ABSTRACT
For over two centuries, Shakespeare’s life and works have been both a source of psychological understanding and an object of psychological analysis. The interrelated trajectories of psychology and Shakespeare reflect the evolution of modern theories, as well as modifications in those theories when they encounter Shakespeare’s plays and poems. This chapter maps the terrain from several perspectives: early modern “faculty psychology”; the range of theories subsumed under the term “psychoanalysis”; and new developments in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. Recent interventions from potent cultural movements – feminism, gender studies, queer studies, new historicism – have made the field especially fertile, and astoundingly vast.
