As the protesters cry, ‘No Kings,’ we yet see a monarch atop our government. It would seem, despite our North American pretensions to having achieved true democracy, and draining the King of his influence, the King archetype will not go down so easily, and this is perhaps in part because it has not been understood in some time. But just as likely it is part of his nature: The King Will Not Be Ignored.
In Shakespeare’s Henriad, we may recognize our own world in the way that political and ideological stability seem to have been undermined, perhaps permanently. Shakespeare keeps his audience related to the individuals involved, from the peasantry, to the knighthood, all the way to the King himself. Shakespeare and C. G. Jung seem to have a shared motto: “nothing human is alien to me.” We will explore the anachronistic premise that Shakespeare was, in certain key ways, a Jungian, and that Jungian ideas have been hiding in plain sight for centuries, embedded in the works of the greatest writer in the English language.
