کمک های پائولینا شکسپیر برای تمرین شعردرمانی

An expression of Shakespeare’s seventeenth century practice of theater art, The Winter’s Tale resembles Japanese Noh Drama, drama inviting an audience to participate in the healing of a diseased character through the spoken poetry of a priest (Shakespeare in Arden, 1963). The diseased character in The Winter’s Tale is Leontes, King of Sicilia, who suffers from jealousy. In the treatment of Leontes’ spiritual and emotional illness, which Renaissance medical practice diagnosed a chemical imbalance caused by too much yellow bile (Gordon, 1992b), Shakespeare gives considerable focus and stage time to his priestly midwife Paulina and her emergent practice of poetry therapy. A practice born by diverging from conventional Renaissance poetry therapy inherited from the Greeks, Paulina’s emergent poetics embody a principle later named the isoprinciple by contemporary music therapists. The isoprinciple, described by the physician-poetry therapist Jack Leedy (1985), is one of selecting an analysand, a work of music or poetry that not only matches the feeling and perception of the patient, but balances that feeling with others, always opening to a larger recognition of truth, a more wholesome balance among feelings, such as a movement from despair to hope (p. 82).

By identifying and describing Paulina’s divergent and efficacious application of the isoprinciple to treat Leontes’ jealousy, this study articulates Shakespeare’s contribution to the history and contemporary practice of poetry therapy. Shakespeare’s contribution includes an accurate portrayal of the Renaissance midwife as a spiritual director, her conventional practice of poetry therapy received from Greek oral tradition, truthful scenes revealing how this conventional practice fails to treat effectively a typical case of jealousy and truthful scenes dramatizing (or giving heightened truth to) a divergent practice of poetry therapy, one applying what contemporary music and poetry therapists call the isoprinciple, in order to reveal how this principle may effectively treat jealousy. This divergent practice not only subdues Leontes’ jealousy by discerning and matching both his flawed perception of justice and his true humility or openness to a larger, more truthful vision, but the new practice restores within Leontes and brings to bear the wholesome dimensions of the human spirit. Therefore Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale dramatizes and embodies an effective treatment of jealousy. Insofar as Shakespeare used the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage to reveal truth (a truth of human nature, a truth about the practice of theater art, a truth about the practice of medicine, or an unfolding truth from divine revelation), this study considers The Winter’s Tale both good theater art and a useful educational application of the isoprinciple to treat jealousy, a recurring human disorder.