The period between Shakespeare and ourselves is divided by a barrier as difficult understand as it is palpable. The past two centuries have seen conceptions of the human identity coalesce into the psychological. It would be foolish to define this term too strictly, but at its core it sees the individual as an atomic unit in pursuit of its own interests. Some interests, like food or sexual companionship, are ultimately biological and therefore common to us all. But other interests are more or less unique to different personalities, and thus define those personalities. The businessman or woman values financial success and acts in hope of gaining it. The artist seeks achievement in creative fields. But one way or another, something in our natures (maybe stimulated by outside influences) is "after something" in this life, and if the term psychology means anything, it means conceiving of all human actions as reflections of their underlying motives.

The modern fiction writer is expected to build characters around a core of motives, and the actor on the screen or stage expects to start with motivations when developing a role. That some characters may have evil motives instead of good ones is entirely acceptable to readers and audiences. But they will not accept the lack of motives -- or confused ones -- as this inherently destroys their notion of a "character" altogether.

Shakespeare, especially in his greatest characters, is bound to disappoint contemporary psychological expectations. Many generations of scholars (not to mention actors and directors) have twisted themselves up into knots to make a solid psychological being out of Hamlet or Macbeth or Iago. They dig into each little phrase and all its variants to conjure up the logic we expect in characters today, but which the playwright did not aspire to. When people speak the oft-repeated judgment that the Bard wrote "only great plays, and not good ones," they usually refer to the impossibility of getting our collective heads around his greatest characters through psychology. The motives of the Danish prince, the Scottish king and the Venetian criminal defy analysis. This is often treated as an opportunity for personal interpretation and creative latitude by actors and directors. But when we think that Shakespeare wrote directly for specific players in his day, and never likely thought about performance of his works beyond his lifetime, it hardly makes much sense to hold that he was purposely indefinite or confusing.

No, Shakespeare and his audience simply did not share our modern psychological perspective, and didn't seek to find it validated in his characters and action. This was still the age of allegory, informed by the morality and spirit of religion as developed through the Middle Ages. When we say that Iago is evil, we must mean it as a noun and not an adjective. Iago is evil is the same way that Satan is evil -- not as coloration but as essence. Thus it is foolish or unnecessary to ask precisely why the man is so despicable and cruel. In Iago's own reflections in his powerful asides and monologues, we only find confusion of his motives. In the same way, the Macbeths are not ambitious, but are ambition in itself. These are spiritual essences that minds of Shakespeare's day (and many centuries before) assumed as fundamentals in a universe of moral forces, in which each human life was nothing other than a passion play -- to finish up in Paradise or Hell.

It took me years to finally give up struggling for a psychological take on Shakespeare's characters. The Bard was unconcerned with what the distant readers of the future would perceive as psychological incongruities, or even failures to establish motives for much highly potent action. To speak boldly, there is no underlying and cohesive psychology beneath the character of Hamlet -- to take the very best example -- and no amount of effort will uncover it. There is, in fact, the very opposite. This character is the perfection of the youthful, brilliant Prince, in whom high birth, intelligence, great power, and even greater haughtiness all struggle, scene by scene, to make the most extraordinary of performances possible out of his condition. If he has anything that we could call a motive, it is to be as great an actor as he can be from the circumstances given him -- to be what we might call today a master of performance art -- and certainly a poet. Hamlet is intoxicated with himself, with his intelligence and creativity. Just as Shakespeare likely was.