SOURCE: "'Since First We Were Dissevered': Trust and Autonomy in Shakespearean Tragedy and Romance," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélla Kahn, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, pp.150-69.

[In the following essay, Wheeler explores the psychological polarities associated with seeking self-fulfillment in Shakespeare's late tragedies and romances.]

In the earlier phases of his career, Shakespeare writes interchangeably—perhaps often simultaneously—comedies, history plays, three widely divergent tragedies, and narrative and lyric poetry.¹ But in the later phases, the last two of Dowden's four periods, Shakespeare tends to write within the inclusive framework of a single, exceptionally flexible genre: tragedy from Hamlet to Coriolanus, and then, with some overlap, the late romances.² In this paper I will try to identify polarized trends in Shakespeare's development, separated by generic distinctions in the earlier work, which confront each other in the drama of the tragic period, and which help to shape Shakespeare's artistry in the tragedies and the romances. Although I will suggest some of the ways these trends are manifested in various plays, my main concern is to state as simply and as sharply as I can a complex pattern, itself composed of smaller, interrelated patterns, that emerges from a long view of Shakespeare's development.³ I hope that the effort to achieve synoptic clarity justifies sacrificing the very detailed reading that would be necessary to situate fully any one play within this developmental outline.

The tragedies and the romances dramatize polarized modes of seeking self-fulfillment in conditions of extreme crisis. This polarity, which persists through an astonishing range of transformations, is itself hardly unique to Shakespeare; Margaret S. Mahler generalizes its essential qualities when she speaks of "man's eternal struggle against fusion on the one hand and isolation on the other."⁴ What is characteristic of Shake-speare is a full imaginative investment in mutually necessary but mutually incompatible modes of self-experience at either end of this spectrum, and a recurrent pattern of oscillation between them. At one extreme, a deeply feared longing for merger subverts relations of trust; at the other, failed autonomy gives way to helpless isolation.

The destructive potential in conflicting needs for trust and autonomy, averted in the festive comedies and displaced away from Hal's quest for power in the Henriad, shapes the drama in a new way in Hamlet. A polarity that begins to take form in the movement from Hamlet to Troilus and Cressida recurs regularly in the drama that follows; it is refined to exceptional purity in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus at the end of the period of the tragedies, and again in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. This polarization is expressed in a pattern of contrast that cuts across other lines of development; with varying degrees of clarity and comprehensiveness, it tends to sort the later drama into two groups of plays. The fear of and longing for merger with another provide the primary driving force in the plays of one of these groups. In the other, a comparably ambivalent relation to the prospect of omnipotent autonomy provides the psychic context in which the protagonists seek self-definition.

I will refer to the two groups as the trust/merger group and the autonomy/isolation group. The terms paired across a slash mark designate the primary positive and negative trends—the need and the characteristic danger that accompanies it—that are held in tension within the plays of each group, and that together distinguish the two groups from each other. It must be stressed, however, that these distinctions indicate emphasis and subordination, not exclusion; they point to shifts in relations among basic needs and psychological hazards, present in all the plays.

The tragedies I include in the trust/merger group are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. In these plays, the effort to establish power and autonomy is ultimately subordinated to what proves to be a stronger need for a lost or jeopardized relation of mutuality. A characteristic fear underlying the experience of the protagonists of these plays is loss of autonomy in a union that destroys both self and other. But the longing for merger shapes the action, and is culminated, tragically, in the endings of these plays. Hamlet's final sense of enclosing himself within the sphere of "a divinity that shapes our ends,/Roughhew them how we will" (V.ii.10-11), completes in a dramatically ambiguous religious resolution a movement more directly realized in the human context of the other plays of this group. Othello, after he labors desperately to reconstruct an image of his heroic self, joins Desdemona on her death bed, "to die upon a kiss" (V.ii.359). The dying Lear, with dead Cordelia in his arms, tragically consummates the overreaching longing that has driven him throughout the play. Antony dies in the arms of Cleopatra, to be reborn through the fertile womb of her imagination into a transcendent image of manhood he has been unable to achieve in his life.

In each of these instances, an extravagant effort to protect a deeply threatened ideal of manly selfhood gives way to a more powerful longing, completed with tragic irony, for merger with another. In skeletal form, the culminating action of these plays is a movement through loss of identity in isolation toward a tragic realization, in mutual destruction, of the longing for merger.

The tragedies I include in the autonomy/isolation group are Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus. In these plays, relations of the self to others that promise fulfillment instead prohibit the achievement of stable autonomy. The protagonists of these plays, unlike those of the trust/merger group, move away from relations of unqualified trust, which ultimately prove to be destructive. Each of these relationships is grounded in a perilous overinvestment of self in others—a mistress, a wife, a whole society, a mother—that negates the autonomy these characters will make desperate efforts to retrieve. Troilus' naive faith in Cressida, Macbeth's desperate reliance on the will of his powerful wife, Timon's bizarre attempt to appropriate for himself the role of nurturant mother to all of Athens, and Coriolanus' bond to his mother—all of these shape dependent, contingent identities that define both the strength and vulnerability of the characters involved.

The psychic separateness that each of these characters initially either denies or surrenders is in each case tragically realized as complete estrangement, isolation, and impotent rage against a world perceived as hostile, intrusive "other." The culminating action of these plays moves through destructive merger toward isolation and emptiness. Rather than die, like the protagonists of the trust/merger group, in a union with a beloved other, Troilus is left in impotent, empty rage; Macbeth and Coriolanus, desperately and defiantly alone, are hacked to death by enemies; Timon dies, in a grave of his own making, after petitioning the "common mother," the "common whore of mankind": "Ensear thy fertile and conceptious womb / Let it no more bring out ingrateful man!" (IV.iii.177; 43; 187-88).

