David Hillman - Listening to Shakespeare: dreams and reality

My life in relation to Shakespeare has always been torn between the stage and the page, thinking about Shakespeare as a literary text that one can pore over.

About David Hillman "I lecture on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture at the University of Cambridge and direct studies at King’s College in Cambridge.

I'm the author of Shakespeare's Entrails, which is my first monograph. I've also written about Shakespeare and Freud; the history of the body in relation to Shakespeare in particular; Shakespeare and philosophy and epistemological issues around Shakespeare. I am currently completing a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and early modern England, which addresses the rich topic of salutary acts in Shakespeare and early modernity."

Key Points

• Shakespeare’s rich, metaphorical language can make his plays difficult to understand at first. • By approaching Shakespeare’s plays with what psychoanalysts call a “third ear”, one can discover patterns and access deeper layers of meaning. • Shakespeare’s plays address the relationship between dreams and reality in a way that speaks to a Freudian understanding of the psyche. The Plays of William Shakespeare, circa 1849 by John Gilbert. wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

My interest in Shakespeare started when I was a teenager, and it was always a perplexed interest in Shakespeare. I immediately fell in love with his plays when I first read them, and my first encounter with Shakespeare was reading, but I felt like I really didn’t understand them. I didn’t understand the language; I didn’t understand the subterranean text; I didn’t know what I was loving. Then I saw some Shakespeare on stage. Othello was the first play I saw, and it moved me to tears. I didn’t understand that, either.

My life in relation to Shakespeare has always been torn between the stage and the page, thinking about Shakespeare as a literary text that one can pore over. Many of the plays I’ve now read 40 times or more. Each time I find more layers, more hidden marvels that are simply astonishing. The Shakespearean text is so rich and full of interconnections between different parts of the text, and different texts.