In Shakespeare’s Mad Men , van Oort treats King Lear and Measure for Measure as works that develop in dialogue with Shakespeare’s
attempts elsewhere (in Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth , and Coriolanus ) to consider how violent competition with rivals is endemic.
Van Oort builds upon theories expounded by René Girard and Harry Berger Jr. in their work on “mimetic desire” and Shakespeare’s “theater of envy.” So long as the power center of a culture was occupied by gods, not human beings, resentment was handled through ritual sacrifice—actual killing. But as cultures become more secular and variegated, resentment gets directed toward the “center’s real human occupant”—away from “an inaccessible sacred center.” The violence this unleashes threatens to spin out of control.
“Mad men,” van Oort proposes, attempt to mitigate such violence by trying to renounce the center—both King Lear and Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure ostensibly abdicate their political authority. By doing so, they test the strengths and weakness, possibilities and limitations,of ethical life unmoored from the violent rivalries churning at its center. These plays by Shakespeare can therefore be read as explorations of how and whether human life and culture can plausibly be shown to survive its own internal, violent threats.
Insofar as van Oort’s book is, as I believe it is, excellent at doing what I have just described it to be doing, then, I also believe, readers interested in these issues will learn a lot from it.