Correspondence Between an Elizabethan Woman and Her Psychoanalyst: Beatrice on the Couch

The following fable represents a wish of mine, a wish that I could analyze a woman like Beatrice in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing. On the surface, I believe my wish is based on the fact that I both like and admire her character; she is exactly the kind of person I would enjoy helping with psychoanalytic therapy. On a somewhat deeper level, I like her sauciness and sensuality; the reader is free to speculate about the rest. Since neither Beatrice nor her creator is available, the next best thing I could do is to create an imaginary analysis, using Shakespeare's words-on-the-page as a foundation and then interpreting these words to her as I might to a real analysand. I then imagine what her response might be and what I might say in return. I think of the product as hybrid—not a chimera, I hope—somewhere in the misty area between a psychoanalytic case report, applied psychoanalysis, and fiction.

I also wish to “analyze” Beatrice because her words show complex motivations and puzzling paradoxes as well as indications of a highly structured internal life of which she has some awareness. Thus, I see Beatrice not only as suffering from the suppression of woman openly practiced in early modern cul-ture—in contrast to the more covert practices of today—but also as experiencing inner psychic conflicts. These conflicts give her the qualities of a tragic figure, one whose flaws would destine her to involuntary spinsterhood were it not for the artifice of the traditional comic ending. This device rescues her from hoisting