Shakespeare - a modern psychologist

by Mihai Radulescu

English version Mihnea Gafita

A Confession

It may be inappropriate that this essay should open with a confession. However, if I am making it, I am also readily forgiven: the reader I address has reached the generous age of confessions. Moreover, since it is an essay, the author's digressions come as only too natural, even if my first one precedes the beginning of the work itself.

So, I was sixteen - the age of the earliest questions. One of my teachers inquired what it was that I wanted to be in life.

"Before I can decide who I am going to be, I would like to know who I am" - I replied.

The same concern I worded so naively at the time comes up again and again in the mind of every teenager, phrased and rephrased in hundreds of ways, as a crowning of his or her youth about to slip into maturity.

"Read Shakespeare" - my teacher advised. "In his work you will find a lot of answers concerning even yourself."

"How can that be?!" - I wondered, drivelling awkwardly. (There may also have been some disrespect in my reply, since I meant it to point to my sense of responsibility, or even "superiority"). And I added, as if I was talking to myself: "As far I have seen on stage, Shakespeare's characters are heroes of adult dramas."

"With adult actors, you mean. If you read the plays carefully, you will see that almost all his main characters are of the same age as you are: Romeo, Cordelia, Desdemona, Ophelia - there's no need for me to list them all. He also brings children before the footlights from time to time. Puberty is one the ages that Shakespeare loved most, and early maturity, one of his favourite themes. Believe ne, you won't find any friend more tolerant, nor any adviser more experienced. No one else knew the youth's soul better than he did.

This made me think. Until then, I had considered Shakespeare to be the greatest playwright, but I had not been particularly fond of him. I had tried several times to read something by him: the profusion of his poetical imagery had left me numb and the age in which his plots took place, one so many centuries apart from our own, emphasized, in my opinion, the fancifulness of whatever he was trying to tell. Shakespeare - an author who could decipher the souls of my generation? A contemporary? I was almost ready to discard such an outrageous idea, if it hadn't been for the great trust I cherished in my teacher's opinions.

Once again I opened a volume of the English playwright's works, searching for the Renaissance man who had been recommended to me so warmly for his love of his fellow humans, but I was also afraid of the Baroque structure of his wordly edifices, that was so alien to the sharp-tongued nature of my teenager soul. I opened the book and never let go of it and more. Nevermore.

From that moment on, I began reading with different eyes. I had previously wanted either to have a good time, or to obtain some information. This time, I was looking for Man. For myself. And I met him. I met myself. In each and every of his printed letters. I abandoned myself to enthousiasm as if it were a stream, until the merging became so thorough, that one night, after a delight of reading, I exclaimed: " I am Shakespeare!" (how awful it sounds!) And I would not deserve any more consideration in my own eyes if I had not added straight away: " We are Shakespeare! All of us!"

Indeed, Shakespeare has helped me know myself, just as he has helped me know the people around me. No one is missing from his wrintings: the fighter, the degenerate, the enthousiast, the plotter, the infatuated, the cinic, the sacrificed, the hangman, the revolutionary, the tyrant, the subdued, the conqueror, the scholar, the no-gooder, the poet, the swindler, the brave, the coward, the honest, the treacherous, the good, the evil, the rightful, the intriguer, the healthy, the sick, the lover, the indifferent, the earnest, the whimsical, the clear-headed, the dreamer, the hero, the coward a.s.o. Each of those stands for a world of his or her own, but also for a part (at times a tiny one, at other times a major one) of the psychology of any of us. I discovered the keys of those worlds and of those recesses of the soul - and I keep on discovering them - in the words put on paper by William Shakespeare.

In the beginning, I deciphered the characters. The laws came later. With the countless books about characters in the work of William Shakespeare and the other, as many, about the laws of human psychology reflected in it, that have been published, my own experience proved to be universal, since I was able to find it in the knowledge of all those who have analyzed his writings. Until recently, forgetting about my own starting-point, I had considered the great Will's theatre to be an asset of all mankind, one conquered and assimilated for good. But then, it so happened that I was talking to this young man who told me unexpectedly: "I would like to know myself". The advice I gave him is quite obvious and I need not repeat it here.

