Michael R D James

  Is Shakespeare a philosophical playwright or not? T S Eliot suggests he is not, a point of view which this work disagrees with. The reason he has not been identified as a philosophical artist is because of the modern philosophical view of aesthetics, which is at odds with both Aristotelian and Kantian views. Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytical concepts are used to analyse the "enveloping" qualities of his productions as well as the aesthetic result. Shakespeare has an awareness of what happens in life when the balance of the mind of an agent is disturbed by mental illness and he demonstrates the grasp of this problem in several of his most famous plays. He also has a deep unde...