Language

What is it that draws us, as psychoanalysts, to Shakespeare? Of course, one might

say it is the primal themes which emanate, already outlined above via Freud and
Lacan (i.e. Oedipus complex, desire, and mourning) but I hypothesis it runs much
deeper. It can be sourced in the main interest shared by all three of these great
men: language. Language is central to Freudian theory (see The Interpretation of
Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious), and Lacan, forever the Freudian, continued this momentum in his form
of psychoanalytic theory (see The Rome Discourse). However, it must be stipulated
that when it comes to an interest in language, Shakespeare trumps them all.

[Language fabric] is specifically to do with honouring the meaning to the full;…how

thought patterns are built up, not only through the emotive words and strong
images, but also through the connections of the words which surround them; and how
we cannot afford to take any word for granted, for everything contributes to the
texture of the thought and is part of the whole fabric, through which we find the
patterns and ladders in the writing.[56]

There are several ways in which Shakespeare took language to be his own personal
tool, used to reshape and manipulate. As with psychoanalysis, he knew only too well
that what was heard was just as important as what was said. The following are some
ways in which Shakespeare used language that will be of importance when it comes to
analysing the play of Richard III in subsequent chapters, and indeed, in the
analysis of any Shakespearean text.

In the time in which Shakespeare was writing texts were made up of verse and prose.
A verse represented the everyday speech of a character:

How all occasions do inform against me

And spur my dull revenge! what is a man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.[57]

A verse is always represented in the text as a column with a capital letter at the
beginning of each line. It is made up of ten beats: te tum te tum te tum te tum te
tum. This is what is referred to as ‘iambic pentameter.’ It begins with a light
stress and is followed with a heavy stress. This was, as I said, the style of
writing at the time. What is interesting about Shakespeare is that he took this
style and played around with it. He began to introduce an eleventh beat in the line
of a verse to represent times of emotional importance in speech. To the keen, well-
practiced ear of audiences accustomed to iambic pentameter, this would have been
instantly striking and a cause to take note of what was being said - just as a
psychoanalyst takes note of irregularities in speech. We can see an example of this
in, probably, the most famous line in Shakespeare: ‘To be or not to be, that is the
question.’ The eleventh syllable present is an extra unstressed beat at the end of
line (i.e. ‘-tion’) and it changes the whole response to this reflection.
Shakespeare has given this sentence a feminine ending. He does this only when it is
a statement concerned with powerful emotion.[58] Interestingly, his feminine
endings are equated with emotion, and this particular one – ‘to be or not to be...’
- holds the same question which Lacan links to women: to be or not to be the
phallus.[59]

Prose, on the other hand, looks similar to a paragraph in a book. In Shakespearean

text it is only used in times of high comedy, high seriousness, when a character is
explaining something logically, or when a character is feeling self-conscious. We
can witness this sudden change from verse to prose when Hamlet is rejecting
Ophelia. ‘I would thou be a breeder of sinners.’ Hamlet is feeling self-conscious
because Claudius and Polonius, who are hiding, are watching him. Shakespeare gave
very little direction within his plays and it is only through viewing how he used
and wrote language that actors can interpret how their character is feeling and
why.[60]

Another example of his mastery over language is his construction of verse by

inserting two (often opposing) images into each line in order to keep the listener
interested. This is called an antithesis and is prominent within Shakespearean
works.

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d[61]

Shakespeare’s characters’ most important words are at the end of their lines. Due
to the natural occurrence of people to insert most of their attention into the
beginning of sentences, Shakespeare wrote in a way that caused an inflection, or
lift, to be established at the line-endings so that the audience hears them.[62]

Another interesting point with regards to Shakespeare’s control of language is the

way in which he used vowel sounds. The vowels in his speech represent the emotion
of the character, whereas the consonants represent informational speech. ‘O that
this too too...’ has open vowel sounds meaning the character is emotionally open.
Whereas when Hamlet feigns madness his speech is dominated by the sounds of
consonants and seems clipped and short. O is a primal sound and many actors find it
difficult to use on stage as it causes embarrassment and uneasiness.[63] This is
not surprising when we look at it from a psychoanalytic perspective. O is a sound
close to the Real. It is the sound made during an orgasm and the sound of made in
mourning.

To return briefly to Lacan, we can see the shared importance, for both Lacan and
Shakespeare, of the sliding of signifiers and the play upon words. ‘One of Hamlet’s
functions is to engage in constant punning, word play, double-entendre – to play on
ambiguity.’[64] Lacan places this playfulness in the role of fools within
Shakespeare’s works: ‘What they say proceeds basically by way of ambiguity, of
metaphor, puns, conceits, mannered speech – those substitutions of signifiers whose
essential function I have been stressing. Those substitutions lend Shakespeare’s
theatre a style, a colour, that is the basis of its psychological dimension.’[65]
This is the ambiguity that is present within Hamlet, for Lacan. He refers to the
particular way in which Hamlet feigns madness – appearing to pluck ideas out of the
air and giving this speech a maniacal quality. It is all through language. It is
through language that everything happens – in which they ‘be.’ ‘It is this
playfulness [of language], which is not merely a play of disguises but the play of
signifiers in the dimension of meaning, that the very spirit of the play
resides.’[66] Shakespeare’s characters speak in order to exist, just as the
Lacanian subject must come into language in order to exist. It is striking how
similar the discourses of psychoanalysis and Shakespearean interpretation appear.
This could be because psychoanalysis is human science. It represents human
intuition. We can see a clear example of this in the following quote from Cicely
Berry, the voice-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company: ‘Language resonates
within us in deep and unexpected ways and I believe that we cannot apprehend the
full meaning of a text until we have voiced it aloud: voiced it with an
understanding of its meaning but without pre-empting either its emotional or
logical truth.’[67]

It is through Hamlet’s advice to the players that Shakespeare offers up his advice
for the audience: ‘Speak the speech I pray you.’ Within this speech, we can see
Shakespeare instructing actors on how to use his text. His passion for the
importance of the spoken word spills through just as much as, or indeed more so,
than Freud’s or even Lacan’s ever did. However, it did not begin with Hamlet.
Language played a critical role in Shakespeare’s previous works also, namely
Richard III.