*

Since this piece of advice can be addressed to all youths, so they may acquire the certainty that Shakespeare's work really is a Book of Man, I have taken the liberty to analyze it, in the following pages, in terms of a series of statements of modern psychology. I do not claim that by so doing I can bring too much help to the achievement of self-knowledge or to the knowledge of man in general. However, I open two gates at a time: that of psychology and that of the shakespearian world. It may be that my virtual young reader's attention will be kept concentrated all along. Maybe he or she will not be supplied with enough relaxing digressions. But I am aware that they do not actually want any. Whenever one undertakes to learn about Man, joking and relaxing become out-of-place. And no one knows it better than the youth craving to decipher reality.

To this end, I have put together this modest essay. I hope it will be deemed more than that.

*

Whoever writes about Shakespeare does his or her best to explain to the reader that the great Brit was a great man of letters. To us, William Shakespeare is not a writer; he is life itself. A hypothesis has been circulated, that Shakespeare were not the author of the Works of William Shakespeare, because life has no author. Life, whether it is called Homer, Cervantes, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Mauriac a.s.o., must be experienced and studied, not attributed. After all, life does not obey the laws of aesthetics; it is the other way round: life generates them.

This book is not concerned with a critique of the shakespearian Work , let alone with throwing a critical glance at psychology.

All we are trying is to sketch a portrait: the portrait of shakespearian curiosity in relationship with the human psychic. While the impressionistic portrait does away with the mechanicity of the realistic one and replaces it with the practical results of several researches concerning the laws of perspective; while the cubist portrait replaces those with a number of findings in the field of geometry and dynamics, we here will attempt to draw the outline of our model with such lines as fit the purpose already mentioned. Unlike the countless animated, academic, fictionalized, monographic, or novelistic portraits that alleviate the scholarly wakes of the connoisseurs of beautiful books, this approach will resort to a less usual technique: that of an inverted perspective, since we believe that it allows to bring to light certain features overshadowed by our fellow authors' majestic, substantial oil portraits. What does such a technique imply? It is not meant to depict the development of psychology from the age of the playwright down to our own, but to prove that the psychology unveiled by the writer has nowadays gained the advantage of a systematizing rigour unhoped for: it manages to break itself up into countless little boxes, forgetting all about the initial thesaurus of the Complete Works ; these boxes await their place in the first chapter of a future, more comprehensive history that will discuss the evolution of human thinking on human thinking).

We believe in the incentive "Know thy own self" as a one-and-only window open towards the truth. But we also believe that there is a door that must be unlocked first, before heading towards that window. The caption on that door says: "Know thy writers". They are the only divers allowed to descend into the depths of the restless waters of the human soul. (The composers and the graphic artists also do that, but they have their own secret gates, their mysterious idioms difficult to cast light upon within the framework of such a straightforward experience as we suggest here.) Know your writers and you will see the face of the human psychic enigmatically mirrored in their smiles.

Hence, we open the book of Shakespeare's Works in order to better understand modern psychology. Are there any fields of the latter, in which the playwright's plough has not left deep furrows? It is doubtful. Are there any facets of the human psychic in Shakespeare's world, that contemporary psychologists have not yet approached? It is certain. We have toiled ourselves with a morsel of a morsel of it for years on end. We have called it dychotomic-antonymical thinking; its analysis is one of the concerns of anthropological stylistics , a would-be science. We will not bother this essay's kind reader with cryptical theories. We will briefly state our opinion and illustrate it equally briefly. In exchange, we will clarify, as profusely as we will do it concisely - and we hope to be forgiven this dychotomic-antonymical structure -, the fact that Shakespeare, beside being life itself, is also the realm of total psychology, while psychology proper is made of a bunch of theories, experiments and measurements that prove useful when it comes to stick labels onto the jars containing "similar psychic reactions, under similar conditions".

Now that we have stated our own modest contribution to the expansion of knowledge on the human psychic in connection with the shakespearian texts and we have also obtained our young reader's permission to mention it when it proves useful to the understanding of the Work under discussion, a question naturally arises, that must be dealt with from the very beginning: why a stylistical anthropology? Are there several types of stylistics?

