Response to Marvin Krims's “Correspondence Between an Elizabethan Woman and Her Psychoanalyst: Beatrice on the Couch”

Abstract

I would like to acknowledge Dr. Krims’s imagination and sense of adventure in his undertaking an analysis of Beatrice. I wonder if he imagined that his analysis of Beatrice brings out the Beatrice in the woman reader, and with it the need to spar. Therefore, I find myself ready to spar, with appreciation for Dr. Krims’s work, and, I hope, with less ambivalence, less fusion of aggression and erotism, than Beatrice, the most capable, and most thwarted, of all of Shakespeare’s women. Beatrice spars to keep her vulnerability hidden. If she cannot be an equal to a man in a man’s world, she cannot be vulnerable enough to love. Shakespeare, the standard bearer for the power, poignancy, evocativeness, and wit in the English language, has created in Beatrice a woman equal to himself, a woman who might penetrate his armor, touch his vulnerability, as she did with Benedick. She is a woman a wordsmith might love. The great Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), postulates that in his plays Shakespeare created our understanding of human nature. In other words, Shakespeare defines our psychology. In Beatrice, Shakespeare, the playwright/psychologist who created our modern sensibility, has created a female alter ego. If Madame Bovary is Flaubert (“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”), Beatrice is Shakespeare. In analyzing Beatrice, Krims upsets Shakespeare’s balance of power. Beatrice is lying down. She may banter, she may bait, but she abrogates equality. And in so doing, she is not the Beatrice of Shakespeare’s play.