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In Character as a Subversive Force in Shakespeare, Dr. Paris argues that Shakespeare's characters are so round, so inwardly motivated, as to be “creations inside a creation.” That is, they are intelligible in their own right, as though they were real human beings whose behavior can be understood in terms of their character structures, defensive strategies, inner conflicts, etc. When we understand them in this way, we find that we cannot see them as the author seems to want us to. Characters who are glorified by the “rhetoric” of the plays strike us as engaging compulsively in behavior that is destructive to themselves and to others. So these characters “subvert” what seems to be the author's intentions. This is a very subtle point of differentiation: The author wants us to see them one way, and we see them another. We tend not to realize what is really going on in the characters so long as we are under the author's spell, but when we see them as “imagined human beings” with inner motivation systems we understand them in our terms rather than in the author's, and we arrive at our own judgments.
To understand these characters in a way that makes sense to us, we need to look at them from the perspective of the explanatory systems available in our culture. Analyzing them in terms of Renaissance-humor psychology is historically interesting, but we no longer believe in that psychology, and its explanations do little to enhance our comprehension.
Dr. Paris argues that Horney's mature theories are highly congruent with almost all of Shakespeare's major characters and that they enable us to recover and to talk about psychological intuitions that Shakespeare could adequately communicate only through his dramatic art. He saw and intuitively understood the same kinds of things that Horney describes, but he did not understand them in a conscious, conceptual way. Using Horney's theory enables us to analyze these characters better than Shakespeare could have done, although he unders