Discover Your Genius by Michael J. Gelb

Author:Michael J. Gelb
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061743320
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE UNIVERSAL SELF

William Shakespeare was the supreme literary manifestation of the Renaissance, who knew, as Leonardo da Vinci did with his Canon of Proportion, that “Man is the measure of all things.” But just as Leonardo’s example lives far beyond the Renaissance, so does Shakespeare’s. As Ben Jonson wrote, Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.”

According to Harold Bloom, it was Ben Jonson who “first saw and said where Shakespeare’s eminence was located: in a diversity of persons.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s range of investigation into his concept of the inner self is dazzling in its breadth and depth. His characters come to life not so much as Protestants or Catholics, Danes or Englishmen, but as archetypes of consciousness.

Shakespeare is able to show us so much about ourselves because what he reveals of the self is universal and true. His plays are simple and accessible enough to be understood and enjoyed by masses of people from all continents. Yet they are so infinitely complex that scholars continue a never-ending quest to fathom his depths. Shakespeare still has much to tell us, and the emotional intelligence in his work has not yet been fully measured. If you are tired of Shakespeare, as Ben Jonson suggested, you are tired of life.

Even the father of the scientific study of emotions, Sigmund Freud, acknowledged his debt to Shakespeare, from whom he drew many of his case histories. (He maintained, for example, that the key to Hamlet was the Oedipal relationship between Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude, and that all earlier attempts to interpret the play were “differing and contradictory.”) In fact, Shakespeare conveys the human drama so effectively as to foreshadow virtually everything that the father of psychoanalysis would later tell the world about the human psyche. Three centuries before him, Macbeth’s question to his physician anticipates the very premise of the discipline Freud would create:

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