SOURCE: "The Psychological Continuum," in Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964, pp. 324-37.

[In the following excerpt, Holland surveys the patterns of psychological criticism typically applied to Shakespeare's plays.]

The Psychological Continuum

Freud, in describing human personality, used the latest and richest version of the metaphor that Plato, Augustine, More, Bacon, Campanella, and many others before him had used: the city. Freud suggested that we think of the human mind as like the Rome he enjoyed so much. At the deepest level lies the primitive village of the Latin tribes. Erected on it are the cities of the republic and the empire. On their ruins, in turn, rose the city of medieval Christendom and from it the Rome of modern Italy. And yet the avenues clogged by the traffic jams of today follow the path worn down by the solitary herdsman of antiquity—indeed, his choice of route centuries before has much to do with the congestion and conflicts of today.

In the city, modern builds on ancient. Modern also brings much that is new, but it escapes only with considerable destruction and renewal the paths anciently laid down. So in the mind: the intellectual and moral concerns lately arrived at in the adult build on the primitive paths and communities of the child. We need to think of modern and ancient, adult and child, as coexisting, as if, by a kind of time-machine vision, we could see in the center of the magnificence of St. Peter's the dream shadow of the Circus Neronis dedicated to cruel and uncanny sports.

Adult and child coexist; but the orthodox critic sees only the adult mind, and the psychoanalytic critic, all too often, sees only the child. The truth lies rather in the continuum between them. The religious, aesthetic, social, moral, or intellectual themes the orthodox critic develops have their roots in the infantile fantasies and conflicts the psychoanalytic critic points out. Indeed, it is only because infantile basis and adult superstructure exist in us together that these intellectual concerns can have at all the emotional power they do in art. Both the psychoanalytic critic and his conventional counterpart need to recognize that each tells half the story. Not only are there complex two-way bonds back and forth between author, text, and reader—these bonds themselves have higher and lower sides, each of which informs the other. . . .

In short, the psychoanalytic critic has (by and large) been both too logical and not logical enough. That is, he has confined himself too rigidly (even if not too explicitly) to one or a combination of the three kinds of psychoanalytic criticism. He has thus failed to follow out the assumptions of his own discipline. . . . [The] essence of psychoanalysis is that it deals objectively with the data of subjectivity. To do so, to think in a truly psychoanalytic way, one must move back and forth from one's own inner responses to what the objective, scientific descriptions of psychoanalysis have to say about those inner responses.

The psychoanalytic critic needs to recognize that he is himself part of the literary process he is describing. The character he analyzes does not exist "out there" in some never-never land; the realism of the character comes as one part—although only one part—of the critic's own responses. Conversely, the play itself is not an isolated reality, a text that can be analyzed separate from the analyzer. What criticism needs is a sense of the continuum and interaction between objective work of art and subjective response; or as this book has tried to act out by its own odd form, between the categories of actual psychoanalytic criticism (Part II) and the psychoanalytic concepts that show how these categories are really not categories but blend one into another (Part I). To understand a work of art, one must understand oneself.

That is clear enough for the critic's thinking, but how about his writing? How does he express this sense of continuum between work and self short of a most unseemly autobiographical baring? By careful language. Through a process of translating psychoanalytic insights into terms that can also describe the play in the moral and aesthetic terms of orthodox criticism. Incidentally, this same admonition applies to ordinary criticism as well, if the critic wishes to express this sense of continuum in the literary transaction. That is, a conventional critic who states simply that, at the outset of the tragedy, Macbeth is physically courageous gives us an isolated insight. If he were to rephrase it—at the outset, Macbeth has "animal courage"—he would bring his insight into meaningful relation with the rest of the tragedy: with a major series of images (animals) and a major theme, What is a man?

For the psychoanalytic critic, however, the difference in terminology spans a far greater range. He is involved in words like oedipus complex, sibling rivalry, repression, displacement, self-object differentiation, and the like. How can he translate these into words that describe the play as a whole? By showing how the intellectual "meaning" of the play grows from the emotional content.

Six Shakespearean Instances

Macbeth is a useful example because psychoanalytic criticism, by and large, has not approached the play through the realistic analysis of character but rather through over-all patterns, thus removing one element from our problem.

