Shakespeare’s Therapy, Therapeutic Shakespeare: A Renaissance Reading of Shakespeare and Therapy in Hamlet

This chapter analyses Hamlet, a play which asks the audience to pay attention to, and question matters of the mind being considered during the Elizabethan period. Many an academic describes how Shakespeare’s knowledge of ‘both physical and mental illness enabled him to enlighten audiences about the soma and psyche of a character and their failure to work in harmony and there are many claims as to how Shakespeare provides important and surprising insights into medicine’.