The Neurodivergent Brilliance of William Shakespeare

I remember as a girl of fourteen feeling my heart crack through my chest. This wasn’t a panic attack (I’ve had those). I believed my heart was literally bursting out of my chest, like the creature in “Alien,” and I rolled on my stomach to keep it in. I also believed I’d moved a clock with my mind.

I was hospitalized multiple times in the next few years, received shock treatment, got a soup of diagnoses, including schizophrenia. I heard I might be hospitalized for life and believed my life was hopeless. Then I started reading Shakespeare. Specifically, the transformative madness of King Lear.

I’ve no clue at this remove how I came across Shakespeare’s plays. I’d dropped out of high school by the time I found him, grown druggy and aimless. I felt so instantly and utterly connected to Shakespeare’s work that it seemed improbable even to me. I didn’t understand much of the language, but the words took up residence in my bones.

So complete was the connection that when I learned Shakespeare had had a daughter named Susanna, I decided I must be her, reincarnated.

Lear, a British king, offers in his old age to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. He announces that he’ll give the largest share to the daughter who loves him most, then pits the three against each other as his daughters are asked one by one to state publicly how much they love him.

Lear’s eldest daughters simper and flatter. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s English, the eldest says, “I love you more than I love my own eyesight.” The second one responds, “Well, I love you even more than THAT.”

The youngest, Cordelia, tells her father she loves him but “cannot heave/my heart into my mouth.” She refuses to participate in this spectacle—rather mad of her, when just the words “I love you even more than Sister #2” would net her one-third of a kingdom.

Lear banishes Cordelia, yelling that he’d rather give his all to cannibals than to her. He hands country and wealth to the simpering daughters, trusting them to treat him well and forever grant him the privileges of kingship.

These decisions are made by the Lear who is medically sane. Who can’t imagine that he’s not more important than somebody else’s eyes, and that the person who said he is probably doesn’t mean it.

Unsurprisingly, the flattering daughters plan Lear’s death. They drive away his attendants and send him, almost alone, into a storm. There, in conventional medical terms, Lear goes mad.

But in his madness, Lear finds humanity. The change is almost immediate: As he says, “my wits begin to turn,” he looks at the few men around him and sees for the first time that they are real, and they also suffer.

“How dost, my boy? Art cold?” Lear asks his Fool, or jester, a character he has a few scenes earlier been threatening to whip. As his madness grows, Lear realizes being king is an accident of birth—even “a dog’s obeyed in office,” he notes bitterly. He acknowledges his own sin in refusing to help those in need, and exposes himself “to feel what wretches feel” so he might give them more.

Lear reunites with his lost daughter, Cordelia, who has returned to rescue him.

The world is full of sane Lears, in and out of leadership. They're hyper-sane in some ways—going single-mindedly after the things our egos and the worst angels of our culture tell us we should want: an inflated sense of importance, wealth, and power.

Shakespeare knew there can be a necessary madness and a pernicious, even toxic, sanity. Lear’s internal shakeup became less a curse than, ultimately, an invitation, to re-enter the world as a human and not a king.

I am diagnosed bipolar now. It is not an illness to me, but a way of existing. I’ve had psychotic periods that were terrible, and I do a variety of things to manage them. I’ve had other periods that enlarged my capacity to understand the pain of others. I think most people who experience states like anxiety and depression feel that—the sense of being an oyster without its shell and others’ pain like grit on the skin. No one wants to go through life with that level of sensitivity, but most know someone who’d benefit from five minutes of it.

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Philosopher Peter Kingsley wrote "To be controlled by insanity is to be feeble. To be controlled by sanity is to be even feebler." Controlled by sanity, Lear’s thoughts did a nice job of circulating only through the calculus of his own value. Opened up by madness, he sees.

When Lear first glimpses the returned Cordelia, he believes she’s dead, “a soul in bliss.” The comment is called insanity, though it’s mad logic: Lear understands how little he’s deserved, if Cordelia’s human and not a spirit whose job description is forgiveness.

The belief I was Shakespeare’s daughter in another lifetime was my own bit of Shakespearean madness, I think. I needed that father—someone for whom my story began with moving clocks with my mind, rather than ending there, a symptom calling for bodily assault. If anyone clinical had tried, we might have unraveled what it was that I needed. But no one did.

It’s Disability Pride month. I can’t articulate all the reasons Shakespeare gave me hope, but pride is one. It was clear to me that pre-mad Lear led a diminished existence. And that the me who moved a clock with my mind and was Shakespeare’s daughter led a richer one, even if my heart—as Lear’s did, in his madness—occasionally tried to jump ship. One of this month's concerns is the Americans with Disabilities Act and physical access in public spaces. But how do we collectively construct—and protect—mental spaces?

The nature of consciousness is to be diverse, often elliptical, and the deepest hunger of minds is to be understood. Time to turn our mind-care wits toward that.