This dissertation aims to read William Shakespeare's text in terms of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of desire, taking King Lear and The Merchant of Venice as examples. Influenced by Lacan's (post)structuralist psychoanalysis, the recent psychoanalytic criticism suggests that literature and psychoanalysis are implicated with each other, the interpretation of text being understood as an endless process of transference taking place between the text and the reader/critic. The Introduction (Chapter One) discusses and presents Lacan's seminar on Hamlet as a model of the psychoanalytic reading of Shakespeare's text.
Chapter Two approaches King Lear and The Merchant of Venice in view of Freud's "The Theme of Three Caskets." Both The Merchant of Venice and King Lear deal with the situation in which one has to choose the object of desire among three alternatives. In The Merchant qf Venice, Bassanio is able to choose the lead casket containing Portia's portrait, since he does not identify his desired object with the appearance of either gold or silver. In King Lear, on the contrary, Lear fails to choose Cordelia as the object of his desire, a failure resulting from his false assumption of the unity between speech and act/thought. Bassanio is aware of the arbitrary relationship between appearance and reality, while Lear is not aware of the arbitrary relationship between speech and act/thought. The arbitrary relationship in both cases, arguably, is analogous in linguistic terms to that between signifier and signified according to Saussurian idea of language. Portia's strategy to bewilder Shylock's desire to kill Antonio can be read also as deriving from a linguistic perception that the meaning of one pound of flesh as a signifier is not fixed.
Chapter Three discusses the desire of Lear as a subject in King Lear. Lear is presented at the outset as a would-be self-contained being, say, an ego or a symbolic entity, but, after a failure to choose the object of his desire, he is re-presented as a subject, his desire of authority being symbolically castrated. He is able to unite with Cordelia, the object of his desire, only through death. This chapter also discusses Lacan's notion of tragedy. In a tragic effect, according to Lacan, hero's suffering turns out to have been disinterested or sublimated in its nature. When hero's suffering is sublimated in a fictional dramatic context, it is deemed aesthetically beautiful and the audiences feel pleasure, not pain.
Chapter Four considers in Lacanian terms the relationship between man and woman as represented in The Merchant of Venice. The ring episode in The Merchant of Venice implies that there doesn't exist any genuine love relationship between male sexuality and female sexuality. Man and woman are unable to fill in each other's lack, foreclosed ever against their desires from a harmonious marital plenitude as an instance of Lacan's notion of the phallus. Portia's transvestism can be read as a female desire to be the phallus. Male clothing provides her with a psychological device to hide her lack and temporarily become the desired object of the phallus.
Using Lacan's notion of the phallus, the Conclusion (Chapter Five) reconsiders the generic difference between comedy and tragedy. In comedy, according to Lacan, the phallus functions as the signifier of life itself floating freely away from socio-cultural conventions; the phallus as the signifier of a symbolic plenitude is assumed to be present in the agency of wit or intellect. In tragedy, on the contrary, the phallus is able to resurface only through the death of the tragic hero.