Thursday, 24 November 2011
Shakespeare Got There First
I was interested to see this - and to hear the good doctor on the radio early this morning... Was Shakespeare a 'pioneer of psychosomatic research'? Hardly. It's more that - as I've always maintained - all you need to know about being human, about our inward and outward lives, is contained in his works. If you needed to explain to an alien race looking on from some distant galaxy what human beings are, you could do no better than to refer them to those works, which tell far more than any science-based descriptions of us. Science - especially the dubious science of psychology - limps along behind Shakespeare, picking up scraps. He was there first, and he went in deeper than any psychologist.
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I wish I had the capacity to memorise the mighty Will. On next entering my doctor's consulting room, I would fiercely declaim: "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?"
ReplyDeleteHe'd put aside the modern doctor's fixation with the computer screen, peer over his specs, and mumble straight-faced: "You'll have a box of mogadon like everybody else"
Haha - very good - you should try it, John!
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