Was Shakespeare Happy with his Patron? One Psychoanalytic View of the Relationship

Psychoanalysis has a long-standing relationship with Shakespeare. Analysts have often tried to demonstrate the validity of their theories using Shakespearean characters, which are accessible to everybody, instead of using their patients’ case-histories, which usually cannot be made public. At other times they have tried to show that long-discussed literary matters like the reasons for Hamlet's procrastination could be made intelligible with the help of psychoanalytic insights; but they often provoked the retort that fictional characters could not be analysed like characters of real life, since they were limited to their texts and more like cardboard cutouts than real people; one could not assign them either an unconscious or a past that was not in the text.

However, as Elizabeth Wright (1984) says of the classical psychoanalytic methodology with literary works, “Despite its obvious shortcomings, in that it neglects the art-aspects of the work, such an approach can be very illuminating for the way it works with figures of repetition.” She urges the importance of interpreting with close attention to context. Her book, Psychoanalytic Criticism, gives a most useful account of the various psychoanalytic theories and their different values for literary criticism.

Over the past 25 years a change has come over the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis; during the last ten years this change has accelerated and given rise to many books and articles, often on specific texts of literature or psychoanalysis but also on the theories of the disciplines. Shoshana Felman (1982) describes the changed relationship clearly in the introduction to a book she has edited, Literature and Psychoanalysis: the Question of Reading, Otherwise. She says, there is “a real dialogue between two different bodies of language and between two different modes of knowledge” and points out that the two disciplines now have an equal status in their application to one another. In fact she ann