Centuries before Dostoevsky explored the mind on the page, Shakespeare brought its hidden workings into view through the voice and body of the actor.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Every actor knows the moment when a line changes in the speaking. A character begins a sentence with one intention and reaches its end altered by the words they have just spoken. Shakespeare understood that consciousness can move inside language, and he built his soliloquies around minds discovering themselves in real time. The audience witnesses the discovery as it happens.

Freud recognized the scale of this achievement in his 1928 essay on Dostoevsky. “Dostoevsky’s place is not far behind Shakespeare,” he wrote, before calling The Brothers Karamazov “the most magnificent novel ever written” (Freud 1928). Read together, the sentences produce a remarkable result: Dostoevsky receives the greatest novel ever written and still comes second.

The hierarchy carries weight because Freud saw Shakespeare and Dostoevsky working within the same psychological territory. He traced a line from Oedipus Rex through Hamlet to The Brothers Karamazov, finding in each the son’s rivalry with the father and the threat of parricide (Freud 1928). Shakespeare reached this hidden life through performance, where an actor carried inward conflict into public view. He had learned how to make the divided mind speak before it fully understood itself.

The Mind Overhears Itself

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom argued that Shakespeare created characters capable of changing through the experience of hearing themselves speak. He called the process self-overhearing: characters discover new meanings in their own words as they speak them (Bloom 1998). The idea remains one of Bloom’s most useful accounts of dramatic technique. Bloom was rarely intimidated by a sweeping historical claim, and his larger argument remains open to debate.

Hamlet supplies the clearest demonstration. After watching an actor summon tears for Hecuba, Hamlet turns the comparison upon himself: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2). He moves through shame and mounting anger until the speech produces a new idea. The players will perform something resembling his father’s murder, and Hamlet will study Claudius: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” For Hamlet, this qualifies as a remarkably efficient afternoon.

The soliloquy allows us to witness thought becoming action. Hamlet begins with self-accusation and leaves with a plan because his language has altered what he can imagine doing. The speech catches a mind in the act of forming itself.

Onstage, Hamlet’s decision unfolds at the pace of his breathing. The audience follows each hesitation until speech carries him toward action, making psychological change an event shared by everyone in the room.

The Reasons Keep Changing

Iago keeps explaining himself, and each explanation enlarges the distance between grievance and destruction. He begins with Othello’s promotion of Cassio, then adds a suspicion that Othello has slept with Emilia: “It is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / He has done my office” (Othello, Act 1, Scene 3). He acknowledges the absence of evidence and decides that suspicion alone will serve. Evidence would only slow him down. Later, he resents Cassio for possessing “a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly” (Othello, Act 5, Scene 1).

The accumulating motives buckle under the weight of what follows. Iago destroys a marriage and engineers four deaths, all while searching for language large enough to make his appetite for ruin sound reasonable. His soliloquies give the audience access to a man manufacturing permission for what he already wants to do.

In notes on Othello later published in 1836, Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave the pattern its permanent name: “the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity” (Coleridge 1836). Coleridge recognized that Iago’s explanations behave like rationalizations generated in service of an established impulse.

Modern personality research offers a useful comparison. Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams grouped narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy under the term Dark Triad. Their study described related patterns of self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity, and aggression while preserving distinctions among the traits (Paulhus and Williams 2002, 557). Iago resembles this cluster as a literary character. He manipulates others with little concern for their suffering and continually recruits fresh grievances to authorize the destruction he desires. Shakespeare dramatizes the mind’s ability to create reasons that flatter an impulse after the impulse has taken command.

At the end of the play, Iago refuses the explanation everyone demands: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word” (Othello, Act 5, Scene 2). The refusal is the most honest thing he does in five acts. By then, the audience has watched him gather and discard explanations for every cruelty. His silence confirms that the appetite for destruction was always more stable than any reason he gave for it.

Guilt in the Body

Lady Macbeth’s collapse reaches the audience through language that enacts her suffering while leaving its full cause beyond explanation. In the sleepwalking scene, a doctor and a gentlewoman watch her rub her hands as if washing them. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” she cries, followed by the terrible sensory memory: “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1).

Guilt appears as compulsion. Her body repeats what her waking mind cannot bear to confess. The hands are clean, yet the washing continues because the murder survives as smell and repetitive motion. Shakespeare gives the audience a psychological state through an action precise enough to carry its own meaning.

Freud later placed Lady Macbeth among those “wrecked by success,” people who collapse after attaining a long-desired aim because fulfillment awakens an internal prohibition (Freud 1916). She gains the crown and loses the structure that allowed her to pursue it. Yet Freud also admitted that he could not fully determine why Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth collapses after her success. He considered several possibilities, including her childlessness and the compression of time within the play, and found each explanation incomplete. Lady Macbeth resists even Freud’s attempt to tidy her into an explanation.

That uncertainty strengthens Shakespeare’s achievement. Freud’s category identifies the shape of Lady Macbeth’s collapse, yet the mystery within it survives. Her sleepwalking makes guilt recognizable while preserving the fullness of a character who exceeds diagnosis. Audiences encounter a body trying to remove a moral stain from the skin.

Theatre depends upon this kind of compression. Psychic conflict must become something an actor can do, and the gesture survives changes in psychological vocabulary because the human body remains its instrument.

No Page to Hide Behind

Shakespeare wrote for an art form that moves forward in time. A character’s inward life had to become perceptible within the duration of a performance, carried by the actor’s voice and body. In a soliloquy, the audience receives each turn of thought as the character discovers it.

This pressure produced an extraordinary economy of expression. Across the plays, the mind becomes legible through dramatic action that survives changes in vocabulary and theory. The audience comes to know these characters by watching thought alter their choices and settle into their bodies.

The achievement belongs specifically to theatre. Shakespeare understood that consciousness reveals itself through what a person does with language under pressure. A sentence intended to conceal may expose its speaker before it ends. The body carries knowledge that conscious language has buried.

Freud’s placement of Shakespeare begins to sound like a recognition of ancestry. Nearly three centuries before The Brothers Karamazov, the stage had taught Shakespeare to make a mind reveal itself before it understood what it was saying.

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Sources and Further Reading

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 2. Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge. William Pickering, 1836.

Freud, Sigmund. “Dostoevsky and Parricide.” 1928. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume 21.

Freud, Sigmund. “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work.” 1916. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume 14.

Paulhus, Delroy L., and Kevin M. Williams. “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.” Journal of Research in Personality 36, no. 6 (2002): 556–563.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shakespeare, William. Othello. Folger Shakespeare Library.