To clear things up, let us open a couple of dictionaries, for it may well be that our reader is not in the least accustomed to this term. In the current sense of the word, stylistics is "a discipline that studies the means of expression of a community, of a domain, of a writer, from the point of view either of its affective content or its expressiveness, or of qualities and their norms" ( Explanatory Dictionary of Romanian , 1995); or it is "the study of style as a means of analyzing works of literature and their effect; now often, specifically, such study using mathematical and statistical methods" ( Webster's New World Collegiate Dictionary , 1995); or, more concisely, it is "the scientific study of style" ( Petit Larousse , 1990). The dictionaries also mention the special mode of expression used in a certain field, for certain purposes, the polished language, the noble behaviour triggered by good manners ( The Concise Oxford Dictionary , 1966), the behavioural characteristics of an individual, a group, or a people, the way of living of the same a.s.o. Expression seems to be the only common denominator of these definitions we have hurriedly reviewed. However, in spite of the first definition quoted above, we believe it is not expression itself that the stylistical researches are concerned with, but its "mode". Hence the possibility of having several types, or at least branches, of stylistics, according to the (incomplete) variety of the profile outlined.

Among those, anthropological stylistics should deal with the way of being, of acting, of behaving, in short of expressing himself (this is not a redundancy) of the human being seen in its natural evolution. (We presume our reader is curious - to paraphrase Camil Petrescu - to see ideas come to life, for such a genesis mirrors, in its own way, the mechanisms of human psychology.)

Let us now resort to the great French naturalist Buffon, founder of modern stylistics, and see to what extent he may be of use to us. Here is the very first sentence he greetes us with: "Style is man himself" . This sentence refers to the quality of literary style. But, commenting on his own statement, Buffon grants style much more than a plain aesthetic role; it is the mediator of expression: "Style is but the order and movement imposed to our own thoughts. If we link them up tightly, if we gather them up, the style becomes firm, nervous, and concise; if we let them follow one another loosely and only come together under the sign of words, however gracefully put together, then the style is diffuse, verbose, and inarticulate" ( ibidem , p. 11). To each section of the argument corresponds a unique stylistical attire. Therefore, the stylistical analysis should lead to the unveiling of those unique rational structures as emphasized through style. The surface is the effect of the content and the content is the cause of the surface. It is like a children's game.

In the French scholar's opinion, the literary work (and, of course, any work of art) is the result of the cooperation between "genius", "judgment", "perception", and the "intellectual operations" they breed. Therefore, the analysis of the work cannot but throw light upon such operations as have given birth to it.

What has all this got to do with Shakespeare, even if there seems to be a connection between stylistics and psychology? - our reader is bound to wonder. (Here is a point scored, because a stylistical branch of psychology does not exist yet.) It all becomes obvious as soon as we turn our attention to any page written by the great dramatist. Let us take, for instance, the following fragment of As You Like It : "ROSALIND: Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal and who he stands still withal. - ORLANDO : I prithee, who doth he trot withal? - ROSALIND: Marry, he trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized: if the interim be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year. - ORLANDO : Who ambles Time withal? - ROSALIND: With a priest that lacks Latin and a rich man that hath not the gout, for the one sleeps easily because he cannot study, and the other lives merrily because he feels no pain, the one lacking the burden of lean and wasteful learning, the other knowing no burden of heavy tedious penury; these Time ambles withal " (Act III, Scene 2).

We need not quote the entire passage, that is twice that long. The above-quoted cues are more than enough to illustrate the statement that metaphor parallels reality. Metaphor steps outside the path of reasoning. And yet, it favours the understanding of reality; it is an expression - or a means of expression - apart from the logical one, but it is not less useful to knowledge. Logical expression is possible because the intellect is capable of logical thinking. What about metaphorical expression? We say: "a flower of a girl": if we can say it, we are first and foremost able to conceive it; if we are able to conceive it, we have captured reality in such a representation. What kind of thinking have we been using, then? There is only one answer: a stylistical thinking - metaphorical thinking in this case. Likewise, there must be a specific stylistical thinking for every family of figures of speech: hyperbolic thinking, metonymical thinking a.s.o. But do these types of thinking manifest themselves only through figures of speech? Let us resort to Buffon once again, for he has something to say in connection to this last perplexity of ours.

