Psychology According to Shakespeare: What You Can Learn about Human Nature from Shakespeare's Great Plays by Philip G. Zimbardo PhD & Robert L. Johnson PhD

The Lion King, West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate all have one thing in common - they are all updated versions of Shakespeare plays. Works that were written four hundred years ago are still popular and relevant today. One reason is the sheer poetry of Shakespeare's language and wordplay, but the other is that he really knew people. In terms of the human condition, nothing has changed.

In this book, two psychology academics argue that the Bard had a psychological insight into human nature. Not only emotions like revenge, jealousy, ambition, love and procrastination, and mental health conditions such as OCD, depression, anxiety and psychosis. But it also covers Shakespeare's broader psychological concepts of personality, perception and consciousness.

The book is divided into four parts with two or three chapters in each. They cover themes of Nature vs. Nurture, the Person vs. the Situation, Into the Mind and Reason vs. Emotion. Fascinating to discover that Shakespeare had so much influence over the developing field of psychology in the 1800s, when terminology was calling out for a wordsmith.

Despite the authors' credentials, the the book is not dry and academic but written in an engaging style and is easy to follow. At times it is surprisingly light and therefore accessible to the layman while also useful for the student.  Of course, analysis of Shakespeare's plays is nothing new (don't we all do it at school after all) and opinions differ on what the playwright's intentions were, and in that sense this book is not different. Well illustrated with photographs, diagrams and paintings as well as quotes from the plays, the book also includes context, explaining the beliefs of the English Renaissance period in which Shakespeare lived, so a fair bit of history is included too. Shakespeare's ideas (in the form of his plays) are compared to modern psychology and the Greek philosophers views.

The appeal of this book for me is my love of Shakespeare, and it is deeply anchored to England because its primary subject matter is the analysis of the Bard's plays and the English Renaissance. However, the American Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford University professor and Psychologist, is more famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971. Here he studied how environment affected human behaviour by dividing students into groups of 'guards' or 'prisoners'. The experiment was stopped after six days because of the distress it caused and the unethical manner of it. The results showed how quickly the students bacem submissive or abusive. Very disturbing. Later research focused on changing ordinary people to focus on avoiding negative social conformity in the Heroic Imagination Project. He died a couple of months after this book was published.

This book though: history, literature and psychology. This is an absorbing and captivating book and I highly recommend it.

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Published by Globe Pequot, Prometheus Books on 18 June 2024.
Advance review copy supplied by the publisher.

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