Shakespeare as American Archetype: diagnosing American Power Complexes!

As early as 1927, Ashley Thorndike went so far as to suggest that ‘Washington, Lincoln, Shakespeare . . . are the three whom Americans universally worship’, a sentiment repeated in front of President Hoover, 1932, at the inauguration of the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library, Washington DC. In fact, as early as 1786, John Quincy Adams was claiming Shakespeare for America as one who “reveals fragility of rational order; fallibility; corruption of monarchy as irrational tyranny.” Yet by the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1879) could name Shakespeare as “the” representative man, repository of humane and stable values. How did Shakespeare become so “American” that the Folger Library in Washington DC holds almost all important sources for study? To what extent is Shakespeare an American cultural archetype, and what might this mean for Jung’s theory of psychological archetypes?

Susan Rowland’s lecture will explore Shakespeare’s pivotal cultural and psychological role in founding and funding diverse American identities. In so doing she will reveal similar Shakespearean and Jungian approaches to symbols, gender and war. If Jung reading Shakespeare can supply his psychological embodying, then so can Shakespeare read Jung as an essentially dramatic attempt to rebalance the modern and American psyche. 

About the Presenter

Susan Rowland (Ph.D.) is Chair of MA Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and formerly Professor of English and Jungian Studies at the University of Greenwich, UK. She is author of a number of books on literary theory, gender and Jung including Jung as a Writer (2005); Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002); C. G. Jung in the Humanities (2010) and The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung (2012). She also researches detective fiction with a book, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (2001) and NEW in 2015, The Sleuth and the Goddess: Hestia, Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite in Women’s Detective Fiction. Forthcoming in 2016 is a new book called Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman. In addition she teaches an online interactive public program on Shakespeare called “Shakespeare in Depth.”