Not only works of art raise problems of style. Human behaviour equally measures the "order and movement imposed upon its own thoughts" . Further more, artistic expression is but a particular case of human behaviour; be it linguistic, pictorial, musical a.s.o., or the most commonplace behaviour of the man who wakes up, who is hungry, who loves - any and each of those is an unpolished mirroring of thought.

According to Buffon: "These men feel vigourously, they are equally affected and, by means of a strictly mechanical impression, they share their enthousiasm and affections with the others. We are dealing here with the body speaking to the body: all the movements, all the signs participate and officiate equally" ( ibidem , p. 10). This passage tells us not only that man has at his disposal, beside speech, as many means of communication as there are types of contacts he establishes with the other beings, or, rather, with reality (for it would be insufficient and inaccurate to confine ourselves to man's contacts with his fellow humans), but also that the organization of all these means of communication - that is to say, the behavioural style - reflects the structure of his thought and, moreover, of his experience. Hence the conclusion that, when two or more behaviours collide, a situation occurs that can be analyzed from a stylistical point of view.

These considerations build up the scientific ground based on which we feel entitled to state that a figure of speech does not exist in a linguistic context alone - it can also appear as a behavioural or situational figure. Only one specific operation of thinking can square with each and every figure of speech. In literary history, we have often come across the opinion that a work of art represents a development of a given figure of speech. This or that figure of speech synthesizes the existence of a smaller or larger group of people: do we not say that poets "have their heads in the clouds"? Did the ancients not complain: homo homini lupus ? Such figures of speech unveil the existence of a paralogical thinking that is being demonstrated by its very existence. The stylistical analysis cannot be reduced to a simple statistical-aesthetical undertaking; it is supposed to unveil the intellectual connections that have bred such non-logical, yet true, sentences and build up an original system of approaching reality. This is what anthropological stylistics is all about.

*

Since we have been allowed to explain our point of view concerning the analysis of some of the less tackled shakespearian dilemmas, we will take the liberty of inviting our patient reader to accompany us a little further, so as to clarify what dychotomic-antonymical thinking means to us. In All's Well That Ends Well (Act V, Scene 3), we find the following statement: "KING: For thou mayst see a sunshine and a hail / In me at once. " The character speaks about the coexistence, within himself, of two distinct and opposite objects, which corresponds to the elementary definition of antonyms. On the other hand, in The Life and Death of King John (Act III, Scene 1), we find: " CONSTANCE : .peace is to me a war. " This other character describes an identity, in fact one single object with two aspects simultaneously opposed. Structures of the latter type, that are almost impossible to count in Shakespeare's plays, have been classified in a variety of ways , but mostly mistaken for antonyms, perhaps because antonyms may be associated with simultaneity, whether implied, as in the area of the universalia, or specified, as in the following example: " .dost thou put upon me at once both the office of God and the devil?. " Lafeu exclaims in All's Well That Ends Well (Act V, Scene 2); on the other hand, the simultaneity of the two aspects is implicit in the figure we have pointed out: " Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way's a Mars. " the Egyptian Queen says in Antony and Cleopatra (Act II, Scene 5). Moreover, antonyms may be determined from a modal point of view, so as to suggest unity: " The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. " the First Lord meditates in All's Well That Ends Well (Act IV, Scene 3) - but it is a false impression: what we are dealing with is a set in the mathematical sense. Likewise, our figure may sometimes resemble an antonymy: " .though music oft hath such a charm / To make bad good, and good provoke to harm. " Duke Vincentio praises music in Measure for Measure (Act IV, Scene 1). This idea cannot be phrased otherwise: the elimination or replacement of the predicate would trigger the change of the idea. But it takes some time to turn "bad" into "good" and "good" into "bad", when "bad" and "good" are simultaneous; moreover, "good" is implied in "bad", as another potential aspect of it, and the other way round, which makes turning one into the other possible.