From a conventional point of view, five recurring themes stand out for me in Macbeth: (1) uncertain perception (the vanishing witches and ghosts, the mysterious voices, such questions as, "Is this a dagger which I see before me?"). (2) The supernatural (witches, prophecies, apparitions, ghosts, and omens). (3) The natural world of eating, drinking, sleeping, having children, in short, domestic and political life. (4) The unnatural disease represented by the Macbeths who corrupt eating, drinking, sleeping, and having children, turning Scotland from "our mother" to "a grave." (5) Finally, the idea of breeding understood either as having children or as spreading evil: "Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles." We could state the essential Macbeth quality as: uncertain perception of the way supernatural, natural, and unnatural mingle in a man's mind and breed outward.⁴

Psychoanalytic criticism, by contrast, sees Macbeth as the interaction of oedipal patterns. Macbeth, a bad "son," allies himself with a bad "mother" to kill a good "father," Duncan. Then, having become a bad "father" or king, Macbeth kills a mother and a son (the Macduffs). Then, a good son, Malcolm, and a not-so-good father, Macduff (both dissociated from women), slay the bad "father," and the good son becomes a good king (or "father").

We can see in these patterns the emotional roots of one of the five big intellectual themes of the tragedy: breeding. Good "fathers" and "sons" dissociate themselves from women: the sons show asexual filial piety, the fathers asexual authority. Bad "fathers" or "sons" get involved with women and concern themselves with breeding, understood either as the act of fathering children or as betraying and destroying family life.

Others of the five themes have the same sexual dualism as "breeding." For example, the concept of the supernatural seems to involve doing the will of another. Macbeth fights rebels for the Lord's anointed, King Duncan, whose virtues plead like angels. Malcolm and Macduff fight under the aegis of the "holy" English king "with Him above to ratify the work." Submission to a father justifies even murder (as of Macdonwald or Macbeth). But this submission is evil and unnatural when Macbeth acts under the auspices of the weird sisters or Lady Macbeth—women. The intellectual themes of the natural and unnatural involve a similar dualism. A noble wishes that

we may again
Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights,
Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives,
Do faithful homage and receive free honors—
Alt which we pine for now,

(III. vi. 33-37)

all which, presumably, he had under Duncan (a man alone) but which Macbeth has now corrupted (a man acting in submission to a woman).

In short, beneath the intellectual dualisms seem to lie conflicting attitudes toward a father. Alone, he is a beneficient and justifying authority, but in relation to a woman, "He wants the natural touch." The witches themselves represent the deepest form of this ambiguity:

You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.

(I.iii.45-47)

Perhaps, too, this constant sense of uncertainty has a symbolic value: the ambiguities in gender, the blood, the darkness, the mysterious noises at night may represent a primal scene fantasy.

At any rate, this pervasive need to "interpret," this theme of ambiguity and uncertainty of perception functions defensively. Responding to a father as benevolent political authority works to reassure against or cancel out that other sense of the father as a frightening and dangerous sexual being. We see this dualism or ambiguity in all the episodes of uncertain perception. We see it, too, in the structure of the tragedy: two waves, one of crime, one of punishment. They act like the defense of doing and undoing (acting on an aggressive impulse, then trying magically to cancel the deed out). The antitheses in the language work the same way: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." "Nothing is / But what is not."

This sense of uncertainty also functions as a projection: Is Macbeth responsible for his crimes? Or the witches? Or Lady Macbeth?

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?

. . . . .

Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

(II.i.33-39)

If these impulses and attitudes are in me, I am guilty. If they are outside me, in destiny or, particularly, in a justifying father, I am innocent. But if I have taken them in, not from a father, but from a woman, I am even more guilty.

Thus, beneath the oedipal pattern of love and hate among fathers, mothers, and sons we come to a still deeper stratum, the problem of earliest infancy: taking things in from outside; what is me and what is notine? Defensively, Macbeth uses the uncertainty to sustain himself, to justify and explain his actions:

Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,

and to supply himself with courage:

Come, Fate, into the list,
And champion me to th'utterance!

And yet this taking in from outside becomes also a fatal dependence. When the prophecies fail him, "I pull in resolution," "I 'gin to be aweary of the sun." "It hath cowed my better part of man."

At the deepest level, then, the "uncertain perception of the way supernatural, natural, and unnatural mingle in a man's mind and breed outward" (our intellectual statement of the essential Macbeth quality) translates into a wish to act aggressively justified by obedience to a parent poised against a fear of dependence and subsequent betrayal of a libidinal kind. In short, the psychoanalytic reading can tell us in a more or less scientific way how the unconscious conflicts and fears buried in us let us find in the fictitious events and intellectual issues of the tragedy emotional power.

