00 What sort of person was William Shakespeare? Although we know few of the facts of his life, modern psychological techniques enable us to glimpse the man behind the works. The essays in this volume explore the conflicts he dealt with, the defenses he used, and the way writing, acting, and directing served him psychologically. What sort of person was William Shakespeare? Although we know few of the facts of his life, modern psychological techniques enable us to glimpse the man behind the works. The essays in this volume explore the conflicts he dealt with, the defenses he used, and the way writing, acting, and directing served him psychologically.
Making a unique intervention in an incipient but powerful resurgence of academic interest in character-based approaches to Shakespeare, this book brings scholars and theatre practitioners together to rethink why and how character continues to matter. Contributors seek in particular to expand our notions of what Shakespearean character is, and to extend the range of critical vocabularies in which character criticism can work. The return to character thus involves incorporating as well as contesting postmodern ideas that have radically revised our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. At the same time, by engaging theatre practitioners, this book promotes the kind of comprehensive dialogue that is necessary for the common endeavor of sustaining the vitality of Shakespeare's characters.
The theory considers human behavior in terms of functional equilibrium between the stable properties of the mind, independent from the pressures of the sociocultural environment and the immediate situational context. What we call "character" thus denotes an autonomous configuration of psychological elements, which remains stable despite the changing external circumstances.
An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.
Shakespeare's history and Roman plays are usually discussed in terms of their political themes; their leading characters are imagined human beings who must be understood in motivational terms. Analyzing these characters with the aid of modern psychology (the theories of Karen Horney), this story attempts both to make sense of inconsistencies within the plays and the controversies they have produced.
Providing a provocative and original perspective on Shakespeare, Peter Holbrook argues that Shakespeare is an author friendly to such essentially modern and unruly notions as individuality, freedom, self-realization and authenticity. These expressive values vivify Shakespeare's own writing; they also form a continuous, and a central, part of the Shakespearean tradition. Engaging with the theme of the individual will in specific plays and poems, and examining a range of libertarian-minded scholarly and literary responses to Shakespeare over time, Shakespeare's Individualism advances the proposition that one of the key reasons for reading Shakespeare today is his commitment to individual liberty - even as we recognize that freedom is not just an indispensable ideal but also, potentially, a dangerous one. Engagingly written and jargon free, this book demonstrates that Shakespeare has important things to say about fundamental issues of human existence.
Think you know Shakespeare? Think again . . . Was a real skull used in the first performance of Hamlet? Were Shakespeare's plays Elizabethan blockbusters? How much do we really know about the playwright's life? And what of his notorious relationship with his wife? Exploring and exploding 30 popular myths about the great playwright, this illuminating new book evaluates all the evidence to show how historical material—or its absence—can be interpreted and misinterpreted, and what this reveals about our own personal investment in the stories we tell.
William Shakespeare has undergone psychological analyses ever since Freud diagnosed Hamlet with an Oedipus complex. But now, two psychologists propose to turn the tables by telling how Shakespeare himself understood human behavior and the innermost workings of the human mind. Psychology According to Shakespeare: What You Can Learn About Human Nature From Shakespeare's Great Plays, is an interdisciplinary project that bridges psychological science and literature, bringing together for the first time in one volume, the breadth and depth of The Bard’s knowledge of love, jealousy, dreams, betrayal, revenge, and the lust for power and position. Even today, there is no better depiction of a psychopath than Richard III, no more poignant portrayal of dementia than King Lear, nor a more unforgettable illustration of obsessive-compulsive disorder than Lady Macbeth’s attempts to wash away the damned blood spot. What has not been revealed before, however, are the many different forms of mental illness The Bard described in terms that are now identifiable in the modern manual of disorders known as the DSM-5. But, as the book shows, the playwright’s fascination with human nature extended far beyond mental disorders, ranging across the psychological spectrum, from brain anatomy to personality, cognition, emotion, perception, lifespan development, and states of consciousness. To illustrate, we have stories to tell involving astrology, potions, poisons, the four fluids called “humors,” anatomical dissections of freshly hanged criminals, and a mental hospital called Bedlam—all showing how his perspective was grounded in the medicine and culture of his time. Yet, Will Shakespeare’s intellect, curiosity, and temperament allowed him to see other ideas and issues that would become important in psychological science centuries later. Many of these connections between Shakespeare and psychology lie scattered in books, articles, and web pages across the public domain, but they have never been brought together into a single volume. So, here the authors retell of his fashioning the felicitous phrase, nature-nurture for Prospero to utter in frustration with Caliban and of how the nature-nurture dichotomy would become central in psychology’s quest to understand the tension between heredity and environment. But that was still far from all, for they discovered that his work anticipated multiple other psychological tensions. For example, in Measure for Measure, he made audiences puzzle over which exerts the greater influence on human behavior: internal traits or the external situation. And in Hamlet, he explored the equally enigmatic push-pull between reason and emotion in the mind of the dithering prince. Aside from bringing together The Bard’s known psychology, the book is unique in several other respects. It reveals how his interest in mind and behavior ranged across the full spectrum of psychology, including topics that we now call biopsychology and neuroscience, social psychology, thinking and intelligence, motivation and emotion, and reason vs intuition. Further, we show how the psychological concepts he used have evolved over the intervening centuries—for example, the Elizabethan notion of sensus communis eventually became “consciousness” and the old idea of the humors morphed into our current understanding of hormones and neurotransmitters. We also note that some of Mr. Shakespeare’s concerns seem especially timely today, as in the subplot of queer vs straight issues complicating the story of Troilus and Cressida and in Shylock’s telling of prejudices inflicted on ethnic minorities.
