Shakespeare. The Journey into the Sacred - Simon Sheridan

Almost everybody is agreed that the works of Shakespeare are not just brilliant artistic creations but also communicate something fundamental about the human condition. Nevertheless, four hundred years after his death, there is still a surprising amount of uncertainty about how to interpret them. Indeed, in the case of arguably Shakespeare's two greatest plays, King Lear and Hamlet, the foremost minds have failed to give an adequate account, with some claiming the works are the result of artistic liberty (Coleridge, Bradley, Bloom) and some of artistic failure (Johnson, Voltaire, T.S. Eliot). 

In this book, author Simon Sheridan sets out to enhance our understanding by presenting a new method of interpretation that draws on the work of Joseph Campbell (the hero's journey) and Carl Jung (the archetypes). Beginning with the simple proposition that every story is about the transformation of the hero, Sheridan analyses seven of Shakespeare's greatest plays using a rigorous and repeatable framework that both unlocks the meaning of individual works such as Hamlet and King Lear and allows a comparative overview of Shakespeare's oeuvre as a whole. 

Having established a base of interpretation, Sheridan is then able to elucidate the higher-level themes in Shakespeare's art. The Bard repeatedly poked fun at the philosophers of his day and their focus on the static forms of existence. By contrast, his works foreground the process of transformation and change. Shakespeare confronts his heroes with identity crises of the highest magnitude, but he also endows them with an incredible clarity of consciousness. The result is that his works are an exploration of those aspects of existence that philosophy and religion had deliberately ignored. We call it the journey into the sacred.