It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst finds Mr. Rogers to be (gulp) creepy.

I have a confession.  Mr. Rogers always creeped me out.  When I was a kid, his Kingdom of Make-Believe just plain gave me the creeps.  Lately, I feel like I’m the only one that experienced this.  I’ve been talking with all kinds of people about him as we’ve toyed with idea of going to see Tom Hanks’ portrayal of him and everybody I talk to seems to be a fan.  The Reluctant Wife is enthusiastic about Mr. Rogers, as are the Reluctant Stepdaughters.  The Reluctant Son has never seen Mr. Rogers.  Which makes sense.  We didn’t watch much live TV.  We watched lots of video tapes.  Mostly of Dinosaurs and Construction projects but also the Sound of Music.  Over and over again.  My students, though, light up when they talk about Mr. Rogers.  One, in particular, remembered the music on the show – music that was largely improvised on set by Jazz musicians whom Fred Rogers supported in their creative efforts.

So you’d think that the movie, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, would be about Mr. Rogers.  And it is, sort of, but mostly it is about Tom Juno, who wrote a piece on Mr. Rogers for Esquire Magazine’s 1998 edition called “Can You Say Hero”.  It is a beautiful piece.  It positively glows.  And if you just read the piece, you’d think it was written by a fan – maybe even a sycophantic fan.  But the movie, where the fictional Lloyd Vogel replaces the real life Tom Juno so that there is license to tell a story that includes make believe, is the backstory about the irascible, angry and hard-nosed journalist who interviewed Fred Rogers because his editor assigned him to write a puff piece on the beloved children's television host.

The man who came to write the puff piece – 400 words – was angry at his father who had left him and his sister and his mother when his mother lay dying.  He was angry at his editor, because he was a serious journalist who did investigative reporting – and exposed the men he wrote about as being anything but who they presented themselves as being – he didn’t do puff pieces.  He was angry at Fred Rogers because Mr. Rogers, instead of answering his questions and telling him about himself, asked Lloyd/Tom about himself.  And he was lost because he was a new father – and angry enough to recreate for his son the kind emotional distance and pain in their relationship that characterized his own relationship with his father.

So this is a coming of age film for a middle aged man.  He comes of age under the guidance of a kindly guy – Mr. Rogers.  And it has a happy ending.  And along the way, we get to know both of these men, and their families, at least a little bit.  And we see what a kind, sweet, but also self-indulgent man Mr. Rogers is.  Mr. Rogers is the kind of man who will keep a whole crew and studio waiting for an hour as he entertains a kid who has come for his make a wish moment and won't stop trying to attack him.  He is also a kind of idealized father figure – the kind of father figure whom Eddie Murphy could send up on Saturday Night Live as being nothing like the father figures in the hood.  And we, who came from the suburbs, could resonate with Eddie Murphy’s portrayal because our fathers were nothing like the father figure on TV either.  That said, when I became a father, I very much wanted to resonate with aspects of Mr. Rogers.  I think that I missed an opportunity by not watching Mr. Rogers more frequently with my son – I didn't get to reacquaint myself with Mr. Rogers and I wasn't able to talk with the reluctant son about the complex issues - things like divorce and death, with which we were dealing in our lives with Mr. Rogers as a foil which we might have done had we seen the show together.  Instead, we had to muddle through, talking about them on our own.

Now, before I go any further, I want to be clear.  I cried through this movie.  I was moved by it and by the relationship between these two men and by the transformation that takes place in the Lloyd character.  I found Mr. Rogers to be an admirable person and I was moved by his ability to bring the best out of people in general and Lloyd in particular.  When they are riding together on a subway car and the kids on the car recognize that Mr. Rogers is with them and they don’t quite know what to do about that, as kids are want to do, and, they start singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, the song that Fred Rogers wrote and sings at the beginning of every episode, this could go either way.  It could be cruel mockery – Eddie Murphy on 6^th grade steroids – but it turns, instead, into an homage.  Not only do the kids sing, but the hardened New Yorkers, on their way to office jobs and janitorial work all join in and the car becomes, for a moment, the shared space of Make Believe and everyone is aware that they live in the same neighborhood and that they care about each other and about life.  It is a wonderfully Disney – or Mr. Rogers – moment.

