Holding a Mirror up to Nature attempts to correct this tendency. James Gilligan, a professor of clinical psychiatry who specialises in violence, draws upon decades of experience with ‘murderers, rapists, and others incarcerated in prisons or prison psychiatric hospitals in the United States or other countries’. David A.J. Richards is a professor of law who has ‘critiqued the criminal justice system which our society has created in an attempt to solve the problem of violence’. The authors have brought their experience to bear upon Shakespeare because Shakespeare ‘has more to teach us about the proclivity of humans to kill others and themselves than any other author we know of’. It is the authors’ familiarity with real-world problems of violence and justice and their sensitivity to extreme violence in Shakespeare’s art that make their work unique.

A central preoccupation of Holding a Mirror up to Nature is that Shakespeare can help promote love and restorative justice in a world damaged by shame, guilt, and nihilism. At least since the writings of E.R. Dodds, it is well known that tragedy marks the transition from a culture of ‘shame’ to a culture of ‘guilt’. To put it in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s terms, shame cultures are dedicated to ‘aristocratic’ values of ‘good and bad’, whereas guilt cultures are dedicated to the ‘priestly’ values of ‘good and evil’. In the epic world of the Iliad, for example, to be good, among other things, is to be beautiful, valorous, and strong in battle, whereas the opposite of good is to be, not evil, but rather cowardly, ignoble, or ugly. The guilt cultures of tragedy exhibit a transvaluation of values in which the principles of shame culture are experienced as evil.

Gilligan and Richards take this often-discussed feature of tragedy as the basis for a new consideration of the causes of violence in Shakespeare and the world. For Gilligan and Richards, shame motivates self-love and corresponding hatred of others, while guilt motivates self-hate and corresponding love of others. The book claims that both moral codes emerge as causes of violence. Shame directs violence externally, and guilt directs violence at oneself. These observations lead the book to one of its central claims: that morality, whose purpose is ostensibly to prevent violence, ends up causing violence instead.

The relationship between guilt, shame, and human violence forms a central part of the book’s genealogy of morality. Another aspect of the book’s moral critique is its claim that the scientific revolution produced nihilism by framing the world in a disinterested, objectified manner, thus reducing all non-scientific meanings to the status of subjective values. However, the book ends by insisting that the dead ends of shame and guilt morality on the one hand, and the dead end of nihilism on the other, can be transcended. Their solution is the ‘replacement of the moral affects and cognitive structures with the affect of love’, and replacing ‘retributive justice’ (which focuses on moral condemnation and punishment of guilt), with ‘restorative’ justice (which involves reconciliation, rehabilitation, and more communitarian values). Examples of the latter, for the authors, include Measure for Measure, in which the Duke chooses not to murder or imprison Angelo but rather to reconcile him with his victims; and the ending of The Winter’s Tale, in which ‘the play overcomes loss and past violence with love, forgiveness, [and] reconciliation’.

Among the merits of the book are its moral seriousness and its humane, compassionate attitude towards its subject. But the book might have benefited from confronting the limitations of its central project: ‘to understand Shakespeare’s plays as if they were case histories, and derive our theories from them’. One of the most celebrated aspects of Shakespeare’s characters is the degree to which they resist being ‘case studies’ of any particular malady or theory. In their idiosyncrasy, variety, and imaginative vitality, Shakespeare’s charismatic personalities stubbornly refuse to be particular instances of general laws.

Moreover, in seeing Shakespeare’s characters as instances of psychological and social maladies, the authors often find it difficult to avoid condemning Shakespeare’s characters for their failures. In a book that sees morality itself as a cause of violence, one is astonished to encounter so much moralising. Henry V is condemned as a war criminal, Othello and Iago are rebuked for their shame-driven values, Timon is compared to Hitler, and so on. Such judgements are not entirely inappropriate, since our legitimate sense of moral outrage forms an important part of our response to the plays. But one of the most uncomfortable aspects of Shakespeare’s art is the way in which it exposes our own susceptibility to passions and failures that we would otherwise condemn in others. Gilligan and Richards adopt towards Shakespeare a stance of clinical and forensic distance and a capacity for judging characters as if from the outside that we rarely experience in the theatre. The authors bring to their work a commitment to justice and morality that is palpable and real. But the book might have benefited from remembering that Shakespeare’s resistance to Pharisaical self-righteousness is one of the most important dimensions of his moral intelligence.