The core argument of Matthew Biberman’s Shakespeare, Adaptation, Psychoanalysis is so vast that it needs to be quoted in full: “We will gain a better understanding of how contemporary conceptions of psychoanalytic cures … derive from the practices of literary adaptation that were worked out or codified during the decades that followed the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660. Careful study of these adaptations reveals key aesthetic strategies that were developed to dissolve the trauma that resulted from the regicide and the English civil war. It is this earlier program of symptom dissolution that has now lodged itself into modern Anglo-American culture as the notion of a therapeutically ‘centered self’ that Freud, and after him, Jacques Lacan, labored so mightily to overturn” (17–18). To say that Biberman presents a number of interpretive trajectories here would be an understatement.

To the extent that the primary trajectory focuses on the practice of literary adaptation in the Restoration, Biberman makes a good-faith effort to cover the topic. While the notion of Restoration adaptation is inexplicably limited to adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (why no Paradise Lost?), the five main chapters offer with varying degrees of success accounts of how Restoration dramatists such as Tate, Dryden, Davenant, and Otway re-created Shakespeare for their own contemporary audiences. Biberman offers no theory of adaptation, and he never provides a full picture of the range of adaptive strategies employed. But overall he lays out a persuasive account of how different writers reworked Shakespeare to their own different ends. And, in a very basic sense, the study offers meaningful (if limited and fragmented) intellectual history in the guise of literary history.

That said, the other interpretive trajectories, which appear to be the conceptual center of the book in its declared interest in psychoanalysis, are simply ignored. For example, at the historical level there is no engagement with Restoration culture that might justify the claim that these theatrical adaptions even responded to (let alone attempted “to dissolve”) “the trauma that resulted from the regicide and the English civil war.” Nothing in the study suggests that the need to offer evidence for this major idea was even considered, despite the fact that many of the Shakespearean works under consideration have obvious political resonance. For example, addressing Otway’s adaptation of Coriolanus, Biberman notes how “Otway handles the eruption of hate as a comprehensible phenomenon” (38) without taking the logical step suggested by his own thesis: exploring how a Restoration understanding of this eruption might be relevant to the period’s backward glance at the English Civil War. And in his concluding reconstruction of Garrick’s 1772 reworking of Hamlet (here and elsewhere no explanation is provided for the inclusion of non-Restoration texts), even as he cites Garrick’s interest in how Hamlet explores a “vanished order now replaced by a new system” predicated on survivors newly “united through civic virtue, committed to preserving the country” (117), Biberman doesn’t see any necessity to relate this assertion to one of his own foundational claims.

This lack of interest in the defining rationale of the study extends to the other side of the Restoration, the notion that these adaptations served some critical function in the historical evolution of “the notion of a therapeutically ‘centered self’ that Freud … [and] Lacan … labored so mightily to overturn.” While it may be that, taken as a group, Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare presented “the abstract codification of human behavior and happiness [later] enshrined within American ego psychology” (31)—and it should be noted that the collective influence of the plays in question is nowhere addressed—Biberman never takes up the historical emergence of ego psychology nor does he make any effort to explore how the specific aesthetic vision of Restoration (adaptive) theater might have served a role in this emergence. For this reason, while there are many citations of Freud’s and Lacan’s writings (rather scattered and never unified around a central theme), the ultimate claim that Freudian thought in its French (Lacanian) form was somehow responsive to Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare is given no conceptual foundation. We get many hints of this process but no consistently presented evidence on either the historical or the theoretical level.