So I say all this to acknowledge that I admire this man and this movie.  But I think it is important to assert there is still something deeply creepy about him and about it.  And part of what is creepy about it, I must admit, is something that I worry about and find creepy about myself – something that is related to the reluctant aspect of my being a psychoanalyst – and perhaps to my being reluctant about most everything that I do.  What is creepy about this movie and, I think, about Mr. Rogers, is that Mr. Rogers is a True Believer.  He believes deeply and powerfully in what he is preaching – and he is preaching. 

At a particularly poignant and difficult point in the film, he says “What’s human is mentionable and what’s mentionable is manageable.”  This is a lovely idea.  It is something that I believe in deeply and I think that it comes from the traditions that inform the work that I do – Mr. Rogers counts Erik Erikson, an important psychoanalyst who helped reframe the psychoanalytic tradition to include the impact of people on each other, not just Freud’s imagined unrolling of an underlying biological mandate. 

By the way, Erik Erikson was not Erik Erikson’s given name.  Erikson called himself that to clarify that he was his own father – he disavowed his biological father and his father’s traditions.  Mr. Rogers – and Lloyd – also do this.  Mr. Rogers was brought up in a home where feelings were not talked about.  And he worked to figure out how to articulate his feelings and help others do that.  When he was working with Lloyd to help him figure out how to manage his anger at his father and ultimately to let go of it, to forgive him, he pointed out that many of Lloyd’s positive qualities – his ability to stand up to powerful men and to write the truth about them – came out of the relationship with his father – not just his relating against him, but his modelling himself, in part, after who it is that his father was.  Fred Rogers was, of course, also talking about himself - and by extension Erik Erikson.  Mr. Rogers, if he would have talked with Eddie Murphy about the father figure Murphy portrayed on Saturday Night Live, would have admired that father figure as embodying and caricaturing and celebrating something real and positive about the father figures that we have had, including my own not-Mr.-Rogers father.

The creepy part, here, is that Mr. Rogers believes that his adoptive fathers – the ones he has read about – including, I’m sure, Dr. Rogers – Carl Rogers – the son of a preacher (Fred Rogers is an ordained minister himself), who also cast off the repressive mantel of a non-feeling life to embrace a life of deeply felt feelings and helping others to tap into them – the creepy part is that Mr. Rogers has carried within himself the evangelical zeal of the religious tradition.  He firmly believes that Lloyd will be a better person for embracing his father rather than rejecting him.  He believes – and the movie is set up to show us that Lloyd is a better person for learning how to forgive his father – a task that seems impossible at the beginning of the film.

The task seems impossible for two reasons.  One is because Lloyd’s father is a louse.  Lloyd sees him for the first time in at least ten years at this sister’s third wedding.  He introduces his father to his wife and his son – his father’s first grandson.  His father, drunk and surly, refers to Lloyd's wife as “doll” and asks for some time alone with his son.  Lloyd, who has been seething all night about his father, explodes – and we join him in righteously feeling that his father deserves to be the focus of his wrath – even if that spoils his sister’s wedding. 

But the second and more intractable reason is that Lloyd appears to have no interest in reconciling with his father.  He is intent on nursing his anger – holding onto it – making it his own and justifying his anger at the world through the righteousness of his anger at his father.  He shows up on Mr. Rogers set to do a puff piece on Mr. Rogers – perhaps to expose Mr. Rogers as a fake good father – but not, in any way, to reconcile with his own father.  But Mr. Rogers doesn’t see it that way.  Mr. Rogers understands him to be a person who is in pain – whose anger is separating him from the world and Mr. Rogers decides to save him.  Mr. Rogers decides that this guy needs some loving – even though he isn’t asking for it.

And this is the creepy part.  Mr. Rogers imposes his view of the world on those around him.  He says, in effect, “This is what you need to do in order to get better.”  It is the same thing that he does in the studio when he decides unilaterally that the most important things - more important than everyone getting home for dinner on time - is this kid and his relating to him.

But don’t I do that as a psychoanalyst?  Even more importantly, haven’t I profited from the many people who have helped me with things, even when I haven't asked, in my life?  What is so creepy about this, you might ask.  

Well, my thin defense of myself as an analyst is that people come to me wanting to change.  More precisely, they decide that they want things to be different.  And the difference between those two statements is what collapses my thin defense.  In fact, most people who come to see me don’t want to change.  They want my help in changing the world – in altering their friends or figuring out how to help their spouses change.  And I do something tricky and a little creepy – I say, “I can’t help the world change, but I can help you change.”  In other words, I say something like – “Do as I say, not as I do.  Make the hard and difficult changes that are part and parcel of having a different attitude towards the world while I sit her unchanged and unchanging.”  And this sounds remarkably like what Fred Rogers does.

