Drawn to Shakespeare for Centuries

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More than 400 years on, why do audiences and readers the world over still seem drawn to Shakespeare?  In her book, Susannah Carson assembled a host of luminaries in drama and academia to speak to this:

We hear from James Earl Jones on reclaiming Othello as a tragic hero, Julie Taymor on turning Prospero into Prospera, Camille Paglia on teaching the plays to actors, F. Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Sir Ben Kingsley on communicating Shakespeare’s ideas through performance, Germaine Greer on the playwright’s home life, Dame Harriet Walter on the complexity of his heroines, Brian Cox on social conflict in his time and ours, Jane Smiley on transposing "King Lear" to Iowa in "A Thousand Acres," and Sir Antony Sher on feeling at home in Shakespeare’s language. Together these essays provide a fresh appreciation of Shakespeare’s works as a living legacy to be read, seen, performed, adapted, revised, wrestled with, and embraced by creative professionals and lay enthusiasts alike.

Shakespeare understood human nature like no other.  I studied psychology thoroughly for my undergraduate and graduate work, and my mates and I learned boatloads from the giants in the field - BF Skinner, Carl Rogers and Sigmund Freud, among many.  But Shakespeare predated them all by centuries with his knowledge and wisdom.

• We learn about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in "Macbeth," and the radically different impact it had on the murderous Scottish King and her unsex-me-now Lady Macbeth.  
• We learn about grief in its breathtaking, tragic complexity in "Hamlet," from the ghostly visitations, to the Oedipal Complex, to the nihilistic denouement.
• We learn about the fantasy-riddled world of an aging mind, in the Romance Plays such as "The Tempest," no less about Prospero than about Shakespeare himself in the twilight of his life.

This, in the end, is what Shakespeare Talks! is all about:  drawing modern day lessons for all of us.