The contrasting movements of the two groups can be summarized by a glance at key developments in the experience of Lear and Macbeth. In the opening scene of King Lear, there is a clear incompatibility between Lear's implicit assumption of absolute power and freedom and his actual forfeiture of political power to his daughters. Driving Lear, and underscoring his desire to "shake all cares and business from our age," is his longing for a condition of childlike dependency with his beloved Cordelia: "I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery . . ." (I.i.39; 123-24). After he banishes Cordelia, and after Regan and Goneril have refused to comply with his demands on them, Lear is unable to articulate the "true need" they have failed to accommodate. But after the shattering experience of the storm, in which his effort to assert hallucinatory omnipotence by commanding the heavens to serve his will gives way to his own collapse, Lear can express that need, and the joy that attends its apparent fulfillment, when he would transform imprisonment into the earthly paradise of a sacred union with Cordelia:

Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel
down And ask of thee forgiveness.

(V.iii.8-11)

Lear's final experience oscillates between the unbearable awareness of Cordelia's death—"Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never . . ." (V.iii.308-09)—and the undeniable longing to retrieve her, to exist in the presence of the radiant, human, feminine face and voice that alone can confer wholeness and meaning: "Look on her! Look her lips, / Look there, look there—, . . ." (V.iii.311-12). The sum of Macbeth's experience, by contrast, is realized as absolute aloneness, bereft even of desire for relations with others. The death of Lady Macbeth offstage releases Macbeth's vision of life as a "walking shadow, a poor player" emptied of any context, within the self or external to it, that could provide meaning: "It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing" (V.v.24; 26-28). There is an enormous gulf between Lear's "never" and Macbeth's "nothing." Lear necessarily fails to achieve the conditions he covets for living through Cordelia's presence. Macbeth annihilates in himself the capacity even to imagine a context that would redeem him from absolute, empty isolation.

Whereas King Lear begins with the separation of Lear from his daughters, the quest for royal manhood in Macbeth requires that Macbeth's ambition be nurtured into action by others. After the first exchange with the witches, Macbeth is driven to achieve a magically compelling ideal of manhood articulated for him by his wife. Macbeth cannot refuse this ideal, but he cannot pursue it except by making himself a child to the demonic motherhood held out to him by Lady Macbeth. As the merger of these two characters dissolves, Macbeth's sustained violence, always exercised in the context of family relations—a fatherly king, a father and son, and finally a mother and her "babes"—only serves to isolate him further, until even the illusion of omnipotence nurtured by the witches collapses before the force of a man "not born of woman."

As my emphasis on family relations in King Lear and Macbeth suggests, the psychological polarity I am tracing is grounded in experience in a family, particularly in the crises that accompany the maturational process of forming a separate self out of an originally undifferentiated matrix. Early development involves, according to Margaret Mahler, "a gradual growing away from the normal state of human symbiosis, of 'oneness' with the mother." As the child discovers that he is not identical with the essential source of nurture provided by the mother, and that his world is not magically responsive to urgent demands originating in him, he must struggle to master the first and most profound divisions in the development of the human self. This development proceeds along the lines of what Mahler calls the "gradual process of separation-individuation." The movement through individuation is essential to the establishment of autonomous identity, but it is accompanied by unavoidable and repeated traumas of separation. This leads Mahler, with other analysts, to see the "growing away process" as a "lifelong mourning process."⁵ Erik Erikson calls the achievement of the early phases of the separation-individuation process "basic trust," the confidence manifest at the very core of experience that inner urges and external providers are trustworthy enough to allow further development of the self and its relations to others. But as Erikson observes:

Even under the most favorable circumstances, this stage seems to introduce into psychic life (and become prototypical for) a sense of inner division and universal nostalgia for a paradise forfeited. It is against this powerful combination of a sense of having been deprived, of having been divided, and of having been abandoned—that basic trust must maintain itself throughout life.⁶

The establishment of basic trust, and out of it the first gains toward the achievement of autonomy, underlies all later development, both toward relations with others and toward the consolidation of individual identity. Mahler suggests that "the entire life cycle" pivots on the double "process of distancing from and introjection of the lost symbiotic mother, . . . the 'all-good' mother, who was at one time part of the self in a blissful state of well-being."⁷ But as the ego develops along boundaries that distinguish the world from the self, crises in the process of separation can engender the wish to reinhabit the symbiotic unity of infant and mother; crises within the environment provided by the mother, including those that provoke fears of "re-engulfment," can lead to the defiant repudiation of essential others and to fantasies of a powerful autonomous self that magically incorporates symbiotic omnipotence. Neither the longing for fusion nor the longing for omnipotent autonomy can be integrated fully into the contingencies of living, and the separation-individuation process to which they are bound is never complete. Arnold H. Modell emphasizes that, in the development of an individual self:

the acceptance of separaten ess, as is true for the establishment of one's identity, is never absolute or final. Even if one has established the capacity for mature love, established a sense of identity, and accepted the uniqueness of the beloved—there is a wish to merge, to fuse, to lose one's separateness.⁸

The wish to merge with another, however, if felt to endanger one's need to be separate, may in turn intensify the effort to establish total separation through withdrawal and isolation. Both the movement toward separation and the longing for fusion may jeopardize the equilibrium of the self that emerges from their interaction. The longing for merger threatens to destroy precariously achieved autonomy; the longing for complete autonomy threatens to isolate the self from its base of trust in actual and internalized relations to others.