Macbeth shows how psychoanalytic readings of overall (nonrealistic) pattern lead us from intellectual response to its emotional roots in unconscious conflict. In Coriolanus the psychoanalytic readings of character lead us to our emotional response. The psychoanalytic critics of character see the hero as a phallic, authoritarian personality seeking to establish himself in terms of his aggression. Under the phallic pattern lies the deeper oral conflict from which it stems: the infant striving to prove his identity separate from a mother who encompasses him. To put it another way, Coriolanus behaves in adult life (in the contrived world of the tragedy) like a man who, through early frustrations, developed an extraordinary amount of unmastered aggression which his mother diverted from herself onto other objects. Farfetched as this statement about a nonexistent infancy may sound, the play provides more than ample evidence for it. But what has it to do with any ordinary reading of the play?

Conventional criticism might begin with a comment like Professor Harry Levin's, on a contrast in the imagery: between walls, buildings, gates, swords, shields, even the Tarpeian rock (hard things) to images of soft flesh or food or cloth. It is precisely Coriolanus' problem to move "from th' casque to th' cushion" and precisely this he cannot do, instead

commanding peace
Even with the same austerity and garb
As he controlled the war.

(IV.vii.43-45)

Similarly, the imagery contrasts deeds and words, Coriolanus failing at the latter even as he is successful at the former. We are seeing in a symbolic or intellectual form the infantile crisis of identity: Coriolanus forced from the soft and symbiotic unit of mother and son into trying to establish his identity by hard deeds in a harder context. Another group of images and episodes contrasts authority which is sole and authority which is divided. Coriolanus succeeds in battle where he is on his own, but fails when he must mingle himself with others, as in civil affairs—or in the primal mother-child unit.

The analysis of Coriolanus' character leads not only to the reason for his downfall but also to a handsome instance of the way realistic character traits blend into the nonrealistic poetic world of the play, each informing the other. We could say Coriolanus is, intellectually, a tragedy of contexts, but that rather late and adult tragedy reaches back to an earlier one, fighting oneself loose from the context of an overwhelming mother. What, though, of the nonrealistic psychoanalytic interpretations of the tragedy—that Coriolanus is a son confronted with helpful, aggressive, or treacherous fathers (Menenius, Aufidius, or the tribunes) and mothers (Volumnia, the citizens, Rome herself)? Here again Coriolanus can find his identity in aggressive actions either toward men or shared with men; he cannot stand being dependent on a mother figure. The total pattern of the play shades into the individual characterization and also into the tragedy's significance.

Perhaps, too, we have a clue to that feeling with which audiences always confront this play: the difficulty of identifying with Coriolanus. We have trouble identifying with him because his identity is, in fact, so precariously established, as shown by "thy stol'n name Coriolanus." The hero lacks the basic libidinal openness necessary before we can ourselves become libidinally involved in his fate: we cannot love a man who does not love himself. Coriolanus shares this disability with Shakespeare's other "Roman heroes," Brutus, Octavius, or even Hotspur, those men who cast aside libidinal ties to peace and family to pursue aggressive aims of war and murder. But these other plays take us into Shakespeare's own character and away from the process we are considering: the way psychoanalytic readings show the emotional roots of play's theme and significance.

This process probably shows more clearly in The Merchant of Venice than in any other of the plays we have been considering in detail. The psychoanalytic readings are plentiful; the view of orthodox New Criticism is clear. We might begin with C.S. Lewis's statement that "The real play is not so much about men as about metals." The play, he goes on to say, sets off Shylock's efforts to take "a breed of barren metal" against Bassanio's marrying the almost-allegorical figure of The Princess, offering her all he has: "All the wealth I had ran in my veins." The play contrasts the cold, lifeless, mineral wealth worshiped by Shylock to the wealth of human relationships he tries to abuse: Jessica and Lorenzo, Bassanio and Portia, Bassanio and Antonio.