This figure we have discovered is the so-called antonymical dychotomy . (I can almost see my readers' faces harden: more difficult terms? You were saying. they mean to object, but they should rest assured that a good understanding of such terms will grant them a fast and smooth reading of the pages to follow.)

Dictionaries explain the term dychotomy as being "the division of certain stems into bifurcated branches" ( Larousse ). Originally pertaining to botany, the term has been circulated by aesthetics and literary theory, sometimes to point to the notion of duality, at other times as a synonym for antonymy, omitting the fact that it used to refer to a bifurcation, that is to the acquiring of two simultaneous existences, without invalidating, in the process, the existence of the primary, never-abandoned, unity. We are using it while having in mind what has just been mentioned, with the adjective attached to it indicating precisely the antithesis between the two aspects resulting from the bifurcation.

Let us now resort to the shakespearian examples once again, in order to get accustomed to this figure which, according to anthropological stylistics, signals a specific thinking, easy to track down in the plays approached below.

For instance, in Troilus and Cressida : "TROILUS: But if I tell how these two did co-act, shall I not lie in publishing a truth? [.] Was Cressid here? - ULYSSES: I cannot conjure, Trojan. - TROILUS: She was not, sure. - ULYSSES: Most sure she was. - TROILUS: Why, my negation hath no taste of madness. - ULYSSES: Nor mine, my lord: Cressid was here but now. - TROILUS: Let it not be believed for womanhood! Think, we had mothers; do not give advantage to stubborn critics, apt, without a theme, for depravation, to square the general sex by Cressid's rule: rather think this not Cressid. - ULYSSES: What hath she done, prince, that can soil our mothers? - TROILUS: Nothing at all, unless that this were she. [.] This she? No, this is Diomed's Cressid: if beauty have a soul, this is not she; if souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies, if sanctimony be the gods' delight, if there be rule in unity itself, this is not she. O madness of discourse, that cause sets up with and against itself! Bi-fold authority! Where reason can revolt without perdition, and loss assume all reason without revolt: this is, and is not, Cressid. Within my soul there doth conduce a fight of this strange nature that a thing inseparate divides more wider than the sky and earth, and yet the spacious breadth of this division admits no orifex for a point as subtle as Ariachne's broken woof to enter " (Act V, Scene 2).

We notice the torments of the mind that cannot recognize its own multiple structure ("if there be rule in unity itself") and grants one single being two aspects distinct and opposed (although it is "a thing inseparate", it is also"more wider than the sky and earth"); the angelical beloved is also the deceiver who "soils" womankind and the very notion of maternal purity, feeling close to "madness" and "revolt": indeed, the unexpected appearance of such a way of thinking in the usual texture of logic may throw off balance or shove someone towards lunacy, as we will see is the case with Othello. Therefore, the final words of the passage quoted above contain more than an explanation of a given figure of speech; they express a proper evaluation, conducted by the great William Shakespeare, of the experience of whoever becomes aware of a dychotomic-antonymical thinking dominating his or her reasoning.

As the reader may himself have noticed by now, the text represents an illustration of a doubtful attitude generated by a cynical or skeptical state of mind (Ulysses') and engendering a pessimistic reaction of the receiver. Such antonymical dychotomies we consider to be negative ones.

When they are positive , they represent an illustration of a state of euphoria and engender an optimistic reaction of the receiver. In All's Well That Ends Well , the King shows Diana a ring: "KING: Know you this ring? This ring was his of late. - DIANA: And this was it I gave him, being abed. [.] - KING: [.] This ring, you say, was yours? - DIANA: Ay, my good lord. - KING: Where did you buy it? Or who gave it you? - DIANA: It was not given me, nor I did not buy it. - KING: Who lent it you? - DIANA: It was not lent me neither. - KING: Where did you find it, then? - DIANA: I found it not. - KING: If it were yours by none of all these ways, how could you give it him? - DIANA: I never gave it him " (Act V, Scene 3). The owner of the ring is present and on trial, so Diana refers to him playing a form of hide-and-seek and rejoicing: "DIANA: Because he's guilty, and he is not guilty: he knows I am no maid, and he'll swear to't; I'll swear I am a maid, and he knows not. [.] But for this lord, who hath abused me, as he knows himself, though yet he never harm'd me, here I quit him: he knows himself my bed he hath defiled; and at that time he got his wife with child: dead though she be, she feels her young one kick. So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick. And now behold the meaning " ( ibidem ).

