What Shakespeare Got Right About PTSD

Othello has long been understood as a play about race, love, and jealousy. But it is also a play about soldiers experiencing what we now call post-traumatic stress. In March 1947, Judge Harry Stackell, of the Bronx County Court, thought as much when he sentenced Victor Vigotsky to a relatively brief prison term. Vigotsky, a 23-year-old combat veteran who had returned from the Second World War after fighting for four years in Europe, was convinced that his young wife, Gloria, had been unfaithful. He killed her with his .45-caliber pistol “in a fit of jealousy.” When the police arrived at the scene, Vigotsky “was in a daze and apparently did not realize his wife was dead.” Before standing trial, he was taken to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. In rendering a sympathetic sentence, Judge Stackell “likened Vigotsky’s action to that of Othello,” according to a New York Times article. The assistant district attorney, who had sought a longer prison term, objected that “there was no Iago here to inflame jealousy in Othello’s mind.”

Vigotsky’s case came to mind during my time as a Shakespeare consultant for Kenny Leon’s Othello, a new Broadway adaptation in which PTSD is central to the plot. In a setting noted as “the near future,” Othello (Denzel Washington), Iago (Jake Gyllenhaal), Cassio (Andrew Burnap), and Emilia (Kimber Elaine Sprawl) are all battle-tested United States Marines. Othello reminds the gathered senators in Venice, who are about to dispatch him to a new front, that since his youth he has been engaged in combat. When, later in the play, he suffers an epileptic seizure, the price he has paid for such a life becomes clear. Emilia and Desdemona (Molly Osborne), married to traumatized soldiers, will pay with their lives. The production takes this aspect of Shakespeare’s story seriously: To deepen the cast’s understanding of the military and PTSD, Christopher Wolfe, a decorated West Point graduate who served in Iraq, was brought in as a military consultant. Other veterans familiar with PTSD spoke with the cast, including Mark “Ranger” Jones, who served as the aide to the commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, and retired General Nadja West, a former surgeon general of the U.S. Army.

Some treatments of Shakespeare—including Laurence Olivier’s influential 1944 film of Henry V—envision the playwright’s first audiences as boisterously cheerful Elizabethans streaming into the Globe Theatre. That would not have been the case for those who went to see his latest tragedy, Othello, in 1604. The “news” shared early on in the play—“our wars are done”—would have struck a resonant chord, coming soon after the end of England’s own long war to crush an Irish insurrection.

The cost of that war was high: Roughly 30,000 Englishmen, ill-equipped and poorly trained, had been rounded up, some of them snatched outside churches and playhouses, and shipped off to join British forces garrisoned in Ireland. Thousands of them died there, along with far higher casualties among Irish men, women, and children, in a nine-year war that was won only after traditional military strategies gave way to starving the Irish into submission. Atrocities included reports of severed heads taken as trophies.

Care for England’s returning veterans was woefully inadequate. A new stock character began limping across Elizabethan stages in plays such as The Shoemaker’s Holiday: the maimed and embittered combat veteran. Audiences knew what was at stake when, in Shakespeare’s Pericles, a character asks, “What would you have me do? / Go to the wars, would you, where a man may serve seven years for / the loss of a leg, and have not money enough in the / end to buy him a wooden one?”

The impact of demobilization extended into every corner of England, including Shakespeare’s Stratford-Upon-Avon, which petitioned the government, unsuccessfully, to “be eased” of the obligation to support “one Lewis Gilbert, a maimed soldier in Ireland.” We don’t know what Gilbert, a butcher by trade, was like before he came home, but after his return from Ireland he was accused of breaking into a local shop and fatally stabbing a neighbor. We would now likely label what Gilbert was experiencing as PTSD.

Read: Shakespeare wrote insightfully about women. That doesn’t mean he was one.

This wasn’t the only source of trauma that Othello’s first audiences had to reckon with, because the end of the Irish war, in the spring of 1603, coincided with a terrible outbreak of bubonic plague. By the time it subsided a year later, roughly 30,000 Londoners (one in six) had died, and perhaps another 30,000 or so had been infected but managed to survive. At the peak of the pandemic, more than 3,000 Londoners died in a single week. It’s hard to fathom the horrors of living through this. The plague-stricken were locked in their home (and the words lord have mercy on us were painted on the door). Those caught escaping from quarantine with visible plague sores were subject to execution. Bodies were dumped in mass graves. The civic authorities couldn’t figure out what caused the plague, but they knew that crowds spread it, so they ordered the theaters closed when plague deaths reached more than 30 a week. London’s playhouses would not reopen until April 1604, around the time that Othello was first publicly staged.

That term PTSD entered the vocabulary only in the early 1980s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Previous wars had their own names for it: battle fatigue, soldier’s heart, war neurosis, shell shock. Shakespeare was familiar enough with its symptoms to describe them in a speech that Lady Percy makes in Henry IV, Part One, written around 1597, a few years into the Irish war. She asks her martial husband, Hotspur, what ails him:

Desdemona, like Lady Percy, had to deal with a husband who lived a soldier’s life. Othello recounts how he has spent his years “in the tented field, / And little of this great world can I speak, / More than pertains to feats of broil and battle.” Iago had fought alongside him and “seen the cannon, / When it hath blown his ranks into the air, / And, like the devil, from his very arm / Puff’d his own brother.” Like Lady Percy’s speech, Othello runs through various symptoms of what might today be described as PTSD, including Othello’s seizure; his angry outbursts, paranoia, and depressive thoughts; and his penchant for domestic violence and suicide.

Producers and directors have made efforts in recent years to capture what it must have felt like to see Shakespeare’s plays in his own day: original pronunciation and costuming, playhouses built to resemble the open-air Globe. But there are other, less palpable features of playgoing back then, including the collective experience of the recent war and pandemic. Shakespeare understood what spoke to his times; he knew, too, that those who warily returned to the reopened Globe to see his new play would have recognized the trauma at the core of Othello’s tragedy.