So this film does not portray what many films about psychotherapy movies portray (Don Juan DeMarco, for instance).  In these films, the person in treatment’s change is contingent on the psychotherapist’s change.  Mr. Rogers does not change.  He knows – from the beginning – what is best for Lloyd.  In fact, the movie begins at the very end, we just don't know it yet.  Rogers imposes his treatment on Lloyd.  

Psychotherapy in general – and psychoanalysis in particular – can, I think, be guilty of this sin.  We can decide, whether based on theory or on empirical evidence, what is right for this person without taking that person into account.  And I call that a sin.  We cannot know what is best for another without getting to know them.  In fact, it is not our place to know what is best for them – and I think Mr. Rogers would agree with me about this – they must come to know what is best for them.  What we can do is provide a space in which they can come to know that for themselves – but also from within themselves.

An illustration of a moment where Rogers creates a space for Lloyd to do this kind of work occurs when Mr. Rogers takes Lloyd out to lunch in a Chinese Restaurant in Pittsburgh.  Mr. Rogers suggests that Lloyd observe one minute of silence so that he can reflect on all the wonderful things that people have done that have led him to become the person that he is.  The beautiful and creepy part of this particular moment is that everyone in the restaurant recognizes that this is what Mr. Rogers is doing and they support him in creating the silent space so that Lloyd can inhabit it.

Mr. Rogers comes to know Lloyd in profound ways.  And Lloyd profoundly profits from it.  The real life Lloyd – the tough guy who was softened by Mr. Rogers, Tom Juno, is part of the P.R. team hyping this film.  Juno sees the film as capturing the essence of the life changing experience that he had in his relationship with Mr. Rogers.

When Freud called Psychoanalysis an “Impossible Profession”, he compared it with education and politics as the other impossible professions.  Mr. Rogers was an educator and, in the moment when he convinced congress not to cut funding to public television, a politician.  But he was also a member of a profession that Freud notably didn’t include – the clergy.  And it is ironic that Freud didn’t include the clergy as an impossible profession.  On the surface, Freud’s position makes sense – he derided religion as trying to reassure us rather than help us face what is essentially difficult about the human condition.  But it is ironic because Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis has often been likened to a religion – and treated by psychology, for instance – as a religion rather than a science.

Freud wanted his adherents – his believers if you will – to have faith that the principles he articulated would serve them well as they worked to engage with the terrible forces that his technique unleashed in the people that analysts serve.  He wanted the folks he enlisted to treat the human condition to know that they were doing the right thing because their patients would experience them as doing something violent to them.

I think that Mr. Rogers, in his own quiet, patient way, was every bit as violent in his interactions with Lloyd/Tom as Lloyd/Tom’s father had been with him.  It is Mr. Rogers certainty that this is best for Lloyd/Tom that I find creepy and perhaps enviable.  I don’t feel as certain as Mr. Rogers, or Dr. Freud when I am helping people uncover the powerful feelings that stir inside them.  My lack of certainty may, then, do them a disservice.  At times I may shy away from something that needs to be said because I am not certain that the pain of hearing what I have to say will be outweighed by the relief that the exposure of the feared experience will bring.  Or maybe I want to respect my patient's ability to articulate what they believe to be their own truth in their own time.  Or maybe that last statement is just a justification – a way of distancing myself from my own belief system that may be somewhat fuzzier or more flexible than that of Mr. Rogers and Dr. Freud, but underneath every bit as hard and unforgiving.  

So I end up in a paradoxical spot.  I need to have faith to do what it is that I do.  My patients trust me to know what I am doing.  But too much faith - too much certainty - puts me in the camp of being an evangelist - imposing my beliefs on others.  I think Juno would object that he is better off.  He has stated that he has finally figured out what Mr. Rogers wanted - he wanted us all to pray.  And for some of us, this is the answer.  But is it the answer for all of us?  Would Mr. Rogers have been OK with a wide range of prayer?  I'm sure he was, at least on the surface.  But I think there is something creepy about all of us striving to be helpful to others, ostensibly by helping them broaden their range of freely being themselves - but the risk is that they may become as much our puppet as Rogers' King Friday the 13th.  This continues to give me pause, and continues to give me the same creepy feeling I got as a kid.