Shakespearean tragedy dramatizes conditions of extreme crisis that bring these longings directly into the felt experience of the protagonist's vulnerable, heroic identity. As C. L. Barber observes, "the roots in infancy from which identity grows outward in healthy situations become, in tragic situations, the source of impossible, destructive, and self-destructive demands."⁹ In much of the earlier drama, however, Shakespeare uses generic boundaries to reinforce selectively barriers that protect "enterprises of great pitch and moment" from the intrusion of deep psychic conflict. The longing for trustworthy feminine control that often lies near the psychological center of the festive comedies asserts itself independently of, or in triumph over, fears of encroachment and sexual degradation that can attend the movement toward intimacy. In the second tetralogy of English history plays, Prince Hal engineers his way toward the assumption of royal authority in an almost entirely masculine world.¹⁰ The Henriad works through tensions of father and son conflict uncomplicated by a directly expressed maternal presence; the actions of the festive comedies proceed under the direction of benign feminine control—but again without the explicit presence of mothers. In the Sonnets, the loving poet often sacrifices claims for his own autonomy to live through an idealizing identification with the adored friend. Self-denial in the Sonnets is transcended by merger with the friend, in which the poet assumes a generous, nurturant role that derives from experiences of maternal cherishing.

Hamlet, because it brings into tragic drama the full range of family-based conflict, forecloses solutions available in earlier works that exclude or minimize potentially disruptive conflict. It seems that the tragedies culminating in relations of destructive merger seek to reinhabit the world of love grounded in trust, often presided over by benign female presences, as dramatized in the festive comedies. The women of these tragedies—Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia, Cleopatra—often recall the women who establish the conditions for loving in the comedies, but they cannot accomplish the comedies' goals of stable relations of mutuality. By contrast, the desperate recoil into movements toward travestied autonomy in Troilus, Macbeth, Timon, and Coriolanus recall the simpler world of masculine authority, uncomplicated by the presence of captivating women, that Prince Hal negotiates in the Henriad.¹⁰

The split in the Sonnets between the chaste, almost sacred idealization of the friend and the degraded sexuality of the dark lady—a split that originates in conflicted responses to a single maternal figure—is taken up and refocused in the tragedies of the trust/merger group, usually in a single relation to a woman, as when Othello inscribes "whore" upon the brow of "divine Desdemona." A sense of desperate isolation, which emerges in those sonnets that suggest failures in Shakespeare's identification with the friend, anticipates the tragic intensity of helpless separation in the plays of the autonomy/isolation group. In Timon of Athens, this helplessness is given dramatic shape by Timon's desperate denial of it when he rails savagely against a society that has failed to reciprocate his nurturant generosity.

In the development of Shakespeare's later drama, the two groups balance and perhaps beget each other in a rhythmic unfolding of plays—or in one instance, pairs of plays—in the same genre. From this vantage point, Hamlet in the trust/merger group is closely linked to Troilus and Cressida in the autonomy/isolation group, Othello and King Lear to Macbeth and Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra to Coriolanus, as if the movement through isolation to union and the movement through union to isolation recurrently engender each other.¹¹ This rhythmic, oscillating pattern can be traced into the reconstructive actions of the late romances, blurred a little in the experimental gestures toward new form in Pericles and Cymbeline, and worked to great clarity in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Like Roethke's woman, "lovely in her bones," Shakespeare's art "moved in circles, and those circles moved."¹² The interanimations of turn and counterturn within this psychic dance are virtually infinite and occur at every level. But it is useful to conceive of four separable contexts in which a movement through an enduring polarity—of trust inseparable from the fear of destructive merger and of autonomy entangled with the threat of isolation and emptiness—is realized in these plays: in the interaction of conflicting needs for trust and autonomy in the protagonist of a single play; in the oscillating movement from a play in the trust/merger group to a play in the autonomy/isolation group—from King Lear to Macbeth, for instance; in a spiraling movement toward increased polarization in the development first of tragic and then of romance form; and in the polarized relation of the two genres to each other, as the central experience of loss in the tragedies gives way to the restoration of lost relations in the reunions of the late romances.

Lying behind these developments, as a half mythic paradigm of stable family harmony, is Hamlet's nostalgic remembrance of his father's kingly authority, complemented by the loving union of royal husband and wife. But at the outset of Hamlet, this private paradise of familial order has become an "unweeded garden." The tragedies pursue fragmentary, aberrant, self-destructive gestures toward reestablishing either half of the balance of trust and autonomy Hamlet recalls in his idealization of the past. The late romances move toward reinstatements of the identity anchored in images of manly autonomy and familial unity, which Hamlet has lost through his father's murder and his mother's remarriage. Although in Hamlet the need to be an autonomous, active self and the need to find a relation of trust in which to ground that self are closely balanced, Hamlet must locate himself within a relation to transcendent providence before completing his personal mission, and both achievements are dramatically ambiguous. But Hamlet's efforts to incorporate the image of vengeful, heroic manhood stipulated by his father's ghost, and to recover the capacity for trust shattered by Gertrude's incestuous union, identify the psychological directions in which the ensuing drama will move. The tragedies that follow intensify this polarization of mutuality based on merger and an autonomy that requires separation. The polarization reaches extreme form in Antony's death in the arms of Cleopatra, set against Coriolanus' death in an alien city. The late romances, by extension and by contrast, culminate in the mutuality reachieved in The Winter's Tale and in Prospero's movement toward benevolent autonomy in The Tempest.

Antony's bond to Cleopatra expresses a longing denied by the Roman ideal of manly honor and autonomy. Once he has been ensnared by Cleopatra's "strong toil of grace" (V.ii.346), Antony can neither retrieve full rapport with that ideal nor fully articulate an identity for himself independent of it. When he fails to live up to a Roman ego ideal he cannot abandon or qualify, the essential imagery of self-experience becomes for him as "indistinct as water is in water" (IV.xiv.10-11).¹³ The deep antagonism between Antony's Roman self and the mode of relatedness into which he is drawn by Cleopatra is ironically manifest in Antony's death. He declares himself "a Roman, by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished" (IV.xv.57-58) while lying in the arms of the woman who has led him beyond the experiential limits of Roman manhood.

