Masks of Loneliness:Alfred Adler in Perspective: Alfred Adler in Perspective Book

The basic philosophical premise to this discussion is that Shakespeare's career is best understood as his attempt to demonstrate the ongoing conflicts between the personal world (man's own individual self), the political world (the state that is, in Hamlet, somewhat rotten), and the universal world (however one conceives that, perhaps in Ptolemaic terms). Spencer follows T.S. Eliot in making the (somewhat inflated) claim that one can't really understand Shakespeare unless one has read the whole set of plays, so his conversation presupposes that his reader is fairly conversant with, say, Antony And Cleopatra and Troilus And Cressida, which I dare say is not usually the case. Spencer makes up for this assumption by quoting perceptively and usefully, so by the time the whole lecture is over, I did acquire a greater sense of Shakespeare's vision and a subsequent compulsion to open the collected works and go digging for the less popular plays, just to see exactly what he's talking about for myself. It's not often that I wish a critical analysis had gone on longer than it did, but that's the case here. It's definitely worth the time.