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Titus Andronicus: Psychoanalysis of Projection and Revenge in Elizabethan Times - and Our Own.

Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and least frequently produced plays.  Whether penned by a player from Stratford or a nobleman, it is generally agreed to be an early and simplistic play.  I had not been wild about seeing it, but we have a local company that has been producing the plays for a long time, they are only one of four companies in the U.S. to have produced the entire canon of 38 plays, and they have recently moved into a new building – their old theater was terrible.  The new one is a smaller scale version of the Globe and it is lovely.  We have been wanting to see a performance in the space for some time and this nicely fit into our need to have a date.  As a kicker, this play has been produced recently at the Stratford Festival in Canada – where they often choose plays with an eye towards helping the U.S. think about just what the heck it is currently doing.

If it is true, as Allan Bloom claims, that Shakespeare invented the human – at least on the stage, but perhaps more generally – this plays counts very few humans in its cast.  This makes sense from the perspective that it is a play from a playwright who is not just learning his craft, but is about to set about upending it.  But first he has to produce something recognizable.  And the odd thing was that this play was easier to watch for me, a person who is far from a Shakespearean specialist, than many of the later, greater plays (Hamlet as perhaps the greatest) have been.  The language was more immediate.  The plot is straightforward, and the characters are cartoons – with the exception of Aaron – the moor.  Aaron is a black slave who creates chaos and disruption – and whose motives are unclear – unlike everyone else on the stage.

I think that the pleasure we had – if you can call watching people get brutally murdered one after the other for three hours pleasure – was greatly enhanced by the staging.  The director chose to set the play in some nebulous time in the silent movie era – and had witty silent film synopses projected ahead of each scene, as well as using projection to let the players and the audience know what had occurred off stage.  We were also invited to participate as Roman Citizens watching the play and rooting for various characters – and helping others at various points – our votes were being courted or we were hiding planted evidence that would lead to miscarriages of justice.  And the characters were played as cartoons – they weren’t enhanced or complicated – in fact they were played as types rather than as persons.  It felt almost campy - but not in an arch way - instead it felt like camp was how this play was intended to be played.

Titus Andronicus returns from a war with the Goths.  He has been successful, but at great cost.  He brings back Tamora, queen of the Goths, her three sons and her moor/slave Aaron as a set of war trophies, but he also brings back the ashes of 21 of his 25 sons, each of whom has died in battle, as well as his four remaining sons who also fought.  Titus' first act of celebration on his return is to execute Tamora’s eldest son in front of her and the Romans as a means of celebrating his victory.  He does this despite Tamora’s entreaties, and we see that she is bent on revenge.

While Titus was away, the emperor of Rome has died, and Titus brother has convince the Senate to allow Titus to run against the two sons of the emperor in a three way election for emperor, but Titus – demonstrating his fatal flaw of fealty to authority – instead endorses and for all practical purposes enthrones the dead emperor’s eldest son, Saturninus, a vain and shallow fool, as the next emperor.  Saturninus was played with somewhat effeminate airs in the production that we saw and they called attention to the essential silliness of the character.  Titus’s choice is a bit of a surprise as the younger son, Bassianus, is betrothed to Titus’ daughter Lavinia, and it would have been a better family based choice to have nominated the younger son, and this underscores that, for Titus, there was no real choice.  The eldest son will lead.  And, more centrally, Titus will do what is called for by culture, tradition, and those who are in power.

No sooner does Saturninus get elevated to the throne than he plucks Lavinia from his brother and insists that he will marry her despite her love for Bassianus because he loves her and he is, after all, emperor.  Bassianus, who is the beloved of the people, and who is annoyingly and simperingly good natured and well intentioned, is, despite his conflict avoidant style, mortified by having his bride stolen from him – as are Lavinia’s brothers – Titus’s remaining children.  Titus sides with the emperor, continuing to be the dutiful and rule bound man that he is – and is so furious with Bassianus and his children that he fights with them to convince them to support the emperor, and, in the process, kills his youngest remaining son (I did say the play  was bloody, didn’t I?  Just wait...).  After Saturninus has set Titus’ family against itself he recants and decides instead to marry Tamora, who is elevated from war trophy/slave to empress by this move – and Titus is now ruled by and must, according to his own code, show fealty to the woman he has defeated, and to the woman who has sworn vengeance against him.

