The Psychology of Shakespeare

Source: Gordon Johnson / Pixabay

Phil Zimbardo’s new book, Psychology According to Shakespeare: What You Can Learn About Human Nature From Shakespeare’s Great Plays, which he wrote with Robert L. Johnson, was recently published. We’re excited to share with you some takeaways from this insightful immersion into the world of psychology by the world’s most famous playwright—nearly three hundred years before it was invented!

Sigmund Freud, the first psychologist to analyze a Shakespearian character, diagnosed Hamlet with an Oedipus complex. Fast forward a hundred years when one of the authors of Psychology According to Shakespeare (2024) realized while viewing a performance of Cymbeline – a story about two young princes abducted as infants and raised in the Welsh wilderness – that Shakespeare was exploring the nature versus nurture issue. In other words, the author realized Shakespeare was, in a way, a burgeoning psychologist.

From a psychological standpoint, his best plays are case studies: Othello is a jealous general whose uncontrolled anger leads to deadly rage; Lady Macbeth suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder; and Richard III is a psychopath, prepared to murder his way to the throne. In these and other plays, Shakespeare reveals his grasp of the human psyche. He was gifted with the ability to reveal people’s private mental lives by cleverly uncovering, on stage, their hidden thoughts, feelings, and motivations.

Three groups of plays

The authors separate the Bard’s numerous plays into three categories: developmental crisis plays; situational comedies and tragedies; and simple history plays. In so doing, we can see how the majority are about the evolution of the characters’ human development. The following is a breakdown of the plays into their groups:

Developmental crisis plays (19): Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, Henry V, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, The Winter’s Tale.

Situational comedies and tragedies (14): All’s Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, A Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Simple history plays (6): Edward III, Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, Henry VI Part 3, Henry VIII, King John.

Five of the six simple history plays mentioned above were written early in his career. Perhaps this is before he had become proficient in learning how to lead his audience and readers into the minds of his characters. The one exception is Henry VIII, which he collaborated on with a younger fellow playwright named John Fletcher. They would write three plays together a few years before Shakespeare’s death at the age of 52.

As for his later works, it appears Shakespeare was pondering human behavioral advancement, as well as its challenges, when he wrote his developmental crisis scripts.

Two lessons

When studying the psychological aspects of Shakespeare’s plays, two psychological lessons become clear:

1. People develop and therefore change over the span of a lifetime. This indicates that we can predict, with a certain amount of accuracy, that most of us will face stress at various ages and stages of development.
2. As people grow and develop, differences in personality, intellect, and the trajectories of our lives become increasingly diverse. This indicates that developmental predictions based on theories of life stages are never perfect. Further, developmental predictions are likely to be wrong about the most interesting people: the outliers.

Shakespearian heroes

Heroes abound in the Bard’s plays. But for purposes of this post we’ll focus on three examples.

• Hamlet is an uncertain hero in the play named for him. He hatches a plan to expose his father’s murderers by hiring a traveling acting troupe to perform for him and the court at Elsinor Castle (the real castle in Denmark is better known as Kronborg Castle). In the play within a play (clever, no?), a king is poisoned similarly to how Hamlet suspects his father was murdered. After the queen in the play declares her deep love for the husband she just killed, Hamlet turns to his mother and asks how she likes the play. She famously replies, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” As an aside, this is an example of what Freud later identified as reaction formation, an exaggerated denial of one’s own motives.
• Portia is the true hero of The Merchant of Venice. A wealthy heiress, she is an intelligent, accomplished young woman with a wisdom beyond her years. She skillfully displays stage six of Erik Erickson’s theory of psychosocial development: challenge of intimacy versus isolation. This stage takes place during young adulthood between the ages of approximately 19 and 40. (Portia is presumed to be in her late teens or early twenties.) In Erickson’s theory, at this stage of life, one can learn to form loving, intimate relationships with others. Or not. Success leads to fulfilling relationships. However, difficulties can take us down a very different path, leading to isolation and loneliness. Portia learns her lesson and ends up living happily ever after with Bassanio, a rather incompetent, albeit charmingly eloquent, gentleman of Venice. Shakespeare was a proponent of clever, strong-willed women, like Portia and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. This may be in part because the monarch at the time was Queen Elizabeth I, a rather formidable, headstrong female role model for his characters.
• Prince Hal/King Henry is the unlikely hero of Henry V. As Prince Hal, he spends his wayward youth as an irresponsible rogue keeping company with the seedier elements of society. He was the Shakespearian equivalent of what we would now refer to as a “bad boy” found in romance novels or films. But in the course of the play, he transforms into the sovereign who would become one of England's most popular kings. He was also a military genius known for his bravery and, hold the phone, piety. Psychologists might attribute the change to internal factors within the person, such as his personality traits, temperament, and character. On the other hand, social psychologists might attribute such a transformation as due to external factors, like the power of the situation, his environment, or other people. The book’s authors believe Shakespeare attributed his change to the person rather than the situation.