The psychoanalytic readings see the play also as contrasting two worlds. Both have oral and anal elements, but one, Venice, is harsh, aggressive, masculine, and niggardly; the other, Belmont, is bountiful, merciful, feminized, and libidinal. In other words, the psychoanalytic readings find the unconscious roots (in our minds or Shakespeare's) for these two different feelings about wealth, and about male and female. After all, it is woman who is the life-giver—man's role in the process is much more tenuous: "It's a wise child that knows its own father." In effect, we could say The Merchant of Venice deals with an early and ongoing human wish—to have. One way to "have" someone is aggressively, destructively, and such having leads to lifelessness, sterility, the "use" (usury) of people, to use the play's term. The other kind of having leads to mutual giving, to creating life, to riches of a nature quite unmonetary.

The notion of "having" leads to a second basic issue in the play: risk. An element of risk in making your money breed absolves you of the sin of usury. Shylock sins in that he seeks a certain return. Bassanio, Antonio, Portia, Jessica are all willing to take a chance: "Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath."⁵ Again, the psychoanalytic readings contrasting libidinal and aggressive ways of "having" people tell us the roots of the feeling the play gives. To "have" aggressively is to destroy, to render lifeless. To "have" libidinally is to unite with the other, and to do that one must (quite literally) take a chance. To love another, I must risk myself, take the chance of being rebuffed. It is in this sense that Portia presents herself as a risky riddle. Life is a risky riddle, and Portia is life. At the deepest level The Merchant of Venice works with the feeling of trust a child needs to have toward his mother: I can depend on her, I can risk her displeasure without disastrous results. In the world of Venice, taking a chance can lead to getting flesh cut off. In Belmont, out of risk comes trust (this, I take it, is the point of the story of the rings).

But what of the psychoanalytic readings of character? One can see how the nonrealistic psychoanalytic readings of the pattern of the play as a whole show the emotional strata underlying the play's conscious and intellectual "meaning." How does one translate back and forth from criticism's statement (that the play is about risking and having) to the psychoanalyst's statement that Antonio is passively homosexual toward Bassanio and Shylock or that Shylock is orally and anally sadistic? The translation is not so difficult as it might seem. In technical terms, Antonio adopts a passive, submissive, homosexual position toward the men around him; in more idiomatic terms, he is willing to risk "being had." Shylock, however, cannot risk being had; he must be the haver, and aggressive destruction is the only certain way of absolutely, certainly, and permanently "having" someone. We could put it another way. Antonio offers himself; he is willing to risk himself in the service of love, while Shylock takes no such chances. From this point of view the Christian element of the play falls into the psychoanalytic pattern. Shylock matches the absolute destructive power of Yahweh (at least as Renaissance Christians used to think of him), while Antonio corresponds to a passive, submissive Christ, risking his body and blood.

In short, whether we enter the play from the point of view of character, over-all psychological pattern, or conventional criticism of meaning, we enmesh ourselves in a continuum of conscious and unconscious material, each giving richness and depth to the other. We begin, too, to be able to guess at a basic element in Shakespeare's character that runs through his plays: ambivalence. The three plays we have looked at so far (in this continuous psychoanalytico-conventional way) all deal with the difficulty of maintaining toward a single person impulses both of love and hate, wishes to unite with and to destroy.

The problem reveals itself with particular clarity in Romeo and Juliet, for, even from the point of view of conventional criticism, Romeo and Juliet is the quintessential tragedy of opposites: black and white, good and evil, night and day, man and woman, old and young, friar and prince, light and dark—and, especially, love and hate.⁶ The tragedy deals with the ways these opposites work themselves out in action:

For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.

(H.ii.17-20)

The catastrophe comes when these opposites engulf each other, when the hate of the Montagues and Capulets reverses the love of Romeo and Juliet:

All things that we ordainèd festival
Turn from their office to black funeral—
Our instruments to melancholy bells,
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast;
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change;
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse;
And all things change them to the contrary.

(IV.v.84-90)

In the terms of light and dark, Juliet's bright beauty turns the dark tomb into "a feasting presence full of light," and, in general, as the prince says at the end of the play,

Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

(V.iii.291-293)

What of the play from a psychoanalytic point of view? The key opposites are love and hate. Directed toward a single person, a psychoanalyst would call them ambivalence, but in Romeo and Juliet love and hate are carefully split off into different figures: the parents hate, the children love; Tybalt quarrels, Benvolio makes peace; the prince tries to settle the feud by threats, the friar by love. In psychoanalytic terms, the special quality of Romeo and Juliet, its preoccupation with sharply outlined opposites, stems from defending against ambivalence by splitting or isolation. The catastrophe comes when this defense breaks down, when hate engulfs love, killing Romeo and Juliet, and love engulfs hate, reconciling the Montagues and Capulets. We can think of the defensive splitting as the formality of the play (the term orthodox critics offer for describing the puns, rhymes, sonnets, and, in general, the stylized quality). The catastrophe comes when this formality fails to master or disguise the raw emotions beneath.