As in King Lear, all of this set up to the motion of the play takes place in the opening scene and before we have really settled into our seats.  And, as in King Lear, the rest of the action is an untangling of these events and the seemingly preordained way that this must needs happen.  This play, though, really does that ruthlessly.  In due time, Tamora’s remaining two sons murder Bassianus and frame Titus’s younger two remaining sons.  After they have done this deed, they rape Lavinia who implores Tamora not to let them do it, but Tamora, intent on revenge, eggs the boys on.  After raping her, they rip out her tongue and cut off her hands so that she can neither speak nor write about what they have done to her.  Meanwhile Titus is told that he can save his boys who have been sentenced to death by cutting off his hand and sending it to the emperor – which he does, but this turns out simply to be a ruse cooked up by Aaron to increase Titus’ pain.  The emperor sends the boys heads and Titus’ hand back to Titus in bags and Banishes Titus’ remaining son from Rome.    

Not surprisingly, next time we see Titus, he appears to be mad.  He is, however, still, underneath it all, the crafty general and he has discovered that it was Tamora’s sons who raped his daughter and killed her husband, and he knows that the emperor killed his children, so he has hatched his own plan for revenge, sending his one remaining son – somewhat crazily, in my mind – to lead the Goths back to Rome to fight the emperor (why would the Goths welcome as their leader one of the people who just defeated them in order to go on a quest to kill their queen?).  In any case, when Tamora comes calling dressed as revenge and brings her sons dressed as rape and murder, Titus, playing the mad man, appears to be taken in, and allows the sons to stay with him – where they plan to cause more mischief, but he turns the tables on them and kills them, bakes them in a pie, and invites the emperor and his wife – their mother, for dinner.

Meanwhile, Tamora has given birth to a child but that child has black skin.  The child is Aaron’s – and Aaron is, completely uncharacteristically, totally taken by it.  He falls in love – as father’s do – and becomes an idiot, cooing and loving on it.  Tamora’s plan had been to kill the thing, but Aaron will have none of that and, instead, he substitutes a white baby from some local Goths and kills everyone who knows anything about the actual child.  He then heads back to Goth, all in love with his child.  Unfortunately, he runs into Titus' son, who apprehends him.  Before he is put to death, he entices the son with information that he knows – so the son gives him a temporary reprieve to hear the information, and Aaron confesses to being behind the killing of Bassanius, the framing of Titus’s other two sons, the cuckolding of the emperor with Tamora, and seems to be quite proud of all this.

The final scene is a doozy.  Dinner at Titus’ place – the emperor and empress eating crow pie.  When they discover what it is, Titus kills his daughter in order to undo the shame that he feels at her having been defiled by the empress’ sons before killing the empress, then he is killed by the emperor, the emperor is killed by Titus’ son, and the son, crowned emperor by his uncle, sentences Aaron to be buried up to his neck and left to starve to death – an ancient Greek means of killing the most evil of people.  Order is restored.  The end.

Wow.  I think that is the most time that I have spent in any post spitting out the plot of a movie, play or book.  I think that is because I really wasn’t interrupted by much that was of psychoanalytic interest, and I think that, in turn, is because this is a very plot driven rather than character driven play.  The people here just aren’t that interesting.

I think it is mildly interesting that there are two prominent female characters.  Lavinia is mostly a prop though, and her suffering – as anguishing as it is – is not understood or appreciated by her father.  Despite their appearing to be of one mind about the revenge (not hard to appear to be in agreement when you can’t speak any lines), the harm that has been done to Lavinia is experienced by Titus as having happened to him – not to her.  His daughter – his pride – his property – was despoiled.  Her chastity was violently broken – as if her unwillingness were not at issue.  I think this can help us appreciate how deeply and for how long women have been blamed for rape and have borne the disgrace of it.  Lavinia's death, of the many deaths on the stage, was the only one that truly surprised me.  I suppose that is good – and a sign that we as a culture have moved along a bit – but it is also concerning, because I should have known that she would be blamed – including by her father – for this action.  If you want to know why more women don’t come forward about such things, we need look no further than this play.

