The Second Law of Shakespeare
Each seminar has three tasks -- deconstructing a fragment of text, untangling the related interpretive problem for the play as a whole, and mapping these precursors onto a related psychoanalytic concept. This triangular exercise should synthesize playable readings from the original texts of Hamlet. Here are the steps:
(1) Close textual analysis of a fragment of the script, typically a passage that occurs at a meaningful node in the action. This excerpt usually marks a turning point or crisis in the trajectory of motivation as it travels through the plot. There is a felt blip of surprise, sometimes puzzlement, at this moment. And, typically, the exact meaning and function of the fragment (or some phrase or word in it) have been hotly debated. Our textual analysis of this passage could take many forms: mid-twentieth century criticism like Levin's explication of the Player King's speech, or historical criticism informed by Marx, or feminist lit crit, or queer theory -- or any other tool that seems sincere. But for this first point in the triangle, the most useful seems to be the New Criticism (as an example, see Paglia's reading of the Ghost's Speech). This strategy consists of a within-text analysis, looking only at the guts of the particular fragment and excluding other considerations for the purposes of argument.
(2) The second point in the triangle involves untangling a problem in the playing script surrounding the passage. It might be helpful to think of oneself as the director of a performance -- as director or actor, there would be scores of expository possibilities and dozens of interpretive decisions to make: Does this passage illuminate why Hamlet hesitates? Or prove that he does not? Et cetera. This problem will be intimately connected to the fragment of text that is the triangle's first point -- the difference is that this problem-analysis will relate the fragment to adjacent parts of the script and to the play as a whole as it pertains to the expository problem -- text and context. This second point of the triangle is to understand the text surrounding the fragment so that it becomes dramatically playable -- so that plot, characterization, and poetry all mesh seamlessly. We want to resolve the script problem so well that the audience watching Hamlet doesn't notice it.
See also Walker Shields's course at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, "Shakespeare, Love Relationships, and the Work of the Unconscious." Participants read aloud an excerpt from one of the plays and then work from a "here-and-now study of our immediate experience in response to reading the selections together including our spontaneous associations...." [spring 2010 catalog pdf below] The course investigates the transformative power of the unconscious in love relationships by looking at Shakespeare's link to the unconscious and its connection with human relatedness in psychoanalysis. |  (3) The text fragment and the interpretive problem are then aimed at the third point in the triangle, a related psychoanalytic concept, an idea that "originated with" Freud. This is harder than it seems because the temptation is to start with the concept and look back and try to use Freud to understand Shakespeare. This is well and good and a noble exercise -- but not for this course. Our work is more to look for how Freud got the concept out of Hamlet -- or in Bloom's terms, how Shakespeare "foregrounded" Freud, how he anticipated the concepts and prepared Freud's audience for Freud's ideas. (Bloom's trope is that Hamlet was "Freud's mentor.") Each meeting will look for the precursors of a concept in depth psychology, it will look for psychoanalytic ideas foreshadowed in Shakespeare -- for instance, how does transference work? The aim is not to apply Freud to Shakespeare, it is to draw out of Hamlet the heart of psychoanalysis. A method of reading the poetry is illustrated in "solid versus sullied." That approach makes this basic assumption: If there is one perfect way to say something, Shakespeare will have found it. We called this The First Law of Shakespeare. So with this First Law in mind, our investigation works from a textual problem to a dramatic problem, then it proceeds from the dramatic problem to a third problem, the basis of a psychoanalytic concept. Often this is a concept about "psychopathology." This brings us to The Second Law of Shakespeare: Any problem in Shakespeare's text or dramaturgy can ultimately be traced to a universal problem of humankind. Our enabling fiction holds that problems in the poetry or in dramatic explication exist because they mirror problems in us.* In an uncanny way, these universal problems of self-made suffering are "strange attractors" for parallel difficulties in reading the text or producing the play. Shakespeare and Freud grow from the same root: a deep respect for original sin. If you want to call these problems psychopathology, that's ok as a first approximation. But for now don't worry if you don't believe any of this -- the burden of proof is on the course, to show how Shakespeare read Freud. * Useful word dramaturgy -- from two Greek roots, drama + work -- the work of making the drama work. |