The neutral structures are wordings by which the author does not intend to communicate any of the characters' states of mind. They are part of the vast category of plays upon words, hence somewhat gratuitous, e.g. : "APEMANTUS: [.] How now, poet! - POET: How now, philosopher! - APEMANTUS: Thou liest. - POET: Art not one? - APEMANTUS: Yes. - POET: Then I lie not. - APEMANTUS: Art not a poet? - POET: Yes. - APEMANTUS: Then thou liest. ( Timon of Athens - Act I, Scene 1)

From the point of view of consciousness, antonymical dychotomy may be: a) unconscious , e.g. : "ROSALIND [To DUKE SENIOR:] To you I give myself, for I am yours. [To ORLANDO ;] To you I give myself, for I am yours " ( As You like It - Act V, Scene 4); the girl speaks according to her heart's impetus, unaware that by so doing she unveils a state of mind with two aspects simultaneously opposed; b) conscious , e.g. : "DUKE OF YORK: Both are my kinsmen: the one is my sovereign, whom both my oath and duty bids defend; the other again is my kinsman, whom the king hath wrong'd, whom conscience and my kindred bids to right. Well, somewhat we must do. " ( Richard II - Act II, Scene 2); here is the exact same situation, but submitted to a test of mind; becoming aware of it does not make it easier, on the contrary, the character lives the anxiety within himself; and c) willful , e.g. : "OLIVIA: Stay. I prithee, tell me what thou thinkest of me. - VIOLA: That you do think you are not what you are. - OLIVIA: If I think so, I think the same of you. - VIOLA: Then think you right: I am not what I am. - OLIVIA: I would you were as I would have you be! ( The Twelfth Night - Act III, Scene 1).

From an intellectual point of view, antonymical dychotomy can be induced of inferred. We call it induced whenever it is triggered by somebody else's dychotomic-antonymical thinking, as in Troilus and Cressida : "PANDARUS: [.] Helen herself swore th' other day, that Troilus, for a brown favour - for so 'tis, I must confess -, not brown neither. - CRESSIDA: No, but brown. - PANDARUS: 'Faith, to say truth, brown and not brown. - CRESSIDA: To say the truth, true and not true " (Act I, Scene 2). Cressida's words are being induced by Pandarus' hesitations: she imitates him on purpose, to point out the nonsense he is talking.

The inferred antonymical dychotomy expresses the result of an analysis of circumstances or experience, e.g. : "CARDINAL PANDULPH: For he that steeps his safety in true blood shall find but bloody safety and untrue" ( King John - Act III, Scene 4).

Any antonymical dychotomy, whether induced or inferred, can be accepted or rejected by the human mind. If it is accepted , it produces a whole series of others. Could the ideas put forward in the following passage not have been communicated by other stylistical means? Still, Shakespeare chose to repeat the initial figure of speech in order to make it more conspicuous (he thought as a stylist) and because this is the very condition of its being accepted (he thought as a psychologist), e.g. : "CARDINAL PANDULPH: So makest thou faith an enemy to faith; and like a civil war set'st oath to oath, Thy tongue against thy tongue. [.] What since thou sworest is sworn against thyself and may not be performed by thyself, for that which thou hast sworn to do amiss is not amiss when it is truly done, and being not done, where doing tends to ill, the truth is then most done not doing it: the better act of purposes mistook is to mistake again; though indirect, yet indirection thereby grows direct, and falsehood falsehood cures, as fire cools fire within the scorched veins of one new-burn'd. [.] The truth thou art unsure to swear, swears only not to be forsworn; else what a mockery should it be to swear! But thou dost swear only to be forsworn; and most forsworn, to keep what thou dost swear " ( King John - Act III, Scene 1).

