I approached this paper with interest having just heard of a new book by Harold Bloom, the Yale University literary critic, called ‘Shakespeare: The invention of the human’ (Bloom 1999, Riverhead). Bloom's contention is that our contemporary conception of what it is to be a human being - as far as the developed West is concerned - stems not from its depiction in ancient or medieval times but directly from Shakespeare's writing. Interestingly, Bloom also reckons that Shakespeare ‘invented’ the psychoanalytic unconscious long before Nietzsche, Freud and Jung redeveloped the idea in the late nineteenth century.