Coaching With Shakespeare
David Thompson, 10 Sep 2007
Shakespeare is everywhere. Google him, and in 0.28 seconds or so, you’ll have a list of more than 45,700,000 sites. Click over to Google Books, and you’ll find 1,680,600 volumes by or about Shakespeare currently catalogued. Go to Amazon, and 21,860 of those titles are available for sale right now. You’ll also find 169 different DVDs, 389 audio recordings and the usual gift-shop smattering of cuff-links, tea-towels, neckties, money clips, wine bottle stoppers and other bits of marketing lint bearing Shakespeare’s image. Listen to people speaking English and you’ll hear any number of the words Shakespeare introduced to the language: words like “barefaced,” “bedroom,” or “bottled;” “flawed, “flowery,” or “freezing” even “tongue-tied” “traditional” and “tranquil” have their first appearances in Shakespeare’s plays. Phrases we hear all the time, like “wild-goose chase,” “tower of strength,” “naked truth,” “laughing stock” and dozens more originate from Shakespeare too. His plays have inspired 13 major operas and more than 100 films.
Shakespeare is recognised as a genius around the world. He is almost universally regarded as the greatest writer/poet/dramatist ever to wield a quill. A number of authors have recently explored the particular qualities of Shakespeare’s art, his life, his era – and the historical process by which he has become the global epitome of literary brilliance. Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language, Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare, Catherine Belsey’s Why Shakespeare, Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography, Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World and James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare are among the best of the many outstanding books published in the last few years alone. Here in Britain, Shakespeare is the one fixed point in the national curriculum, and his plays are an essential element of the national consciousness. Shakespearean references abound across the culture – high, low and everywhere in between. In my native America, Shakespeare is less prevalent, perhaps, but he is no less of an icon of creative genius.
Shakespeare explores every aspect of human feeling in a manner that encourages us to open our minds and hearts. Whether on the stage or the page, there is in Shakespeare quite literally something for everyone. From the most elevated poetry to the downright dirtiest prose; from delicate romance to bloody, riotous action; from lurid excitement in pleasures of the flesh to austere contemplation of the universe and our places in it – it’s all there in Shakespeare. Engagement with his plays – either surrounded by others in the theatre, discussing them with friends, or studying them in isolation – has the power to transform us. And we’re better off for it.
In my work as an executive coach and communications consultant, I help people become more aware of the way they process their experience and how their particular patterns of thought, speech and action either help them succeed or hold them back. I help my clients identify a wider range of options than they may have previously considered. Most importantly, I help my clients make lasting and substantial changes in the way they think about themselves and the world around them. Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been indispensable resources in this work. The plays and their characters are rich sources of metaphors that help people view their current situations in a different light, assess the consequences of their actions and discover new possibilities. As a hypnotherapist, I have used Shakespeare’s language to induce trance and to help clients awaken dormant inner resources at an unconscious level. Shakespeare’s rhythmic speech – either in verse or prose – can also act as an anchor for particular states, allowing us to access thoughts and feelings that can aid us in challenging times, and enhance our enjoyment of pleasure.
Shakespeare’s revolution in character development was to show people responding to their environments and their circumstances with the mental and emotional resources available to them in a given moment. This is one reason that even the most debased of Shakespeare’s villains can gain the audience’s concern and empathy. While their behaviour is often wildly abhorrent, they act with a psychological realism that we can understand. The emotional states that influence their behaviour are familiar. Shakespeare understood the inextricable link between a person’s emotional state and a person’s behaviour, and he knew how the one could influence the other. He knew how mercurial our emotions can be, and how our perception of a situation can differ vastly from the reality. He shows us how his characters – like each of us – creates their own version of reality, for good or for ill. Over the course of the plays, he shows us a wide range of potential responses to challenging situations, along with dramatically different results. Most importantly for the purposes of this study, Shakespeare recognised, centuries before William James wrote it down, the extraordinary ability people have to change their lives by changing their attitude of mind. As Hamlet puts it, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.244-45).
The plays contain example after example of Shakespeare’s understanding of the relationship between the way we think and quality of the lives we lead. He shows us the process by which people expand their range of resources, and thus increase the range of responses to their situation. In As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, Hamlet and Henry V among many others, Shakespeare shows us his characters learning about themselves, adopting new perspectives and changing for the better as they do so. As they change the way they think, they discover new possibilities for overcoming obstacles, fulfilling their desires or transcending earthly pain. They transform themselves to become something more than they thought they could be. Of course, Shakespeare also presents such characters as Macbeth, Othello, Richard III and Coriolanus to name just a few, whose transformations have the most dire consequences. Their view of the world around them narrows until they can only perceive and project despair. As their capacity for adaptive understanding diminishes, their tragedies become inevitable.
In future articles, we will explore the means by which Shakespeare’s characters achieve positive or negative results within their fictional worlds. We will see how Rosalind and Portia apply behavioural flexibility to achieve their goals. We will look at how Richard II learns to adopt a “third person” perspective on his situation – a perspective that provides him with clarity and even empathy, even if he does find it too late to save his life. We’ll look at Henry V’s ability to create vivid and compelling internal representations for himself and his followers. And we will explore how Edmund, Edgar, Gloucester and Lear follow different routes toward responsibility for their own lives. We will pick apart and play with a wide range of passages to explore their affect on our state, and we will consider questions that help us draw learnings from the metaphorical world of Shakespeare’s plays into our own experience.