Inasmuch as it is accepted by the human conscience (acceptance or denial are decisions taken in an area of the latter that has to do with affections), antonymical dychotomy, be it induced or inferred, can be either benign or malignant , from the point of view of its intensity. Its proliferation depends on this intensity. If it is benign, it does not engendered other offsprings, nor does it upset logical thinking; if it is malignant, it triggers both effects.

As for its form, the figure of speech we are dealing with can be simple , advanced or artificial . To illustrate the first two characteristics, let us compare this brief example from Cymbeline : "CLOTEN: I love and hate her " (Act III, Scene 5) with the following cues from Henry VI , Part I : "TALBOT: I laugh to see your ladyship so fond to think that you have aught but Talbot's shadow whereon to practise your severity. - COUNTESS OF AUVERGNE : Why, art not thou the man? - TALBOT: I am indeed. - COUNTESS OF AUVERGNE : Then have I substance too. - TALBOT: No, no, I am but shadow of myself: you are deceived, my substance is not here; for what you see is but the smallest part and least proportion of humanity: I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here, it is of such a spacious lofty pitch, your roof were not sufficient to contain't. - COUNTESS OF AUVERGNE : This is a riddling merchant for the nonce; he will be here, and yet he is not here: how can these contrarieties agree? - TALBOT: That will I show you presently. [Winds his horn. Drums strike up: a peal of ordnance. Enter soldiers] How say you, madam? Are you now persuaded that Talbot is but shadow of himself? These are his substance, sinews, arms and strength, with which he yoketh your rebellious necks, razeth your cities and subverts your towns and in a moment makes them desolate " (Act II, Scene 3). The third characteristic refers to an artificial linguistic phrasing that contains the notion symbolized and its contradiction within one and the same word, as, for instance, Unomnia , the term by which Francesco Patrizzi (1529-1597) used to designate the prime cause of things. In King Lear , the Fool addresses the King seventeen times by calling him "nuncle" (Act I, Scenes 4 and 5; Act II, Scene 4; Act III, Scenes 2, 4, and 6), from the moment his heiresses prove their unfaithfulness. The term uncle expressed reverence in Shakespeare's time and the initial n marks the negative, according to a pattern for which there are other examples as well in English: ever-never , or-nor , either-neither a.s.o.

Finally, there is another possible classification, from the point of view of manifestation. We have followed so far the linguistic dychotomic-antonymical illustrations; in the pages to follow, we will have plenty of opportunities to analyze the behavioural and situational ones. It may prove useful, however, to offer even here a sample. When the Bishop of Winchester exclaims, in Henry VI , Part I : " Love for thy love and hand for hand I give. [.] [Aside] So help me God, as I intend it not! " (Act III, Scene 1), he actually clarifies his own behaviour. A behaviour emphasized by the masks and disguises the Renaissance is so full of. Jean Rousset characterized the Renaissance-man as being "persuaded that he is never fully what he is supposed to be or seems to be, hiding his face behind a mask that serves him so well, that one can hardly tell which is the mask and which his own true face".

For us to claim that behind all these linguistic, behavioural and situational figures there is a specific thinking whose Weltanschauung is that reality consists of two simultaneously opposed aspects, that thinking must be active in all areas of human manifestation, like all stylistical ways of thinking are. Researches in fields like psychiatry, sociology, or representational arts confirm this hypothesis. Let us add one single example, taken from linguistics. A very long time ago, when we were not even dreaming of what a fruitful evolution our observation was about to have, we co-edited with our then-teacher Andrei Banta s (I was still his student) a book entitled Capcanele vocabularului englez ( Traps of the English Vocabulary - Bucharest, Scientific Publishing House, 1967) and noticed the striking characteristic of certain words that seemed to inexplicably contain the seeds of antonymic dychotomization. The lexical category of so-called false friends was the very subject of our book, i.e. words of (almost) identical form, within the same language or from two different languages, which had a common origin but acquired, in time, two very different, if not opposed, meanings. This idea, once launched, was not without consequences in Romanian linguistics. Alexandru Graur took over and established the term "traps". As we will see further on, when talking about Hamlet , this word simply labels a fabrication of dychotomic-antonymical thinking that becomes obsessive in the existence of Shakespeare's characters.