Shakespeare makes it clear that Antony's failure to integrate the two poles of his experience is a necessary, tragic failure. To be Cleopatra's "man of men" (I.v.72) is to be enmeshed in the contradictory imperatives realized as paradox in Antony's death. In his life, they are realized by a series of circular movements in which the union of Antony and Cleopatra is severed and then renewed with heightened intensity. The longing for this union is the most powerful need driving Antony: it at once allows him to achieve a richer, more inclusive humanity, and estranges him from political resources established by Caesar's deflection of all human impulse into the quest for power.

The longing for identity in mutuality continues to seek elaboration after Antony has been sacrificed to it. It remains for Cleopatra to articulate a dream of an Antony adequate to her own shrewdly exploited dream of herself. From Cleopatra's vantage point, "'Tis paltry to be Caesar" (V.ii.2). In the dream she describes to Dolabella, an extravagant consummation of human longing for transcendent identity finds in her vigorous, earthy imagination the home it cannot maintain in ongoing human experience: "His delights / Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above / The element they lived in" (V.ii.88-90). This dream of her lover's endless "bounty" ("an autumn 'twas / That grew the more by reaping" [V.ii.88-89]), which embraces Antony in Cleopatra's bountiful imagination of him, is the exalted counterpart of Lady Macbeth's effort to live through her husband in the image of a manhood she covets. Underlying this dream is the longing to reinhabit the serenely mysterious realm of complete unity that Lady Macbeth shatters in her violent repudiation of maternal nurture:

Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?

. . . . .

As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—
O Antony!

(V.ii.307-11)

Cleopatra has offered Antony a mode of relating in which his manhood is completed in his response to the feminine in Cleopatra, and which releases the mutual interchange of masculine and feminine in both lovers.¹⁴ Although this union is tragically incompatible with the structures of sustained life as they are understood in this play, its ideal imaginative completion holds the stage even as Cleopatra's corpse is scrutinized by curious Romans seeking a cause of death in a world that does not crack, even with "the breaking of so great a thing" (V.i.14).

The restless expansiveness that often makes Antony and Cleopatra seem as much like comedy or romance as tragedy, the inclusiveness of an action that holds contradictory modes of living and understanding in its wide embrace, and the rich lyrical imperialism that can melt Rome in Tiber to establish new heaven, new earth, make this play a fitting culmination of the tragedies of the trust/merger group. Wide-ranging dramatic movements concerned with establishing a source of irreducible value characterize these plays: Hamlet's imperiled nobility is set off by the rotten world of Denmark; the precious womanhood of Desdemona is dramatized against Othello's "lust-stained" imagination of her; Cordelia's truth survives the sacrifice of Cordelia in Lear's quest to fulfill "true need." More than in any of these plays, in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare dramatizes value in a dream of fulfillment plainly incompatible with pragmatic reality. Cleopatra's folly, as Janet Adelman observes, "is the folly of vision; and the whole play moves toward the acknowledgement of its truth."¹⁵

Coriolanus, by contrast, completes a group of tragedies centered from the beginning in movements toward disillusionment and devaluation. Cressida's infidelity and the bankruptcy of heroic ideals define the world of Troilus and Cressida; the "imperial theme" is transformed into royal butchery in the action of Macbeth; Timon's grand generosity collapses into vindictive misanthropy in Timon of Athens. Like Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus exaggerates trends in the group it completes. The strong Egyptian fetters that bind Antony are liberating as well as destructive; Cleopatra's immortal longings are illusions that illuminate a human truth; together the two lovers appropriate the right to define, against Caesar's might, what is noble, what is great. On the other hand, psychological patterns that entrap Coriolanus are explored in ways that severely qualify the glory of Roman manhood to which he aspires. The "lonely dragon" is accorded no visionary power to counterpoise the relentlessly reductive force of the action in the last tragedy of the autonomy/isolation group.

Volumnia creates in Coriolanus a self that expresses "my very wishes / And the buildings of my fancy" (II.i.188-89). As Coriolanus fulfills her wish to be a man, embodying the "valiantness" he has sucked from her, the relation also takes unto itself a deep maternal antagonism toward the son who becomes the man such a mother longs to be herself.¹⁶ Within the context of her exalted identification of herself with her son, the glory Volumnia takes in Coriolanus' wounds expresses a deep resentment toward a manhood she cannot realize in her own person. The inseparability of the nurturant maternal bond and violent attack of the infant who has become manly warrior is established strikingly in Volumnia's own imagery:

The breasts of Hecuba,
When she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier
Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood
At Grecian sword, contemning.

(I.iii.38-41)

In his brutal successes at war, Coriolanus both localizes his mother's ideal of manhood and absorbs her fierce inner rage. In battle, Coriolanus will display his bloody body to urge on the Roman troops, for the wounds he receives are in balance with the destruction he metes out, in a kind of desperate homeostasis of violence. But in peace, his wounds become a source of vulnerability and shame. Coriolanus' angry refusal to show his wounds to the citizens reflects a fear of exposing himself as incomplete, piecemeal, a collection of fragments held together only by his mother's idea of him.

Coriolanus' fear of gaps in himself—represented by the wounds his mother has enjoined him to suffer, and which she regards as emblems of her own self-fulfillment—betrays his perpetual indebtedness to Volumnia for what provisional psychic wholeness he possesses. Coriolanus is ashamed to show the wounds that reflect his own fear of being female, of being identical with that part of his mother which she repudiates by identifying herself with him. This fear of being female, of being possessed by "some harlot's spirit" (III.ii.112), is linked to a hidden hatred of the bond with his mother, which the play expresses by dwelling on Coriolanus' turning against his motherland and on his role as destroyer of family units in battle. But the action bends this resentful impulse back toward its origins, until Coriolanus' imminent assault on Rome is equated with an assault on "thy mother's womb / That brought thee to this world" (V.iii.124-25). Coriolanus is forced to renounce in direct confrontation a matricidal impulse implicit in his effort to "stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin" (V.iii.35-37).

