Last week marked the 75th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s
death, which made me want to ponder the interesting connections between the man,
his work, and Shakespeare. Freud was an admirer of the bard’s work, both
personally and professionally. Some plays (notably Hamlet) bore considerable
influence on his conceptualisation of melancholia, mourning, and narcissism. Though
his use of the Danish price remains the benchmark of his involvement with Shakespeare,[1]
other plays appear throughout his body of work to a lesser extent (such as The
Merchant of Venice, or Julius Cesar), serving to illustrate the
various psychological phenomena Freud details. When it came to outlining the
intricacies of the human psyche, Freud often looked to Shakespeare’s characters
as the ideal touchstone.
I find Freud’s use of Shakespeare compelling, but it can also make for
a cavalier type of criticism that dangerously reads “backwards,” from psychoanalytic
theory into Shakespearean drama, treating characters such as Hamlet,
Portia, or Iago under purely clinical auspices. The practice too often negates the
fruitful interplay between the two authors.[2]
The clearest example of this critical pitfall remains the uneasy conflation of
Hamlet’s melancholy with Freudian notions of melancholia and mourning. Though
the play serves as a building block for Freud’s essay, the prince’s stubborn
clinging to his grief and Shakespeare’s broader revision of melancholy within
the play is an altogether different animal. His with melancholy rallies
classical sources such as Galen, Hippocrates an Aristotle, with the contemporary
writings of physicians and philosophers such as Timothy Bright and Robert Burton
to offer a dramatic synecdoche of a powerful cultural, social, and historical
signifier that simultaneously proves physical, psychological, and spiritual.
Freud’s exploration of melancholia is an attempt to understand the modern
psyche within a (then) novel scientific framework deeply rooted in the process
of subjection. Again, a contrast of both
treatments is worthwhile, but reading the correlation counter-currently does a
disservice to both ends of the spectrum. The parallel is also complicated by
the fact that beyond the scientific revisions that Shakespearean drama
undertakes, notions such as melancholy are altered by the playwright‘s own aesthetic
and literary sensibilities. Though Shakespeare masters the art of
characterization, the state of minds his characters exhibit are always situated
within clearly defined dramatic objectives.
Interestingly, Shakespearean comedy seems to provide a more fascinating
(and seldom acknowledged) resonance within psychoanalysis. Emancipated from the deadly
conventions of the tragic genre, comic explorations of melancholy place a
greater focus on ideas of melancholia and narcissism, and what Freud terms the individual’s
“satisfaction
from self-exposure.” Characters such as the merchant Antonio, Jaques, or Olivia
and Orsino not only display an overwhelming sense of melancholy, but make a
point of refusing to alter or abandon it, claiming it as their fundamental character
trait. Comic characters that manage to transform themselves and integrate the newly
form social order at the end of a Shakespearean comedy can be thought to
successfully evade the process Freud discusses. Orsino and Olivia are paired
off with the twins by the end of Twelfth Night. Fate is not a kind with
Antonio or Jaques, and their all-encompassing melancholy is to blame.
This
particular connection serves as a great reminder of the powers and limits of literature
in the “real” world. Dramatic representations of melancholy can offer great
examples or allusions to depression and other mental illnesses, but the link is
never straightforward as we would hope. Human behaviour on the stage, on the page,
or in our heads engages in a complex dance of cultural, cognitive, and
emotional interplay.
Then
again, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar …
Excitement:
Fall means freedom from blockbusters, and the arrival of several
films I am keen on seeing, such as Fox Catcher with an unrecognizable Steve
Carrel,[3] Love
is Strange with John Lithgow and Alfred Molina and Jon Stewart’s Rosewater.
We are still a few months away from the release of a Cymbeline adaptation with Ethan Hawke[4]
and Ed Harris, and I’m not sure what to think of this one.
Smooshy:
I’m in a good mood, so no smooshy this week. Go out and hug a tree![5]
Shout out:
This blog came out stupidly late, so I actually miss the event I was
shouting out to. Yesterday was the first meeting of the season for the Shakespeare
Performance and Research team at McGill (also known as the SPRiTE team)[6].
We had a wonderfully challenging discussion and reading of scenes from Cymbeline.
There are more meeting coming up until Christmas (and the next one will be a
rambly hot mess of a paper on Hamlet by yours truly!). Check out the schedule on
the SPRiTE website: http://mcgill-shakespeare.com.
Till next time!
Who goes there?
The Tacos Salesman
…. Thou may enter.
[1] Hmmmm
danish …
[2] Hmmmm
fruit …. Hmm fruit danish.
[3] In
a parallel universe where I would cast an adaptation of Othello, I would
cast Steve Carrel as Iago. As brilliant of a comic actor as he is, Carrel does underlying
darkness really well.
[4]
Also, for a little spice in your lives, walk up to a stranger on the street,
point to the sky ominously and mutter “any day now…”
[5] Hmmm
Sprite. No wait, I actually don’t like soft drinks. Hmmm Perrier.
No comments:
Post a Comment