'I Am Against All This Diagnostic Effort'

Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) once played Florizel in a production of The Winter’s Tale. That strains credulity but he was fifteen at the time and admits his performance was “wooden, self-conscious.” In his essay “The Interpretation of the Tale,” Daniels examines the motivations of characters in this famously gnomic late play. He does so as a retired psychiatrist: “[T]he  principal diagnostic puzzle is the nature of Leontes’ jealousy.” 

Read the whole thing to appreciate Daniels’ sometimes tongue-in-cheek psychoanalysis. He makes such preliminary diagnoses of Leontes as having a “primary delusion” of “sudden psychotic jealousy” and experiencing a “brief psychotic episode.” He tempers this by noting the play is not “a work of social realism, to put it mildly,” but is, rather, “mythopoeic.” I usually avoid such words as reeking of graduate seminars. Psychoanalyzing fictional characters has always seemed futile and silly, and Daniels has gone on record as agreeing, which makes me think his look at The Winter’s Tale is at least partly parodic. In a 2007 essay, “Diagnosing Lear,” he writes:

 

“I am against all this diagnostic effort. It is not just that, as Dr. Truskinovsky dryly remarks, it is not altogether easy to decide what constitutes the symptom of grandiosity in an absolute monarch like Lear, so few of us having either experienced or witnessed that condition of man. It is rather that the medicalization of Lear’s behavior deprives it of moral significance.”

 

With Shakespeare, I’m not much bothered by the enigmatic behavior of his characters. I don’t expect to ever thoroughly understand them and come to grand conclusions about their motivations and essential natures. That is part of Shakespeare’s “realism.” In a poem about John Berryman (a Shakespeare scholar as well as a poet), Robert Lowell remembers “talking about the Winter’s Tale, / Leontes’ jealousy / in Shakespeare’s broken syntax.” For once, Lowell is insightful. Look to the language. Take this great raging, jealousy-fueled monologue spoken by Leontes to Camillo in Act I, Scene 2. He echoes both Lear and Othello:

 

“Is whispering nothing?

Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?

Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career

Of laughter with a sigh (a note infallible

Of breaking honesty)? Horsing foot on foot?

Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift?

Hours minutes? Noon midnight? And all eyes

Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,

That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?

Why then the world and all that’s in ’t is nothing.

The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,

My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,

If this be nothing.” 

 

That passage is a pleasure to read aloud, with accelerating intensity of emotion, spitting out the “nothings.” Shakespeare knows we are baffling creatures, forever slippery, irrational and self-contradictory, and is seldom naïve in his understanding of human nature, especially in the mature plays. Daniels writes:

 

“The Winter’s Tale was beyond my powers of comprehension, and I still find it difficult. Certainly, it is not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. There were and are too many lines whose meaning remains obscure to me even after I have read the exegesis of learned commentators, who often leave the reader with alternative meanings to choose from.”

 

For this reader, that’s not a bad thing. It’s what makes some works endlessly rereadable – that is, what makes them literature.