“Looking on Darkness Which the Blind Do See”: Psychobiography from a Social Perspective

Abstract

If psychobiography is about historically significant individuals, then Shakespeare certainly fits the bill. His works belong to the most venerable, most studied and most read of world literature. But where is the biography? Can there be psychobiography in the absence of knowledge about meaningful events in the individual’s life? In this chapter Shakespeare is viewed from the vantage point of the social outlier. His psychobiography will then be concerned with the ways in which later generations dealt (and deal) with him. Much of the mystery surrounding his person (mystification, idealization, but also denial, rejection, suppression, pathologizing) is to be understood in the light of how he escapes entrenched categories of evaluation. Psychobiography’s concentration on individual personality thus misses out on understanding how human outliers function. The author therefore pleads for a social psychobiography and will illustrate the issue by two examples outside the Western context: the historical figure of Sunjata in the fourteenth century Mande epic, and Hatshepsut (fifteenth century BCE), one of the very few female pharaohs in ancient Egypt. In doing so, this chapter offers a criticism of the WEIRD concept, in terms of its (limited) applicability in socio-historic research.