The impotent rage released in Coriolanus when Aufidius calls him "boy" completes an understanding developed throughout the play—that Coriolanus' savage masculinity remains bound to the overpowering mother who invented it and filled it with her son. Coriolanus would rather die than acknowledge this psychic incompleteness:

Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. Boy? False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there
That, like an eagle in a dovecoat, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles;
Alone I did it. Boy?

(V.vi.110-15)

He is destroyed amidst cries that define him as the arch-enemy of the family and reflect his deep hostility toward the familial constraints that underlie his very being:

ALL PEOPLE Tear him to pieces!—Do it presently!—
He killed my son!—My daughter!—He killed my cousin Marcus!—He killed my father!

(V.vi.119-21)

Like his own challenge to the Volscians, the cry of the people to tear the hero to pieces clarifies the fragmentation that results from Coriolanus' futile effort to assert a manly autonomy independent of his bond to Volumnia.

The late romances as a group retrieve a place for the basic needs sacrificed in the tragedies to destructive impulses within those needs. A psychological index to the development through the tragedies to the romances can be constructed from D. W. Winnicott's understanding of the role of aggression in the formation of the self. Winnicott specifies conditions that enable the self to "use" objects that exist "out in the world."¹⁷ This "capacity to use objects" includes the capability of relating to others in a manner that acknowledges their full, independent existence. In locating others in a world outside the realm of mere projection and exploitation, Winnicott argues: "It is the destructive drive that creates the quality of externality." The object can be "used" in a world recognized as external to the self only if it is first destroyed in a psychic world not yet differentiated from the world beyond it: "It is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of the subject's omnipotent control." Winnicott points to the importance of the mother (and the often analogous role of the analyst) as "the first person to take the baby through this first version of the many that will be encountered, of attack that is survived." Acknowledgment of a separate world, not completely independent of projective fantasy, but which does not exist simply as a creation of projection, can only be achieved when a world beyond omnipotent control reveals itself as such by surviving its destruction within the sphere of omnipotence. The completion of this process is crucial to the establishment of both trust and autonomy; it makes possible relations to others that can unite persons who acknowledge the separateness of one another.¹⁸

In the crises of Shakespeare's later drama, the boundary that establishes the condition of externality is blurred by protagonists who replace actuality with worlds that reflect inner need and conflict. In movements either toward fusion or radical isolation, encounters with essential others recreate in drama the conditions of infantile destruction Winnicott describes. But in these plays, the implications of this aggression extend far beyond a two-person encounter grounded in one individual's regression to deep conflict; destructiveness based in fantasy leads to actual destruction in the plays' dramatic reality. Often, as in King Lear, this destruction becomes the image of permanent, generalized loss:

Kent. Is this the promised end?
Edgar. Or image of that horror?
Albany. Fall and cease.

(V.iii.264-65)

But each of these plays, at its psychological core, participates in part or all of the process Winnicott describes, in which an essential other is denied a place in reality, is destroyed in fantasy, survives that destruction, and thus becomes a part of the actual world, separate from the subject, but united with him in a bond of trust. Within the complexities of their whole dramatic movements, the romances dramatize the renewed completion of this process, but the tragedies return it to and abort it at the destructive phase.

In the tragedies, essential others, replaced by projective fantasies, are denied places in the actual world. Tragic protagonists who lose touch with actuality attempt to recapture it within the sphere of omnipotent control: "Now he'll outstare the lightning" (Ant. III.xiii.195), Enobarbus observes of an Antony who has forfeited his actual resources of power; "I banish you!" (Cor. III.iii.124) cries Coriolanus to the Rome that has banished him. Frustrations that penetrate the assumption of omnipotent control, rather than lead to its dissolution, tend to divert magical, projective thinking toward a negative vision no less grandiosely self-centered. Othello, "the noble Moor whom our full Senate / Call all in all sufficient" (IV.i.257-58), expects the universe to suffer a cosmic repetition of his own unbearable loss after he murders Desdemona:

I have no wife.
O, insupportable! O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that th' affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.

(V.ii.98-102)

Timon would annihilate Athens, indeed humanity ("Destruction fang mankind!" [Tim. IV.iii.23]), when Athenian ingratitude annihilates in him the illusion of a world defined by the nurturant generosity through which he has lived. But Timon's raging belongs no less to the projective realm of omnipotent control than his earlier generosity, and it is Timon, not mankind, who cannot survive his destructiveness: "'Timon is dead, who hath outstretched his span. / Some beast read this; there does not live a man'" (V.iii.3-4).

More than that of any other tragic protagonist, Timon's fate reflects the catastrophe of infantile self-annihilation that Winnicott associates with the failure to be able to create the quality of externality. It is a limitation of Timon of Athens that Timon's misanthropic reconstruction of the world is inadequately balanced by a dramatic reality independent of it. The Athenian world Timon rejects is never compellingly established in the first place, and it is scarcely affected by Timon's withdrawal of himself from it into impotent rage. More typically in the tragedies, destructiveness that originates in the sphere of omnipotent control does lead to actual destruction in a fully rendered world that sustains life for the protagonist who has belonged to it. When Lear gives up his kingdom, he relinquishes such a world, one that Cordelia and Kent struggle at the outset to keep intact and struggle throughout to reinstate.

