The Problem of Circular Reasoning

BENJAMIN REISS: The asylum superintendents had a real problem on their hands, and that was that they were claiming that Shakespeare licensed all of their theories of mental illness and even almost all of the practices of treating people in asylums—that he had predicted them. And the question that they had was, Why has nobody noticed this before? Why is it suddenly we who understand what Shakespeare intended in his treatment of mad characters?

And the explanations that they gave were typically quite contorted. The reason that nobody in Shakespeare's day understood him was that there wasn't an adequate scientific basis to really understand his plays. In other words, Shakespeare had this sort of pre-vision of ultramodern science and medicine that leapt out of the early modern period and placed him smack in the middle of the nineteenth century in terms of his being up to date with scientific progress. And so nobody during his own day or even in the intervening centuries could really have been expected to get him right, because the science simply wasn't good enough. So science was what allowed them to see him correctly, but strangely enough, he was the one who validated the science.

So there was this sort of feedback loop of reinforcing legitimation. Shakespeare validates the psychiatrists, the psychiatrists validate Shakespeare, and once you've established that, there's no possibility that anybody could be wrong.