William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare’s fascination with mental illness is readily apparent in his writings. For years, I taught Macbeth to my 9th grade students, and mental illness plays a decidedly prominent role in the story through both Macbeth’s visions and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking night terrors. Macbeth himself even explicitly refers to mental illness when prompting the doctor to cure Lady Macbeth by asking, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased”? Add in characters such as Lear, Titus, Ophelia, and Hamlet, and Shakespeare’s fixation on the mentally unwell is without question. Even composed at the turn of the 17th century, Shakespeare’s renditions of mental illness are poignant and relatable down to some of the more minute details. I have personally delivered many versions of Lear’s desperate pleading: “O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!” Madness is not a choice, though, as Shakespeare understood. It must be lived, nonetheless.