In doing this, Lear trades actual power for illusory omnipotence. When he banishes Cordelia, he does not send her out into the world, but expels her from an imaginary world of omnipotent control defined by magical, automatic responsiveness to the demands of his psyche. When Lear is ready to go with her to prison, he continues to deny her a place in a world beyond that created by his own need. In his longing, Lear destroys Cordelia by creating her presence in the image of his own need and imprisoning her in that image.¹⁹ But the consequences of Lear's actions extend throughout the world of the play. He has tragically altered the conditions of an actual world in which Cordelia must be destroyed, cannot be retrieved, cannot be used. In the play's symbolic action, the malevolence of that outer world mirrors the inner destructiveness of Lear.

The late romances create a comparable intermingling of symbolic and actual destruction. The resolutions of these plays hinge on the restored presence of those who "survive destruction," but often at considerable cost in the actual world. After Leontes retreats into persecutory fantasy in The Winter's Tale, he cannot begin to recover a world apart from his omnipotent recreation of it until his "psychic murder of Hermione."²⁰ The eventual recovery of Hermione, who survives Leontes' hatred, will reinstate the creative rapport between inner need and external reality that Leontes annihilates in jealous delusion. But this process of recovery is decisively complicated when the attack on Hermione destroys in actuality the one figure who provides for Leontes a link between the world of fantasy and the actual world. That link is Mamillius, whom Leontes both loves as a son in the world and endows with projected attributes that reflect his persecutory fantasies: "Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in him" (II.i.57-58).

In the infantile struggle that Winnicott interprets, the external world can only be recognized and lived in after it survives destruction, but in the complex dramatic reality of The Winter's Tale, Leontes can recognize a world apart from fantasy only when an essential part of it does not survive. Even the oracle of Apollo is powerless to free Leontes from his delusion until news comes of Mamillius' death. Mamillius is a real victim of the assault on Hermione that takes place within the sphere of Leontes' destructive omnipotence; Mamillius dies when he is deprived of the essential maternal presence Leontes destroys in fantasy. The loss of Mamillius in the actual world confirms its independent existence, but cannot enable Leontes fully to assume his own place in it. The completion of Leontes' mourning must reestablish the boundary that both connects and separates the inner and outer world, and must prepare him to acknowledge that outer world as a place to live in. Only then can he and his wife be newly united, in a bond of trust that confirms the autonomy of each, "at the point in time and space of the initiation of their state of separateness."²¹

Each of the romances culminates in the restoration of figures who have survived destruction. The romances also tend to divide into pairs of plays which extend the groups within the drama that precedes them. Pericles and The Winter's Tale follow in the line of those plays that move toward tragically achieved relations of merger, and I regard them as part of the trust/merger group. Cymbeline and The Tempest have stronger affinities with the tragedies of the autonomy/isolation group, in which the protagonists move toward isolation and emptiness. The resolution of Pericles in the reunion of the protagonist with his daughter and wife is facilitated by the intervention of the goddess Diana. Like that of Pericles, the ending of The Winter's Tale is centered emotionally in the protagonist's recovery of lost relations of mutuality and trust. Hermione's reappearance in The Winter's Tale takes unto itself the quality of sacredness suggested by the appearance of Diana in Pericles.

By contrast, Jupiter, god of masculine power and autonomy, must intervene to allow the resolution of the tangled action of Cymbeline. Autonomous patriarchal power is restored to the human sphere in The Tempest through the actions of Prospero. In the ending of The Tempest, and to a lesser extent in Cymbeline, feelings of loss and separation qualify the spirit of restoration and renewal. The Tempest closes on a Prospero who has given up his beloved daughter, his beloved Ariel, and his beloved magic, and for whom henceforth "every third thought shall be my grave" (V.i.311).

In The Winter's Tale, the longing for merger and the violent recoil from it are ultimately subordinated to achieved trust and mutuality. Perdita, Hermione, and Paulina together enable Leontes to recover a place in the world of relations he has himself destroyed in the delusional rages of the first three acts. In the hallowed presence of Hermione, maternal and wifely, sacred and human, Leontes recovers the base for potent, sustained selfhood lost to Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Antony. In The Tempest, the need for autonomy is purged of the drive toward omnipotence and the collapse into failure. Rendered helpless by his misplaced trust in Antonio, Prospero wrests new power away from the savage legacy of the "foul witch Sycorax," malevolent symbol of feared maternal power. In Prospero, Troilus' "venomed vengeance" yields to the "rarer action" of a mercy that seems to contain, rather than transcend, his vindictive impulses. Macbeth's usurpation by a demonic wife and three cunning witches is superseded by the liberation of those powers imprisoned by Sycorax. Timon's fantastic quest for maternal omnipotence and his collapse into misanthropic rage are transformed into artfully exploited magical power and Prosperous final resignation of himself to his own human limitations. Finally, the mutual banishment of Coriolanus and Rome gives way to the mutual recovery of Prospero and Italy.

In Leontes, Shakespeare allows the richness of relations grounded in mutual trust to flow back into the life of a character who has fearfully transformed those riches into a nightmare of violent jealousy. The Winter's Tale moves beyond the poisoned cup that fragments psychic wholeness to the mutuality Leontes finds through a magic "lawful as eating" (V.iii.111). In Prospero, Shakespeare provides a character who subdues the longing for omnipotent control to responsible power, who can release the daughter whose loss leaves an unfillable void in himself and not collapse around his own experience of emptiness. Leontes' recovery of himself in the embrace of Hermione and Prospero's assertion of self-sufficient autonomy through the power of his mind extend, and perhaps embody in its purest form, the division I have tried to trace through the drama leading up to these plays.

