Shakespeare, Adaptation, Psychoanalysis

In Shakespeare, Adaptation, Psychoanalysis, Matthew Biberman analyzes early adaptations of Shakespeares plays in order to identify and illustrate how both social mores and basic human psychology have changed in Anglo-American culture. Biberman contests the received wisdom that Shakespeares characters reflect essentially timeless truths about human nature. To the contrary, he points out that Shakespeares characters sometimes act and think in ways that have become either stigmatized or simply outmoded. Through his study of the adaptations, Biberman pinpoints aspects of Shakespeares thinking about behavior and psychology that no longer ring true because circumstances have changed so dramatically between his time and the time of the adaptation. He shows how the adaptors changes reveal key differences between Shakespeares culture and the culture that then supplanted it. These changes, once grasped, reveal retroactively some of the ways in which Shakespeares characters do not act and think as we might expect them to act and think. Thus Biberman counters Harold Blooms claim that Shakespeare fundamentally invents our sense of the human; rather, he argues, our sense of the human is equally bound up in the many ways that modern culture has come to resist or outright reject the behavior we see in Shakespeares plays. Ultimately, our current sense of 'the human' is bound up not with the adoption of Shakespeares psychology, perhaps, but its adaption-or, in psychoanalytic terms, its repression and replacement.