ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a series of rather disjunctive thoughts as a way of approaching the problem of later-life creativity and throwing a different, personal, though in no way more “profound”, light on the topic. It suggests that in the theatre the proper names chosen for the characters will convey not only something about them, as well as reverberating through both the spectator’s external world and his inner personal nexus of meanings. The chapter explains the homonym Gonzalo/Gonzago provides the practi-cable—the unconscious link between the two plays of Hamlet and The Tempest—and signifies for operators that the later piece represents a different age-specific treatment of some of the major themes of the earlier play. It also suggests that without the addition of the basic meaningful relationships analysed in structuralist terms, any psychoanalytic interpretation must remain incomplete. The chapter argues that any psychoanalytic theory of creativity needs to account for such mature work in creative artists relating them to their early productions.
