats, he could have made his point perfectly – and in fact he didn’t need to because Shelley made the point about Keats after his death.
Quine was right. The semantics of counterfactuals depend upon what you’re interested in. Obviously you could imagine if Shakespeare were alive today, he would be terrified of cars and would hide under the bed, or utterly hopeless at using the internet. These possibilities take aspects of Shakespeare that are real – he lived before cars, he lived before the internet – and carry them forward into the counterfactual world.
A more interesting question Owens could have raised is,what would a genius who invented modern subjectivity (wresting it from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages) have to say in the world he gave birth to? What would that genius mind do if he weren’t taking the revenge play and turning it into Hamlet but taking the films of Charlie Chaplin and turning them into – what? Who knows? The closest Owens comes is that reviewers view Shakespere’s newly written “Venus and Adonis” with modern categories. “It was Marxism on the left hand and Freudian on the right, with the poet in between, upstage” [p. 234]. But what if you take seriously that there would be no Freud without Shakespeare? What would a post-Freudian Shakespeare with Shakespearean firepower be like? No answer from Owens, sadly.
Shakespeare as a contemporary person is a hot property to do counterfactuals about because as Harold Bloom argued, “Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us.”
Bloom makes us realize that wondering what Shakespeare would be like if he were alive today is a bit like wondering what your grandparent would be like if he were you. It’s vertiginous – you are you because your grandfather made you you. So who are you if your grandfather is you? If Shakespeare made us who we are, who would he be, if he lived in the world he already made? Would he be the poet of some future iteration of the human?
It’s fascinating to think about but Owens doesn’t.
Picture of Nobody ends with Falstaff and Shakespere killed in an aerial bombing of London.
[O]n this last night of their lives… Shakespere looked up into the darkness above… [M]en if they would feel less afraid, must look into the very things they are afraid of. He was only repeating what primitive man had always done. To be cold and hungry, to look up into the night sky and hear the wind coming across the black fields was to return to membership in the countless hordes of the past, those whose existence had been one long and frightened inspection of what was forever above their tents. [pp. 281-282]
Even more than the cruel anonymity of industrial civilization, Owens cares about this: that hunger and fear are the same even if you’re Shakespeare. At the end of the day famous writers, not famous writers, courtiers from the court of Elizabeth and Pete Hegseth - we’re all the same. We “feel want, taste grief, need friends.” Fair enough and possibly true. Owens just didn’t need time-slipped Shakespeare to make it. Actual real-life Elizabethan Shakespeare made it in Richard II.
But Owens’ novel does make you wonder. If the very first caveman who looked up into the night sky had been born in the 1980s, how would that have been? I’d venture to say, with all due respect to Quine, pretty damn cool. And it gives us leave to wonder, would the caveman have voted for Hillary Clinton? Would he have hid under a bridge in Central Park and come out only at night to eat people’s dogs? Or would he have invented something as revolutionary to us as fire was to his Paleolithic friends? And what would that have been?
Maybe if Owens had been born today, he would have written a book about that.
very interesting review!!!
If Shakespeare were catapulted into the Korean War...