But, then, what is so intolerable, either to Shakespeare or to us in the audience, about ambivalence? The answer lies in a layer deeper than the defense—in the quality of the love and hate themselves. Hate, in Romeo and Juliet, is associated with the men, while even in the opening scene Lady Montague and Lady Capulet act as peacemakers. Separating love from hate separates man from woman, fends off the sexual act which leads in this tragedy to death, as in the opening quarrel:

Sampson. When I have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the maids—I will cut off their heads.

Gregory. The heads of the maids?

Sampson. Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads—take it in what sense thou wilt.

(I.i.27-31)

Behind the fear of sexuality as a form of aggression we can guess at a fear of being engulfed at a still deeper and more primitive level:

The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb.
What is her burying grave, that is her womb.

(II.iii.9-10)

To be united with another, sexually or as a suckling, is to be swallowed up as in a tomb—in particular, the Capulets' tomb:

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth.

(V.iii.45-46)

If we feel both love and hate toward someone, they must feel the same way toward us. If the someone is an all-powerful parent, ambivalence means total catastrophe and the failure of isolation becomes disastrous.

In short, we can, as it were, regress from the conventional critical reading of the tragedy to see the psychological dynamics behind and within the play and our response to it. The reading of unconscious material interacts with the reading of conscious material, each fulfilling the other to show the wholeness of the play from its deepest and most primitive level to its most sophisticated. We are seeing in action the complex net of interactions between author, text, and audience across the spectrum of conscious and unconscious elements in text and response.

What about the view of the play as imagined event, the realistic analyses of character? We have only one in this play, Theodore Reik's insight that Romeo and Juliet, very much in the manner of ordinary adolescent lovers, are each building up a self out of the other to replace a self no longer felt as narcissistically satisfying. As they say,

Juliet. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

Romeo. I take thee at thy word.
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

. . . . .

My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee.
Had I it written, I would tear the word.

(II.iii.47-57)

In effect, each of the lovers avoids self-hate by receiving love of self from another. The realistic dynamics of character work out both the unconscious, nonrealistic pattern (the unsuccessful splitting of love from hate) and the intellectual "meaning": life on this earth takes the form of opposites and tragedy results when these opposites cataclysmically engulf one another.

My only love, sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathèd enemy.

(I.v.138-141)

At such a moment of birth, when love and hate, a man and a woman, merge, their doom is sealed—or so the tragedy seems to say.

Richard III is another early play in which we can see conscious and unconscious elements in character, plot, and imagery work together around the issue of ambivalence. The history play shows much the same symmetry and formality as the tragedy, most notably in the highly stylized dream scene at the end with the two opposed leaders, one good, one evil, having parallel dreams, one of victory, the other of defeat. Among the opposites in the over-all pattern, three stand out. First, love contrasts to hate, as in the psychoanalytic reading of Richard's character, that he turns libidinal frustration into aggressive political action. Second, we are made constantly aware of either a marked similarity or a sharp difference between the way things seem and the way they really are; between, in other words, inside and outside (the most obvious example being Richard's deformed body as an outward emblem of his deformed soul). Third, the play often refers to people as "souls" (the word occurs twice as often in this play as in any other of Shakespeare's) or, as a distinct alternative, to people as objects to be controlled, "men that fishes gnaw'd upon" or Richard as "A base foul stone." These same attitudes toward people carry over toward words: there is much interest in puns, place and family names, and words used to mask feelings (words, in short, as things); then, by contrast, words serve to curse, prophesy, or pray—they become means to supernatural power. From a conventional point of view, then, three contrasts inform the world of Richard III: love and hate; inside and outside; natural and supernatural.

In the play the retribution that sweeps Richard from the throne has something of a supernatural quality, symbolizing, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the unknown forces within the self. As Richard says, after his dreams before the final battle,

Have mercy, Jesu! Soft! I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason, why?
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree,
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree,
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, "Guilty! Guilty!"

(V.iii.179-199)

His self-dialogue shows the several dualisms of the play, between what is inside and what is outside, supernatural and natural, words as things and words as forces. The speech shows, too, Richard's ambivalence.