The restoration of Leontes in the facilitating presence of Hermione reverberates back through the plays of the trust/merger group to complete an image of manhood complementary to the feminine powers invested in Portia and Rosalind in the festive comedies. Hermione "hangs about his neck," restoring to health not only the mind that has imagined a Polixenes who "wears her like her medal, hanging / About his neck" (V.iii.112; I.ii.306-07), but also Hamlet's anguished memory of Gertrude, who would "hang on [King Hamlet] / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on" (Ham. I.ii.143-45). Essential to the comic achievement that takes The Winter's Tale beyond the catastrophic world of tragedy is the movement toward a reciprocal, mutually creative relation between a vigorously rendered manhood and a comparably complete realization of essential womanly power. But the play can only come to this point through Leontes' trusting submission of himself to the active, guiding spirit of Paulina.

The trusting investment of self in others gives way in The Tempest to exacting control and shrewd vigilance; the mature womanly powers embodied in Paulina and Hermione drop out altogether. The maternal capacities to give and withhold essential nurture, which inform Timon's initial generosity and his subsequent withdrawal of nurture in the feast of stones and water, are incorporated into Prospero's magic, as in the banquet Ariel first provides and then withdraws from the distraught visitors to the island. In order to dramatize the controlling presence of Prospero, Shakespeare must split his imagination of the feminine into the compliant, innocent daughterhood of Miranda and the evil, maternal power bequeathed to the island by Sycorax. Prospero's autonomy, which completes with new intensity an ideal of manhood anticipated in the Henriad, is achieved by the rigorous subordination of trust to power. In the world of The Tempest, trust exercised within the sphere of human activity "like a good parent" (I.ii.94) begets a contrary falsehood great as itself

Taken together, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest relate to each other across a division in Shakespeare's imagination that is never closed nor completely bridged. This division separates a potential identity sought in a trusting investment of self in another, and which turns on the mutual dependence of male and female, from a potential identity sought in a counterturn toward the assertion of self-willed masculine autonomy over destructive female power or over compliant feminine goodness. But The Winter's Tale and The Tempest look across this division toward needs that form the separate, incompatible centers of the previous drama.²² Perhaps, like Leontes and Polixenes, these two plays, written at the end of Shakespeare's career, "shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds" (WT I.i.28-29). From the vantage point of this conceit, it is well to recall what happens when that vast is dissolved by intimate contact in The Winter's Tale. But nonetheless, Leontes, restored fully to himself in the arms of Hermione, presides over the ending of The Winter's Tale with kingly power and autonomy. And Prospero, having willed his own autonomy in triumph over the threatening power invested in Sycorax's heritage, submits himself to the playwright's ultimate "other" for the life-giving applause that only can save him from isolation and despair. Together, these plays culminate a vast dramatic enterprise that encounters with incomparable courage and skill human vulnerabilities that entered into Shakespeare's life, and enter into our own, in that "wide gap of time since first / We were dissevered" (WT V.iii.154-55).

Notes

¹ In my title I quote from Leontes' closing speech in The Winter's Tale; all quotations from Shakespeare are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969). Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, April 1977, and included in a lecture given at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, in February 1978. The present form is adapted from the final chapter of my book, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980).

² See Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881). His division of the works into periods is entangled with speculations regarding "spiritual tendencies" in Shakespeare's "personality" that occasionally make Dowden's Shakespeare almost unrecognizable to modern readers. But the groups themselves provide a useful way of identifying important shifts in Shakespeare's development of dramatic form, and I think his insistence that the critic must in some way "attempt to pass through the creations of a great dramatic poet to the mind of the creator" (p. xii) is as appropriate to our age, with its speculative tools, as it was to Dowden's.

The chronology Dowden provides has been altered by modern scholarship, which pushes Julius Caesar back to 1599 from Dowden's date of 1601-03. I do not include Julius Caesar in my discussion of plays from the tragic "period," although it anticipates them more than it recalls either Titus Andronicus or Romeo and Juliet. Twelfth Night, according to modern dating, may have been written after Hamlet, and its comic world reflects some of the concerns of the tragedies, but its deepest affinities, in spirit and form, are to the festive comedies that precede it. Two comedies contemporaneous with the tragedies, All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure, can be assimilated to the pattern I trace through the tragedies and the romances (see n. 22).

³ The idea of "psychological development," as Heinz Lichtenstein has observed, requires the "postulation of an invariant, to which all transformations must be related." See "The Role of Narcissism in the Emergence and Maintenance of a Primary Identity," The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45 (1964), 55. In his own work, Lichtenstein postulates "the concept of a primary identity as an invariant, the transformations of which we could call development" (p. 55). My purpose is not to disclose a primary identity for Shakespeare, but to establish the presence of polarized modes of self-experience that are repeatedly transformed in the tragedies and romances without losing their identifying characteristics. Because I see this polarity as both an animating force and a structural principle in Shakespeare's development of the drama, one that persists as an "invariant" against which complex variations can be measured, it serves a purpose in my argument analogous to that served by the concept of primary identity in Lichtenstein's work.

⁴ Margaret Mahler, "On the First Three Subphases of the Separation-Individuation Process," Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science, 3 (1974), 305.

⁵ Mahler's theory of "the psychological birth of the individual" specifies a series of subphases, each of which contributes differently to the separation-individuation process, and each of which has its specific forms of psychic hazard (pp. 295-96). But all the subphases are understood within the larger context of opposing gestures toward fusion and separation, a context that she sees as active throughout the life span.

It is this larger context that I have found most pertinent in formulating an overview of Shakespeare's development in the tragedies and the romances. Mahler's full-length studies of early development, which summarize and extend work reported on in many articles, are On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation (London: Hogarth Press, 1969) and The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

⁶ Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), p. 250.

