New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains. Edited by James Newlin and James W. Stone

Psychoanalysis, as think-pieces in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other journalistic outlets have observed, is currently having a renaissance. It’s a particularly opportune moment, then, for the appearance of New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains, described by its co-editors, James Newlin and James W. Stone, as the first major edited collection on psychoanalysis and early modern literature and culture in over two decades (2). Prefaced by a bracing introduction in which Newlin and Stone argue for a return to psychoanalysis in early modern literary studies, the volume’s fourteen chapters aim to demonstrate what psychoanalytically informed approaches can offer a field of scholarship dominated by historicist and empiricist methodologies, in which recent studies of the mind have more often engaged cognitive psychology and neuroscience than Freudian theory.

Two essays discuss the affinities between psychoanalytic clinical practice and the close-reading typical of literary interpretation. Nicholas Bellinson argues that Hamlet’s speeches, from the soliloquies in which he works through his inner conflicts to his enigmatic dialogues with other characters, anticipate the distinctive method of the psychoanalytic “talking cure.” Richard M. Waugaman, a clinical psychoanalyst, also takes up the analyst–analysand relationship; while literary scholars may balk at his Oxfordian views, they are unlikely to object to his belief that analysts and critics share a responsibility to listen closely to the idiosyncrasies of their patients’ and texts’ language.

The essays in New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare model this attentiveness. Some do so by demonstrating how psychoanalytic concepts can illuminate the dynamics of Shakespeare’s plays. In an especially rich reading of the repetition compulsion intrinsic to revenge, Kasey Evans traces the return of the knowledge that she suggests Hamlet represses—the Ghost’s story of his father’s sinful corporeality—in his impossible striving to “set right” a time that is “out of joint”(37). James W. Stone’s analysis of Julius Caesar, which considers Caesar’s assassination as alternately a repetition of the primal murder of the father and the sacrificial killing of a feminized victim onto whom male anxieties have been projected, attends to the way in which the repression and ritualized repetition of this trauma regenerates the body politic. Russell J. Bodi brings Freud’s description of cathexis and anticathexis to bear on Hamlet’s mental preparations for his fatal fencing match with Laertes. W. Reginald Rampone, Jr., suggests that the distinction Lacan draws between the penis and the phallus may explain why productions of The Taming of the Shrew stop short of full frontal male nudity when Petruchio disrobes. Andrew Barnaby tracks Shakespeare’s evolving “psychotheology” in two temporally proximate plays, Hamlet and Twelfth Night, that explore what it is to be answerable to the Other (52). Reading Alex Garland’s 2014 sci-fi film Ex Machina as an adaptation of The Tempest that elucidates both the narrative construction and the early modern theatrical staging of Miranda, James Newlin suggests that Shakespeare, like Lacan, understands desire to be structured by fantasy. In a vibrant essay that examines Romeo and Juliet’s topos of infinite iterability through Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s account of melancholia as incorporation, Adam Rzepka reads the Capulet tomb as a figure for a fantasy of timelessness.

The volume’s overarching claim that psychoanalytic and historicist modes of reading can productively complement each other is borne out by several chapters that show how psychoanalysis helps render early modern forms of thought legible. Devori Kimbro’s essay on Macbeth proposes that equivocation, described by Protestants as a terrible splitting of the self, is an early modern counterpart to psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma. Gabriel A. Rieger draws on Freud’s theory of primary masochism to argue that Hamlet represents self-dissolution as fundamental to self-fashioning. Two especially strong contributions on early modern formulations of gender, sexuality, and/or race underscore the importance of post-Freudian developments and interventions in psychoanalytic thought. In an essay that treats biblical and classical typology (a framework that stresses the patterned recurrence and retrospective interpretation of events) as an early modern analogue to trauma theory, Zackariah Long demonstrates how a typological reading of Pericles’s encounter with Antiochus and his daughter lets us see the paternal incestuous desire that haunts the play. What Pericles repeats, Long argues, is not the Oedipal drama but instead an archetypal story about the problems that arise when “there is no feminine counterweight to patriarchal authority” (143). While acknowledging the racism and Eurocentrism of Freudian thought, Drew Daniel suggests the capacity of psychoanalytic theory to “analyze the structures of racist fantasy before us” (165). This potential is persuasively actualized in his excavation of Antony and Cleopatra’s “scatological imaginary” (164), which Daniel reads as a fantasy of white masculinity and situates within the play’s strategies of racialization and hierarchy of racial value.

If New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare arrives in the midst of psychoanalysis’s return, its conception dates back to a symposium held on the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns of March 2020. This point of origin is the subject of the volume’s final chapter, an afterword by the literary scholar and training analyst Vera J. Camden, who traces the pandemic’s effects in the essays’ collective motifs of trauma, loss, death, and the death drive—dynamics that psychoanalysis offers unique purchase on recognizing and understanding.

This is a timely volume that will hopefully herald a revival of psychoanalytically oriented inquiry in early modern literary and cultural studies. As Stone and Newlin suggest in their introduction, such future work might engage with a broader range of psychoanalytic thought, and be shaped by the insights of (as well as the critiques of psychoanalysis posed by) other analytic frameworks, such as premodern critical race studies and early modern trans studies. It might also develop in dialogue with the renewed interest in psychoanalysis happening in para-academic institutions and publications. This book is a welcome contribution to that conversation to come.