Shakespeare and Jungian Typology: A Reading of the Plays

The psychological type of a writer's character can be understood as a projection of the author's own personality: Iago can show Shakespeare's rational function whereas Othello expresses the dramatist's capacity to experience emotion. Thus Jungian typology initiates a quasi-biographical approach to writers and their works. Instead of directing attention toward an author's education, class prejudices, and so on, it reveals emotional undercurrents within the writings, which in turn express similar currents within the author's psyche. Jungian psychetypology is overdue in gaining recognition as a tool for literary analysis, and this work applies these theories to the spectrum of Shakespeare's plays.