In effect, his trouble is that, despite his protestations, he does not love himself—enough. He lacks that basic substratum of self-esteem or narcissism that any human being (or literary character) must have in order to function: he can neither really love nor really be loved,

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

(I.i.28-31)

Richard tries to make up this lack of self-love by making himself all, by making himself the kingdom which will then perforce respect Richard as its king:

The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoiled your summer fields and fruitful vines,

Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
In your embowelled bosoms—this foul swine
Is now even in the centre of this isle.

(V.ii.7-11)

Richard devours his environment. He tries to make what is outside him part of himself; he tries to push the titantic forces within him onto the world around him. In technical terms, we are dealing with two opposed defenses: identification with the aggressor and projection, psychological forms of what the conventional critic would call the theme of inside and outside.

We can also guess at an oedipal motif: Richard behaves like a man who desperately needs to possess (devour) the nurturing mother. Measuring the retaliation he fears by his own brutality, he tries to make himself immune by becoming the thing he fears:

I'll marry Warwick's youngest daughter.
What though I killed her husband and her father?
The readiest way to make the wench amends
Is to become her husband and her father.

(I.i.153-156)

Here we have a clue to the mythic pattern of the play. Good King Henry VI is murdered by a bad king in the image of a boar (as in the myths of Osiris or Adonis) and mourned by three queens. The boar-king, now his successor, lays the land waste, but he is finally killed by good King Henry VII who comes from across the sea to kill the boar-king and set the wasteland free. In effect, in the style of this play, the titanic forces within Richard become supernatural forces outside him. The catastrophe comes when the world outside Richard ceases to be a mere series of things he can manipulate, but takes on a libidinal and aggressive life of its own and revolts against its Frankenstein master.

Again we see the psychological (and mythic) pattern within the character giving rise to the dualistic themes of the tragedy: love and hate, inside and outside, natural and supernatural. Again we see the interaction of conscious theme and unconscious impulse and defense as giving rise to the distinctive style of the play. And, again, we see Shakespeare's concern with ambivalence and defenses against it. Here, Richard defends by attempting to make himself omnipotent, but he fails within and falls without.

Romeo and Juliet and Richard III are early plays—The Tempest comes at the very end of Shakespeare's career. Yet even in this late comedy we find the same attempt to master conflicting aggressive and libidinal impulses through isolating them and projecting them out-ward. The psychoanalytic insights into the play are two. From the realistic point of view of analyzing character, Prospero is giving over his oedipal attraction to his daughter. From a nonrealistic point of view (considering over-all patterns), the other characters in the comedy are projections of Prospero's own psyche.

Conventional criticism points to The Tempest as a play (like the also-late Winter's Tale) about art and nature: a play very much about plays, with its interest in acting, shows, masques, costume, music, and teaching. In effect, the play shows us a magus-king with godlike powers manipulating the other characters so as to lead them into the paths of justice and chastity. Prospero uses his island to teach the way to heaven, just as God (or destiny) "hath to instrument this lower world / And what is in't." As the myth critics have pointed out, the comedy is an initiation ritual, an imitation of death and rebirth (from the sea), with Prospero leading the conspirators through a maze, putting them to sleep, showing them supernatural visions, and finally welcoming them as adult members of the group:

The charm dissolves apace;
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.

(V.i.64-68)

Being controlled by outer force brings the conspirators against the "king" to a mature control of their impulses.⁷ Conversely, by controlling the people around him (projections, according to the psychoanalytic critics), Prospero achieves control of his own inner impulses.

But what are those impulses? The psychoanalytic critics say that Prospero masters his oedipal, libidinal ties to his daughter. We can add that he plays with the death or subjugation of a son (of Alonso, parallel to Prospero). Thus, at the end of his life, we find Shakespeare dealing with the impulses of childhood in their latest development, the father's love for a daughter and his resentment of a son-in-law, one recapitulating the child's love for his mother, the other the last version of a child's aggression toward his father or older brother. And Prospero deals with these impulses very much as a writer-director of plays might, by putting them into dramatic characters and moving them through a plot toward catharsis.

Notes

⁴ Norman N. Holland, The Shakespearean Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 50-71 and 323.

⁵ Holland (n. 4), pp. 91-108.

⁶ Holland (n. 4), pp. 72-90.

⁷ Holland (n. 4), pp. 304-322.