Squibb academic lecture: Shakespeare and DSM-III

Abstract

Modern literary criticism generally rejects the idea of off-stage lives for Shakespeare's characters. All we have is behaviour--the visible behaviour of 'Shakespeare's talking animals'. But a review of that behaviour in the light of DSM-III suggests a high degree of clinical accuracy in some of it. The depictions of Ophelia, Lear and Caius Martius Coriolanus supply examples.