Shakespeare And Jungian Typology

The reader of Shakespeare has always been curious about the Bard's actual religion, opinions, sexual orientation, and relationships. We would like to ask him why his Hamlet is so indecisive, whether Henry V is his ideal ruler, and whether he himself fell in love with Rosalind. The Jungian theories of psychology used in literary interpretation have almost always involved a broader theory of archetypes rather than concentrating on more specific psychological types, despite Jung's belief that an understanding of these types is vital to self-realization. Jung's typological theories, applied to literary studies, may illuminate the personalities of fictional characters and indeed of the author himself. The psychological type of a writer's character can be understood as a projection of the author's own personality: Iago can show Shakespeare's rational function whereas Othello embodies the expression of the dramatist's capacity to experience emotion. Thus Jungian typology initiates a quasi-biographical approach to understanding writers and their works. Instead of directing attention toward an author's education, class prejudices, and so on, it leans toward important emotional undercurrents within the writings, which in turn express similar currents within the author's psyche. Jungian psychetypology is long overdue in gaining recognition as a tool for literary analysis, and this work applies these theories to the full spectrum of Shakespeare's plays in detailed individual readings and comparisons.

Employing the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, Matthew A. Fike provides a fresh understanding of individuation in Shakespeare. This study of "the visionary mode" - Jung s term for literature that comes through the artist from the collective unconscious - combines a strong grounding in Jungian terminology and theory with myth criticism, biblical literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Fike draws extensively on the rich discussions in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung to illuminate selected plays such as A Midsummer Night s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Henriad, Othello, and Hamlet in new and surprising ways. Fike s clear and thorough approach to Shakespeare offers exciting, original scholarship that will appeal to students and scholars alike.

This text, which examines such plays as Measure for Measure, and Oedipus the King, traces the archetypal manifestations of the sacred marriage, the search for wholeness, and the tragic hero, through psychological analysis of Shakespeare and Sophocles.

A close textual analysis of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra reveals the archetypal background which is still relevant in the psychological life of the author's clients. The power which the dark side of the feminine exerts on masculine consciousness; the desire of the feminine to find objectivity through this same masculine consciousness; the mutual hope of finding completion and fulfillment through the opposite: these are the themes not only of Shakespeare's play but of many people's lives.

The Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship examines William Shakespeare’s rationality from a Ramist perspective, linking that examination to the leading intellectuals of late humanism, and extending those links to the life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The application to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets of a game-theoretic hermeneutic, an interpretive approach that Ramism suggests but ultimately evades, strengthens these connections in further supporting the Oxfordian answer to the question of Shakespearean authorship.