New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains

It has been over two decades since the publication of the last major edited collection focused on psychoanalysis and early modern culture. In Shakespeare studies, the New Historicism and cognitive psychology have hindered a dynamic conversation engaging depth-oriented models of the mind from taking place. The essays in New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains seek to redress this situation, by engaging a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic theory and criticism, from Freud to the present, to read individual plays closely. These essays show how psychoanalytic theory helps us to rethink the plays’ history of performance; their treatment of gender, sexuality, and race; their view of history and trauma; and the ways in which they anticipate contemporary psychodynamic treatment. Far from simply calling for a conventional ＂return to Freud,＂ the essays collected here initiate an exciting conversation between Shakespeare studies and psychoanalysis in the hopes of radically transforming both disciplines. It is time to listen, once again, to seething brains.

James Newlin is a lecturer at Case Western Reserve University in the Department of English. He is the author of Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television (University of Alabama Press, 2023). He has alsopublished in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Shakespeare Bulletin, SubStance and elsewhere.

James W. Stone is a lecturer on Shakespeare at American University, at the Osher Institute at Johns Hopkins, and at OLLI at American University. He taught at the American University in Cairo and at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within (Routledge, 2010) and articles on Shakespeare, Milton, the Renaissance Ovid, film theory, and contemporary Egyptian art. His current project is co-editing a collection of essays by British scholars on Shakespeare and psychoanalysis.