In a little humoresque on Shakespeare in my volume Instead of a Critic, I made passing reference to Ted Hughes’s monumental study Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. It wasn’t a flattering reference and I omitted to mention that I never made it past the ‘Introduction’. However, when a friendly reader asked me what I thought of the tome, it prompted me to take Hughes’s doorstop of a book off the shelf and look at it again. I still get no further than page 43. But I admire Hughes as a poet, so he must be saying something worth hearing. No?
The book certainly divided opinion when first published in 1992. ‘Exit, pursued by a boar’ was the Observer’s headline above Anthony Burgess’s mystified review. The Independent declared the book to be ‘egregious twaddle’. For John Carey of the Sunday Times it was ‘appalling nonsense… tedious mythical mumbo-jumbo’. But it found supporters – rather fewer of them – in Tom Paulin, Michael Hoffman and Marina Warner.
The idea goes something like this. Shakespeare’s work is bound together as an organic unity by a single mythic-symbolic structure which Hughes calls the ‘Tragic Myth’. Shakespeare’s early poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece embody two great myths of the archaic world, that of the hero who rejects the love of the Goddess and is killed in revenge by a boar; and that of the king, or god, whose crime is rape and whose punishment is banishment. These themes are then followed through in the subsequent plays and in some way correspond to the conflict in Elizabethan society between the Old Religion, Catholicism, and the emergent challenge of Protestantism, especially in its most extreme – and theatre-hostile form – Puritanism. By tapping into the energy of these myths Shakespeare was able to revivify his imagination (and, we might add – though Hughes doesn’t – by uncovering this formula Hughes was able to reconcile himself to the suicides of two women in his life, Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevil.)
At once I see a couple of approaches that on the face of it are contradictory. One is Hughes’s experience of practical theatre work with Peter Brook and Donya Feuer. With Brook he worked as an ‘ideas man’, first at the National Theatre, later at the Centre for Theatre Research in Paris, providing suggestive dramatic situation for the actors to explore. Feuer’s notion, inspired by Hughes, was to shuffle extracts from the plays into what they called a perpetuum mobile performance, one passage merging into another to bring out their commonality: the evolution of one of the Myth’s figures from play to play.
The other approach, its opposite, is an armchair reading of the Collected Works as plays for the page, not the stage – what the Germans would call ‘Lesedramen’– excerpting them and mingling lyric poems with dramatic speeches. This approach has its origins in Hughes’s Selection of Shakespeare’s Verse, which was first published twenty years earlier.
What unites the approaches is a habit of selective quotation: ripping from context, treating Shakespeare as a ‘single titanic work, like an Indian epic’ (p43). The justification lies in the epigraph from Yeats – ‘the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought’. Hughes tell us he’s in search of Shakespeare’s myth, but really he’s in search of his own. Which is acceptable, if he were more honest about it. For those of us who use literature to navigate our lives it’s instructive to watch Hughes, a keen intellect and gifted wordsmith, on the job. Just as a stopped clock will show the right time twice a day, so a totalising vision may occasionally bring particular objects into focus.
So what is this loose baggy monster? Is it literary criticism? If one penetrates that far, there are probably flashes of insight, discussions of individual passages that might illuminate the text in the way a good literary commentary does. But the wise commentator, his contribution complete, has the good grace to withdraw and leave the reader alone with the text. Hughes cannot do that, because nothing is so specific, so local; everything must be subsumed to his overarching theory of the ‘Tragic Equation’.
If not literary criticism, then what is it? ‘Poetic criticism’? Mythopoeia? The bastard offspring of Robert Graves and C.G. Jung? The response of one creative artist to another? The book is full of fine phrases that might qualify as prose poems: even John Carey, in a scathing review, was taken by a footnote on page 11 about the sow, her ‘elephantine lolling mouth under great ear flaps, like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with over-production’. Flicking through later pages, I noticed many a felicitous turn of phrase – the sonnets as ‘the vestibule to the bloody temple of the tragedies’, for example (p64), or Shakespeare’s language as ‘a kind of prodigiously virtuoso pidgin’ (p152).
Yet I sense dishonesty, subterfuge, the ripple effect of obsession. He deploys the tools of evidence-based scholarship, but craftily.[1] The procedure is to decide what you’re looking for, to ‘look’ for it, and to ‘find’ it. QED. In the opening pages, where the Myth is already established as a given, we are told that Shakespeare ‘strips the myth of all identifiably mythic features and secretes his mechanism within his plot’ (p2). Thus we have a sort of conspiracy theory: it’s there but it’s hidden; reminiscent of the way that anti-Stratfordians (those who deny that the man from Stratford wrote ‘Shakespeare’) claim that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford hid coded messages about authorial identity in the First Folio. Then, finding the characters of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well and Isabella in Measure for Measure unsatisfactory, Hughes has his explanation: it is because these ‘secularised’ characters are ‘inadequately insulated from their mythic roles’ (p3) – mythic roles that he has assigned to them. QED.
Shakespeare is ideal for such approaches because the work is so polymorphous, so open to interpretation that you can assert what you damn well like. The biographical details are so scant as to undermine a biographical reading of the work: not that that has stopped legions from doing so, probing the identity of the Dark Lady, or positing hidden sources of inspiration as Oscar Wilde did – playfully – in ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ (My own capriccio was supposed to be a variation on the latter.)
That said, some context is recoverable. Hughes fails to take account of how the plays were written, at great speed, often collaboratively, mostly reworking existing material (either old plays or stories Shakespeare found in books). They were also responses to contemporary taste – revenge drama, the indoor performance conditions of Jacobean theatre, the availability of stage effects (think of Hermione’s statue coming to life in The Winter’s Tale).
‘That’s not how it looked on the ground’ would be my verdict. Hughes views Shakespeare from a great height and with retrospect of the Bard’s entire career before him. Even here his sight is faulty. He assumes an order of the thirty-seven plays starting from All’s Well and leading to the great tragedies (pp98-9). The developmental sequence is dubious. In the ‘Conjectural Chronology’ in the front of the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2010), All’s Well That Ends Well is placed after Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and Othello, not before it.
‘The ideal reader would regard my idea as a sort of musical adaptation, a song’, we read on page 43 – this has to be Hughes pitching for my sympathy and urging me to saddle up for the next 474 pages. A Ring cycle projected over thirty-seven nights, not just four! As cookshop owner Maria says to Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess when he tries to peddle his happy dust, ‘I fears I mus' decline.’
[1] One consequence of reading history alongside literature as an undergraduate over forty years ago was to sensitise me to the need for ‘evidence’. See the divagation on literary biography in my book Encounters with Michael Arlen (2023).
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