Modern literary criticism generally rejects the idea of off-stage lives for Shakespeare's characters. All we have is behaviour — the visible behaviour of ‘Shakespeare's talking animals’. But a review of that behaviour in the light of DSM-III suggests a high degree of clinical accuracy in some of it. The depictions of Ophelia, Lear and Caius Martius Coriolanus supply examples.
References
1.
EvansG. Blakemore (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1974. Quotations from Shakespeare throughout this lecture are from the Riverside edition.
2.
Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977) was an issue entirely on literature and psychoanalysis. Special ed. Shoshana Felman.
3.
StracheyJ. (trans, and ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, London, 1953–74, vol. 14, p. 315.
4.
FraynM.Noises Off, Methuen, London, 1982, pp. 26–8.
5.
HawkesT.Shakespeare's Talking Animals, Edward Arnold, London, 1973.
6.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd edn) (DSM-III)American Psychiatric Association, Washington DC, 1980, p. 190.
7.
BarkN. M.Did Shakespeare know schizophrenia? The case of Poor Mad Tom in King Lear, British Journal of Psychiatry146, 1985, 436–8.
8.
GelderM.GathD.MayouR.Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983, p. 514.
9.
KailA. C.Medicine in Shakespeare: the bard and the body—2. Mental illness, Medical Journal of Australia139, 1983, 403.
10.
PowellC. [in a private note following some discussions of King Lear, 6 May 1985].
