In a letter to a fishing friend written in the summer of 1990, Ted reported that he had no news other than ‘strange tales from the depths of the Shakespearean caves, which no man wants to hear’.1 He had been exploring those caves all his literary life and now a project with a gestation period of more than two decades was coming to a head. It would be his equivalent of Graves’s White Goddess.2
Oscar Wilde remarked that criticism is the only civilised form of autobiography, while Virginia Woolf believed that all Shakespearean criticism is as much about the critic’s self as about the dramatist’s plays. Shakespeare is a mirror in which serious readers and spectators see sharpened images of themselves and their own worlds. In this respect, the Shakespeare book was also Ted’s veiled autobiography.
Shakespeare was the absolute centre of Ted Hughes’s sense of the English literary tradition. The plays were a major influence on his own poetry, in both linguistic intensity and thematic preoccupation. The world of Hughes’s verse is one in which, as Macbeth puts it, ‘light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood’.3 More than any other poet, Shakespeare assaulted Hughes – one of the great literary readers of the twentieth century – with the shock of the as-if-new. In a long journal note dated 22 January 1998, Ted wrote of reading with amazement (‘as if I’d never seen it before’) a line of Shakespeare: ‘Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stell’d.’4 This was during the weekend when the news of Birthday Letters was released. The line is the opening of Sonnet 24, in which the image of the beloved is held in the poet’s heart, as Sylvia’s was in Ted. This act of reading at a vital moment was symptomatic of a lifelong passion: all his days, Hughes read Shakespeare with amazement, as if he had never read him before. The key to Shakespearean acting is to speak each line as if it were being spoken for the first time, as if it were new minted from the thought-chamber of the character who utters it. In this regard, Hughes, fascinated as he was by actors and by the process of making theatre, read Shakespeare as if he were an actor playing all the parts. Which is probably how Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
Having devoured the whole of Shakespeare as a teenager and studied him at Cambridge, when he moved to America with Sylvia in the summer of 1957 Ted re-read all the plays in what he considered to be their order of composition. He showed particular interest in the late collaborations with Fletcher, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen: ‘The Shakespeare in it is incredible in that it seems at first better than Shakespeare – but the rest, a great deal, is Fletcher. “Late Shakespeare” gets the blame for a lot of Fletcher.’5 In distinguishing between the styles of Shakespeare and Fletcher, he revealed the ear for the movement of Shakespearean verse that went along with his appetite for a big-picture understanding of the plays.
Again and again, Shakespearean characters find their way into Hughes’s own creations. A poem in Lupercal is written from the point of view of ‘Cleopatra to the Asp’. A verse sequence drafted in the Eighties under the title ‘Court Cards’ offers readings of works ranging from Venus and Adonis to The Tempest, by way of the major tragedies and the relationship between Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV.6 ‘Setebos’ in Birthday Letters casts Sylvia as Miranda, Ted as Ferdinand, Aurelia Plath as Prospero, Ariel as the aura of creativity shared by the lovers, and Caliban as their dark secret inner life. An unpublished poem among the Birthday Letters drafts refracts Plath’s anger against her father through Timon of Athens’s rage against the world.7
Although his responsiveness to Shakespeare in both verse and prose was lifelong, it was only in 1969 that Hughes began to write systematically about the plays. In 1968 he had edited A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse for a Faber and Faber series. His editor Charles Monteith asked him to undertake a similar volume of Emily Brontë, a poet close to his heart. Hughes replied that he would think about it, but that what he really wanted to do was a selection of Shakespeare’s verse for the series. He suggested that it would be novel and interesting to treat Shakespeare as poetry, not as drama. Monteith was extremely enthusiastic, immediately seeing a ready market. He proposed a decent advance (£150 on delivery) and a royalty of 10 per cent on the hardback, 7½ on the paperback. Hughes could do the Brontë as well, but the Shakespeare was infinitely more important.
Ted set to work. But the coming three months, March to May 1969, was the traumatic period of Assia’s and Shura’s deaths, then his mother’s. It was the introduction to his Shakespeare anthology that he was wrestling over, dismayed and disappointed with it, when the phone rang on the morning of 14 May and Olwyn told him that their mother was dead. The gestation of the Shakespeare book was inseparable from the shock of Assia’s death and his belief that the terrible news of her suicide had killed his mother.