Tamora is also interesting because of her duplicity, but that is relatively straightforward.  She is called forth to be the vain and foolish newbie emperor’s bride and she, no fool herself, knows how to use him.  But it feels a little like putting a formula one race car driver on a tricycle.  Yes, the driver will win the race, but the competition from six year olds is hardly a challenge. 

So Aaron becomes the character of interest, but largely out of curiosity.  He is, at least in this production, largely outside or above the idiots around him.  He is, by far, the strongest and most lithe of the players.  He is also the smartest, coming up with the plot to frame Titus' remaining sons.  He is most off balance in his interactions with Tamora, where he is more smitten with her than she with him, which seems out of character.  Or perhaps she is more focused on revenge, which Aaron has some investment in – but he is, after all, a slave of the Goths, not a native of the country that was defeated by Titus.  We hear no pronouncement of his attachment to Tamora’s son who is executed – at least in this production his body language suggests that he doesn’t have a dog in that race.  Does he carry out the revenge plot just to stay in the good graces of Tamora?  Is he merely trying to butter up his paramour?

At the end, he is, as the reluctant wife pointed out, unrepentant.  He cares not a whit that he has been directly responsible for the deaths of three men, about whom he cared little, and that he has cut the hand off a fourth.  Though he thought that the rape of Lavinia was a childish act on the part of Tamora’s boys, he did not prevent it.  We might think that he is cunning – or perhaps psychopathic – meaning unmoved by the experiences of others.  But he is so totally taken with his own child – we realize that a human heart beats under that black exterior.  And the issue of his skin color – despite those (including myself) who consider race to be a US invention – is vivid in this play.  He is black – and this blackness becomes a stain on his child – it marks his child, just as it has marked him.  And it is equated, in the language of the play, with evil.  But I think it is also equated with his being an outsider – an other – the excluded one.  The one who has no legitimate seat at the table.

Part of Aaron’s glee at having a child is general, but part of it is specific.  His child is the child of a high born woman – the queen of the Goths and the empress of Rome.  His child is royalty.  How could that have happened to a man who is a commoner – indeed, a slave?  On the one hand, all of his machinations as an outsider have bought him the ultimate insider ticket.  His progeny is in the inner circle and carries not just free but royal blood.  He, who has been the target of racist erasure of who he is – he who has lurked outside the wheels of power, has been able to exercise puppet master expertise in manipulating situations and he does not feel guilty – he feels proud.  If murder and mayhem be the cost of inclusion, give me the bill, and I will pay in full.

So why do the Canadians want us to pay attention to this play?  Do they see us, at this time when impeachment is in the air, as having the fatal flaw of fealty?  Do they want to remind us that just because someone has the title of emperor or president, that doesn’t mean they deserve the title?  That was my initial thought – that they identified us with Titus and wanted to remind us to watch out for the king.  But I think that, perhaps, they may also have wanted to warn us that there might be an Aaron in our midst.  Aaron, the second son of Adam.  Aaron, the one who was passed over – and who responded with murder.  The one who was blinded by his having been excluded from the family, and so destroyed it.  Are they pointing a finger at our president who pursued the office not to do good or out of any kind of ideological verve, but rather out of a wish to finally be included – to be considered up to snuff.  Were they exposing the snake in the grass?

My hunch is that this is what they had in mind – or should have had in mind.  That said, I am worried about the use of race as a means of marking outsiderness.  I think that we have done this since, well, I guess at least since the time of Shakespeare.  But I think that this is a vehicle for a deeper truth.  Yes there is enmity between races, and between Goths and Romans, but this play is about the enmity of an individual being excluded from a family – even though he was able to demonstrate that he was not only up to snuff but above the members – and attractive to the queen.  I think that whites (whatever they are) have long projected their disowned aggression against oppressed others – frequently people of color – and then justified their continued aggression as a need to contain the projected aggression. 

If this play is a flat footed first attempt at tragedy – it was, I don’t doubt – popular with those who lusted for blood and revenge (as referred to in Shakespeare in Love).  Perhaps more importantly, it portrayed quite clearly the prejudice and aggression of a culture against those most disempowered within it – the women and the slaves.  It is shocking but not surprising to find this so clearly spelled out in a play from so long ago.  

  

I have posted about other Shakespearean Plays including: Hamlet, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, and a fanciful and lovely film about an imaginary Shakespeare in Love.   I have also posted about the controversy about who Shakespeare might really be based on the books Will of the World and Shakespeare by Another Name.  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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