Discovering Shakespeare’s Own Psychology
It wasn’t the actors’ fault, nor was it the Bard’s, that my mind was wandering as I watched a performance of Cymbeline at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I had not yet come to love the Bard as much as my English teachers wanted me to. Four hundred years of history, culture, and language still separated me from Will Shakespeare and his archaic words, the likes of nonce, fletcher, withal, anon, foison, spleen, apace, fain, peradventure, and wot.
But, my attention abruptly lurched back to the stage as I realized that the plot centered on the kidnapping of two infant princes, raised in the wilds of Wales by their abductor—yet their noble birth was recognizable years later as they came into manhood. You see, psychology is my trade, and it suddenly became clear that Shakespeare was exploring the heredity vs. environment issue—a problem that lies at the heart of psychology today! What other ideas did Shakespeare have about mind and behavior, I wondered. That question eventually led me to write a book, Psychology According to Shakespeare, with my good friend and long-time collaborator, Philip Zimbardo.
We were not trying to diminish the literary aspects of Shakespeare’s work, nor did we seek to supplant existing Shakespearean scholarship. Rather, we hoped to open wider a window on the psychological underpinnings of William Shakespeare’s work. And so, we began to see him as a colleague, a sort of patriarchal proto-psychologist who lived some three centuries before there was a discipline called “psychology.”
Unfortunately, psychology and psychiatry have had a one-sided relationship with Will Shakespeare ever since Freud diagnosed Prince Hamlet with an Oedipus complex. To mix a metaphor, as the Bard himself sometimes did, we sought to turn the tables and remove him from the analyst’s couch. Instead of “psychoanalyzing” Shakespeare, we have tried to understand how he understood us!—or, more precisely, the people with whom he collaborated and for whom he wrote, plus the characters to whom he gave more inner life than any of his fellow playwrights.
One of the first things we learned was that Shakespeare arguably coined the felicitous term “nature-nurture” for The Tempest, where the wizard Prospero complains that he is unable to civilize the creature Caliban whom he found on an island where Prospero and his daughter Miranda had been washed ashore. Thus, he calls calling Caliban:
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost.
– 4.1.211
And that’s the context that lured two psychologists into the world of the Bard, hoping to collect and disseminate the psychological aspects of his work that have never before been gathered in one volume. Here is a brief overview of what we found:
Even today, there exists 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 damn’d blood spot. What has not been revealed so completely before, however, are the many different forms of mental illness the Bard described in terms that we can associate with our 21st-century conception of mental disorders as described in the psychiatric manual known as the DSM-5.
But Shakespeare was not just about mental illness. His fascination with human nature and nurture ranged across the psychological spectrum, from brain anatomy to personality, cognition, emotion, perception, lifespan development, and states of consciousness. To illustrate, our book tells tales involving astrology, potions, poisons, the four body 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. And yet, Will Shakespeare’s intellect, curiosity, and temperament allowed him to glimpse ideas and issues that would become important in psychological science centuries later.
In this blog, I plan to expand on what we wrote in Psychology According to Shakespeare, using material that space limitations of the book forced us to forego and adding new material that has since come to our attention. I’m staking no claim that Phil and I were the first or only ones to find psychology in Shakespeare. On the contrary, textbooks, papers, and lectures are frequently peppered with Shakespearean quotes illustrating psychological concepts. Likewise, it is easy to find websites devoted to Shakespeare’s classification of personality types according to the four bodily “humors” or to the Bard’s views on emotions, dreams, and many other psychological phenomena. Again, what we have attempted is to bring all (or most) of Shakespeare’s psychology together in one tome.
In the process, we have broken some new ground, making discoveries of our own. Among them:
We found that our playwright’s developmental psychology, based on Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man, maps surprisingly well onto Erik Erikson’s eight-stage progression across the lifespan. Moreover, the life “crisis” that Erikson identified at each stage matches the crises faced by protagonists in nineteen of Shakespeare’s plays.
We argue that Shakespeare’s concept of the unconscious mind, as evidenced, for example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is less like Freud’s and more like the unconscious of the dual-process mind proposed by psychologists Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) and Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow).
While the term consciousness did not exist in Elizabethan times, we present evidence from Juliet’s “What’s a Montague” speech that he had a poet’s intuitive awareness of what neuroscientists call “the binding problem,” in which the theater of the mind combines elements of a stimulus into a percept.
We documented and quantified Will Shakespeare’s fascination with sleep, finding that he refers to this altered state of consciousness in every one of his plays, often with references to features and disturbances of sleep, such as dreams, nightmares, insomnia, sleepwalking, and sleep apnea.
Likewise, we counted Shakespeare's fascination with the brain, learning that he referenced it more than one hundred fifty times in his works, often in a brain-behavior context such as the description of seizures, but also by name-dropping anatomical terms (pia mater and ventricles) and Lady Macbeth’s exhortation of her husband: “Why, worthy thane, / You do unbend your noble strength to think / So brainsickly of things.”
We present evidence that Will Shakespeare was aware of the push-pull between reason and emotion, still being explored by psychologists today. Moreover, our playwright closely examined that tension comically in Love’s Labor’s Lost and tragically in Hamlet.
We inferred from the plays that Will Shakespeare’s developmental path as a playwright reflects the pattern that Howard Gardner found in the careers of Freud, Eliot, Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Martha Graham: seven highly creative people identified by Professor Gardner as shapers of the 20th century. In addition, using Gardner’s model of “multiple intelligences,” we propose that Shakespeare’s pattern of intellect places him in the company of Eliot (linguistic intelligence), Freud (intrapersonal intelligence), and Gandhi (interpersonal intelligence).
Based on the ancient psychology of the four humors (used extensively by our playwright), we present a new psychological portrait of the playwright, using comments about him recorded by friends, acquaintances—and one jealous rival. (Mind you, we don’t do so by putting the Old Fellow on the couch; rather, we describe him in terms used by those who knew him.)
We argue that an exchange between Rosalind and Orlando, wherein they muse over one’s changing sense of time that depends on the preoccupations of a person’s mind, suggests that The Bard anticipated a mental state that Csikszentmihalyi identified as “flow.”
Also in Hamlet, we were surprised by the Bard’s intuitive understanding of flawed reasoning that Dr. Kahneman calls faulty heuristics.
But the discovery that surprised us most lay in Measure for Measure. Set mainly in a prison, it uncannily anticipated the abuses of unrestrained power given to ordinary individuals centuries later in the mock prison Dr. Zimbardo constructed for his famous Stanford Prison Experiment—perhaps the most controversial studies ever produced by social psychology.
On a sad and final note: Dr. Philip Zimbardo, collaborator on this project, died last October (2024). He will be greatly missed by all who knew or worked with him—and there were many of us. I hereby appropriate Horatio’s words to mourn my dear friend’s passing:
Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
—5.2.97-98
Psychology According to Shakespeare is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major book outlets. But please remember that your local small bookstore probably needs the business at least as much as the mega-stores do.
Psychology According to Shakespeare was published in June 2024 by Prometheus Books, a division of Rowman and Littlefield.
My book has arrived and I look forward to reading about Shakespeare's psychology, Bob! Bravo!