Despite the anguish of these days, he managed to deliver the typescript of A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse to Monteith towards the end of June, explaining in a covering letter that he had written a long introduction, but was sending a short one. He was not satisfied. Throughout the summer and autumn, he reworked both the selection and the introduction. In early December, from Lumb Bank, he sent Monteith a new version with a more detailed introduction – and the information that there were enough rejected drafts of it to fill a small suitcase. He sent the collected Crow poems at the same time.
The Shakespeare project, then, had its origins at a time not only of extraordinary personal trauma but also of his first major poetry collection for several years. Hughes sometimes introduced public readings of the Crow poems by explaining that Crow’s quest was to meet his maker, God. But every time he met Him, it was a Her, a woman, an incarnation of the Goddess. Each time, Crow was unsatisfied and had to move on to another encounter.8 Hughes read Shakespeare’s career in the same way that he read his own Crow: the argument that begins to emerge in the introduction to A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse and that is articulated at enormous length in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being is that Shakespeare’s developing art unfolded through a series of encounters with this same Goddess.
Some time after writing his own Goddess, Hughes provided the enquiring enthusiast Nick Gammage with an account of the formative influence of Graves’s. Here he recalled that he felt a little resentment on his first reading of The White Goddess, since Graves had taken possession of what he considered to be his own ‘secret patch’. He recapped the book’s argument that the same Goddess who presides over birth, love and death was worshipped under different names in the mythologies of the Greeks and the Egyptians, the Irish and the Welsh, and countless other ancient cultures. Beautiful, fickle, wise and implacable, she later becomes the Ninefold Muse, patroness of the white magic of poetry. Shakespeare, Graves mentions in passing, ‘knew and feared her’: we see playful elements of the Goddess in Titania, a more serious approach in Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, her ultimate manifestation in the absent but forceful deity of Sycorax, Caliban’s mother in The Tempest.9 Hughes assured Gammage that Graves’s syncretic method – his yoking of Middle Eastern material with Celtic – was already familiar to him from his own researches in arcane mythology, which had begun in his early teens. What really struck him in the book were ‘those supernatural women. Especially the underworld women’. He reminds his correspondent that he had already begun to work out a relationship to chthonic female deity in ‘Song’, which he always considered to be his first important poem.
Gammage asked Hughes whether The White Goddess had been his first exposure to the religious context in which Shakespeare’s imagination was formed. He replied that he was not sure how clearly or consciously he saw the pattern at the time, but that the idea of ‘Goddess-centred matriarchy being overthrown by a God-centred patriarchy’ was indeed most likely something that he first really grasped in the Graves. ‘In giving me that big picture fairly early, yes, The White Goddess had a big part – and it was the Graves maybe that made the link directly to that lineage in English poetry – from the Sycorax figure to La Belle Dame [of Keats] and the Nightmare Life in Death [of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’]. Made it conscious and obvious.’10 Woman and Goddess, sex and death, the underworld and the hidden current of nature worship in opposition to patriarchal monotheism: this was the network of associations that Hughes took from Graves and brought to his reading of Shakespeare.
When he was putting the anthology together in 1969 he knew that such associations would raise the eyebrows of academic Shakespeare experts. On New Year’s Day 1970, he explained to Monteith that the argument of his introduction had to be understood as an imaginative rather than a scholarly idea. It wouldn’t appeal to the scholars. Disarmingly, Hughes added that he hadn’t read any Shakespeare criticism, except for A. C. Bradley long ago.
Because of various complications and delays at Faber, together with anxieties over the timetable for publication of a series of titles in different genres by the ever-prolific Hughes, the Shakespeare anthology did not appear until the autumn of 1971. It was overtaken into print not only by a privately printed text of the introduction accompanied by a quietly self-revelatory poem called ‘Crow’s Song about Prospero and Sycorax’,11 but also by an American version of the entire book with a variant title, foisted on Hughes by the publisher: With Fairest Flowers while Summer Lasts. This was a quotation from Cymbeline, one of the lesser-known plays with which he was especially fascinated.
