Shakespeare character study has fallen into disrepute among psychoanalysts in recent years, especially since the appearance of Norman Holland's Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare in 1966. The current consensus is that it is not quite legitimate, and certainly naive, to discuss or even think of Shakespeare's characters as if they were real people. The implication of this new taboo is that most previous psychoanalytic discussions of Shakespeare, dating back to Freud's original remarks about Hamlet (1900), are now seen as fundamentally misguided. A practical result of the taboo is that articles written from the old perspective, which continues to come naturally to most psychoanalysts, are no longer acceptable for publication in journals of applied psychoanalysis. It is surprising that such a significant.