⁷ The "'all-good' mother" is not an actual person but an aspect of the infant's experience of maternal care as a "blissful state of well-being." Mahler links this experience with an "actual or fantasied 'ideal state of self,'" which is a source of longing identical with the longing for fusion ("On the First Three Subphases," p. 305).

⁸ Arnold H. Modell, Object Love and Reality (New York: International Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 61-62.

⁹ I quote from the opening chapter of C. L. Barber's book (in progress at this writing) on the place of the tragedies in the development of Shakespeare's drama and the drama of the Elizabethan stage. This note gives me an opportunity to acknowledge my large indebtedness to Barber's work generally, and in particular to strategic comments he offered in response to an earlier draft of this paper. Painstaking readings of earlier drafts of this paper by Carol Thomas Neely have also contributed substantially to its present form.

¹⁰ Ernst Kris, in his essay on "Prince Hal's Conflict," makes this point in distinguishing Hal's relations to parental conflict from Hamlet's: "In Hamlet, the oedipus [conflict] is fully developed, centering around the queen. In Shakespeare's historical dramas women are absent or insignificant. Prince Hal's struggle against his father appears therefore in isolation, enacted in male society." See Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 17 (1948), 502.

¹¹ Although the chronology can never be made totally secure, there is considerable consensus among recent scholars and editors. Harbage provides the following dates for the tragedies, which vary little from those supplied by G. Blakemore Evans in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) and by Sylvan Barnet in The Signet Classic Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963, 1972): Hamlet, 1601; Troilus and Cressida, 1602; Othello, 1604; King Lear, 1605; Macbeth, 1605; Timon of Athens, 1606; Antony and Cleopatra, 1607; and Coriolanus, 1608. Harbage's dates for the late romances are: Pericles, 1607; Cymbeline, 1609; The Winter's Tale, 1610; and The Tempest, 1611.

¹² "I Knew a Woman," in Theodore Roethke, Words for the Wind (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), p. 151.

¹³ Janet Adelman perceptively explores the movement in the play by which Antony's Roman identity is dissolved and transcended through its immersion in the fluid, hyperbolical, erotic world of Cleopatra's Egypt in The Common Liar: An Essay on 'Antony and Cleopatra' (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1973): "The Roman horror of that loss [of oneself in the sexual process] and the ecstatic union which the lovers feel as they die are two elements in the same process: for the dissolution of personal boundaries is both our greatest fear and our highest desire" (p. 149).

¹⁴ Murray M. Schwartz emphasizes the "interpenetration of opposites, self and other, male and female," in Antony and Cleopatra, as he explores shifts in Shakespeare's use of the "playspace" of drama in the development from the tragedies to the late romances. Schwartz's paper, now Chapter 2 of this book, was delivered at the International Shakespeare Association Congress, Washington, D.C., in April 1976. In the same session, Janet Adelman presented a paper that is now Chapter 7 of this book; it helped focus for me the discussion of Coriolanus that follows.

¹⁵ Adelman, The Common Liar, p. 163.

¹⁶ Cf. Philip E. Slater's analysis of the "oral-narcissistic dilemma" in Greek family structure and mythology in The Glory of Hera (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Slater describes "a deeply narcissistic ambivalence in which the mother does not respond to the child as a separate person, but as both an expression of and a cure for her narcissistic wounds. Her need for self-expansion and vindication requires her both to exalt and to belittle her son, to feed on and to destroy him" (p. 33).

¹⁷ D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 91.

¹⁸ Winnicott summarizes his argument by providing the following sequence of development: "(1) Subject relates to object. (2) Object is in process of being found instead of placed by the subject in the world. (3) Subject destroys object. (4) Object survives destruction. (5) Subject can use object" (p. 94; see also pp. 90, 92, 93).

¹⁹ M. Masud R. Khan provides a clinical instance of this process in a discussion of three patients whose progress in analysis was blocked by their incapacity to relinquish "symbiotic omnipotence": "They needed my presence—in the analytic situation so they could disregard and negate me, and in their life so they could be related to themselves." See The Privacy of the Self (New York: International Univ. Press, 1974), p. 84.

²⁰ Murray M. Schwartz, "The Winter's Tale: Loss and Transformation," American Imago, 32 (1975), 156. This illuminating discussion of "how Shakespeare transforms the fears and realities of loss into the theatrical revelation of fulfillment" (p. 146) completes a thorough psychoanalytic interpretation begun in "Leontes' Jealousy in The Winter's Tale," American Imago, 30 (1973), 250-73. I am also indebted to Stephen Greenblatt for emphasizing the importance of Mamillius' death in the whole design of The Winter's Tale (personal communication).

²¹ Winnicott, p. 97. The quoted words are italicized in the original.

²²The Winter's Tale and The Tempest also look back to the more problematic resolutions of two comedies from the tragic period, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. The resolution of the plot in All's Well through the efforts of Helena suggests the roles of such heroines as Portia and Rosalind in earlier comedies, but Helena's cure of the king's fatal disease and her arrangement for her own miraculous reappearance after rejection and apparent death anticipate the roles divided up among Paulina, Perdita, and Hermione in The Winter's Tale. The design of All's Well places it among the trust/merger group ("we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear," says Lafew [II.iii.5-6]), although Bertram resists trusting submission up to the very end and does not then embrace it very convincingly.

Measure for Measure, by contrast, comes under the control of a man, Vincentio, who, as many have noted, anticipates the role of Prospero in The Tempest. Measure for Measure belongs with the autonomy/isolation group; indeed, Vincentio's autonomy is purchased at the expense of isolating him from direct involvement in the range of human conflict that besets lesser mortals in this play. His proposal to Isabella in the comic resolution suggests a denial of that isolation more than a fully successful triumph over it. The book from which this essay is adapted is a study of All's Well and Measure for Measure and the place they occupy in Shakespeare's development (see n. 1).