Shakespeare: The Journey into the Sacred now available

One of the cool things about writing is that the book you set out to write and the book you end up writing are never the same thing, which is why the act of composition is as much of a learning experience for the author as the reader. So it was with my latest book, which was originally going to focus on the emerging concept of story-as-transformation that I have been developing over the past several years. Since I’d already used Shakespeare’s works as examples, my plan was to make them the primary source material to explicate a theory about stories.

But, as the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. In order to incorporate the works of Shakespeare into the book I thought I was writing, I figured I should actually go back and read them first. I now realise it had been more than ten years since I’d read any Shakespeare, well before I started toying with the new ideas about stories. Thus, I was approaching him with an entirely different mindset. What I found was that my old understanding was wrong. But then I realised something far more important: the understanding in the general culture is wrong. I went back and looked up the big names in Shakespearean criticism, Harold Bloom, A.C. Bradley, Northrop Frye, Coleridge, Johnson, Voltaire, etc. and realised they were all wrong too. That’s how I ended up writing a book in what is one of the most overcrowded genres in modern non-fiction: Shakespearean criticism and commentary.

Still, the approach I ended up taking is one I believe has not been done before. There are plenty of guides on how-to-read Shakespeare and they all seem to focus on the approach developed within modern literary studies. Then there are commentaries on the themes in Shakespeare such as Bloom’s idea that the Bard created the very notion of “the human”. What I haven’t seen done is a book which combines the two to both provide a commentary while also outlining the method of interpretation which drives it. That is what I have done in this book. Along the way, I discovered a technique that Shakespeare uses which unlocks the meaning of his major works. I call it covert exposition. It’s a way of creating the backstory via implication. All of the big names just listed misunderstood the works because they didn’t understand the Bard’s use of covert exposition.

However, what I hope to convey in this book is not really Shakespeare criticism or technical commentary but appreciation, mostly because that’s the experience I got by going back and reading the Bard again. We all know he was a genius, but his genius is even more extraordinary once you grasp the deeper meanings of the works.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, the book is now available. Here’s the details.

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Available at most online book retailers including Bookshop (US/UK), Booktopia (AUS), Barnes and Noble (US), AbeBooks, Amazon, Amazon Kindle (eBook), Kobo (eBook), Apple Books (eBook), Everand (eBook) and more.

Overview

• Outlines a method of story interpretation inspired by the work Joseph Campbell which begins with the premise that every story is a transformation of the hero’s identity
• Applies this method to seven of Shakespeare’s greatest works, unlocking the true meaning of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and others
• Uses Jung’s concept of the archetypes to show that Shakespeare’s oeuvre is an exploration of the most common transformations in life
• Draws out the difference between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy to show how Shakespeare represents a major turning point in Western cultural history that still resonates in our time

Summary

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 aims to enhance our understanding of Shakespeare 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 then elucidates 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.