Our research has not gone so far as to analyze all of man's self-expression modes that make up the target of anthropological stylistics; for the moment, it has just proved that stylistical ways of thinking exist beside the logical one. In the present essay, we will attempt not only to unveil the shakespearian roots of modern psychology, as we have set about to do, but also to make brief forays into the domain of dychotomic-antonymical thinking, in order to throw light upon some of the methods and readings of anthropological stylistics.

*

Hopefully, we have not imposed on the patience of our young reader who has been willing to stay with us so far. We have promised to clarify our opinion "as profusely as we will do it concisely". Regarding the profusion of the pages above, his or her hard tried patience will be able to say its own word; if they find them concise, however, we advise those interested parties to leaf through other, much more elaborate, works of ours.

The gratification we set before our reader is to be able to check everything we say through his or her own evaluation, whether it is a matter of analyzing literature as a reflection of the human psychic, or a matter of analyzing the human human in all its behavioural patterns as expressing the very thinking that is far more complex than can even be imagined. William Shakespeare is awaiting at the gates of "self-knowledge".

Georges Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon (1707-1788), Discours sur le style , Paris, Librairie M. Hattier (1920).

Buffon, op.cit .

3 Man is a wolf to man. A reflection by Plautus ( Asinaria , II, 4).

4 Under the title Contraries and Contradictories , Sister Miriam Joseph, c.s.c., lists and illustrates eleven figures, in Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York and London, Hafner Publishing Company, 1966), based on both shakespearian and contemporary texts.

We thank our teacher, Zoe Dumitrescu-Busulenga, as well as Nicolae Balota, Leon Levitchi and Mihai Nasta for their guidance and moral support that have greatly helped us complete our disertation on the same theme.

See the analysis of Bacon's Essays in our paper " Gândirea dihotomic-antonimica în literatura elizabetana" ( Dychotomic-antonymical thinking in Elizabethan literature), in Limbile moderne în scoala ( Modern Languages in School ), 1975.

Jean Rousset, La littérature de l'âge baroque en France. Circé et le paon , Paris, José Corti, 1953.

See, for instance, Silvia Pandelescu, Dificultati ale lexicului francez ( Difficulties of the French Vocabulary ), Bucharest, Scientific Publishing House, 1969; Doina Condrea-Derer, Dificultati ale limbii italiene ( Difficulties of the Italian Language ), Bucharest, Scientific Publishing House, 1973; Victor Vascenco, Dificultati ale lexicului rus. Elemente de semantica contrastiva ( Difficulties of the Russian Vocabulary. Elements of Contrastive Semantics ), Bucharest, Scientific Publishing House, 1975.

See his book "Capcanele" limbii române ( "Traps" of the Romanian Language ), Bucharest, Scientific and Enciclopedic Publishing House, 1976.

Beside the article quoted above, see also: Mihai Radulescu, "O tragedie a cunoasterii: Othello" (A Tragedy of Knowledge: Othello), in Limbile moderne în scoala ( Modern Languages in School ) , vol. I, 1973; "Stilistica antropologica. O aplicatie: Gândirea dihotomic-antonimica" (Anthropological Stylistics. An Application: Dychotomic-Antonymical Thinking), in Revista de istorie si teorie literara ( Journal of Literary History and Theory ), vol. 24, no. 41, 1975; "Un mesaj hindus într-o miniatura armeneasca" (A Hindu Message in an Armenian Miniature), in Revue Roumaine de l'Histoire de l'Art. Série Beaux-Arts , vol. XII, Bucharest, 1976; "Un problème de stylistique anthropologique: la «Grotte intérieure»", in Revista de istorie si teorie literara ( Journal of Literary History and Theory ), vol. 27, no. 2, 1978; "Ibsen si fotografia" (Ibsen and photography), in România literara ( Literary Romania ), no. 40, 1978.



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