Peter Brook was the Shakespearean whose opinion Hughes valued most highly. It was Brook, he later wrote in the dedication to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, who ‘provided the key to the key’. Tellingly, Hughes made a point of sending Brook the American as opposed to the British version of the anthology. Faber had decided to tuck away most of the introduction, to which he had devoted so much effort through so many difficult months, at the back of the volume. The American version had the virtue of presenting it up front.
The introduction to With Fairest Flowers while Summer Lasts remains the most lucid and economic summary of Hughes’s hypothesis about the key to Shakespeare’s imagination. In reading Shakespeare, he proposes, we periodically come upon passages of white-hot poetic intensity. When he extracted these passages and put them together in an anthology, he discovered that many of them had a structure of feeling in common, a ‘strong family resemblance’. They were all hammering at the same thing, ‘a particular knot of obsessions’. By reading these passages as short, self-contained lyric poems, we simultaneously ‘look through them into our own darkness’ and find ourselves ‘plucking out Shakespeare’s heart’ – which, we discover, ‘has a black look’.
‘The poetry has its taproot’, Hughes claims, ‘in a sexual dilemma of a peculiarly black and ugly sort.’ Belittling as it might seem to boil Shakespeare down to a single idea, if the idea is big enough it can prove itself the key to his imagination. After all, for all his vaunted variety and impersonality, Shakespeare was finally ‘stuck with himself’. The works are the expression of his own nature. The greatest passages constitute Shakespeare’s recurrent dream. In them, his imagination ‘presents the mystery of himself to himself’.12 Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf would no doubt say at this point that the heart, the nature, the dream, the imagination into which Hughes was gazing as he wrote this were not Shakespeare’s but his own.
In the early 1590s, during a period when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare wrote two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (goddess of love attempts to seduce reluctant virginal male youth who is more interested in hunting and ends up being gored to death by a boar) and The Rape of Lucrece (royal-blooded Tarquin attempts to seduce, then rapes, virtuous woman Lucrece, who commits suicide, such is her shame). Here, ‘where nothing but poetry concerned him’, argues Hughes, Shakespeare produced two versions, one light and the other dark, of his core fable. The same structure can, however, be seen in many of the plays, for instance in ‘the polar opposition of Falstaff and Prince Hal’ in the Henry IV plays or the encounter between Angelo and Isabella in Measure for Measure.13 In each case, one figure represents the earth, submission to the body and the forces of desire, while the other stands for the heavens, purity of spirit and the repression of desire. Venus and Falstaff are figures of capacious and celebratory desire, embodiments of the Goddess, while Tarquin and Angelo represent destructive sexual possessiveness turned against the Goddess.
For Hughes, a great poet is, as Ben Jonson said Shakespeare was, the soul of the age. The opposition is accordingly read not only as Shakespeare’s personal dilemma, but also as a perfect representation of ‘the prevailing psychic conflict of his times in England, the conflict that exploded, eventually, into the Civil War’. The repression of the Goddess by the forces of radical Protestantism took its distinctively English form in the extirpation of the cult of Mary. Though the process was temporarily slowed by the cult of Queen Elizabeth as a kind of substitute Mary, the rise of Puritanism amounted to a dragging into court ‘by the young Puritan Jehovah’ of ‘the Queen of Heaven, who was the goddess of Catholicism, who was the goddess of medieval and pre-Christian England, who was the divinity of the throne, who was the goddess of natural law and of love, who was the goddess of all sensation and organic life – this overwhelmingly powerful, multiple, primeval being’.14 The forces that drive Hughes’s own poetry – the implacable but vital law of nature, woman, sexual desire, sensation, organic life, sacramental royalty – are overwhelmingly those associated with the Goddess.
For Hughes, Shakespeare’s distinctive twist on the myth is his imagination of figures who attempt to ‘divide nature, and especially love, the creative force of nature, into abstract good and physical evil’. Nature, being unified (the Goddess of complete being), will not let them do this, with the result that love returns in the destructive form of rape, murder, madness and the death-wish. An ‘occult crossover’ occurs, causing a ‘mysterious chemical change’ in which ‘Nature’s maddened force’ takes over the brain that had rejected her.15 This was what he called the Tragic Equation. In a single sentence of wild reach and energy, Hughes sketches how the equation operates as the key to the ‘powerhouse and torture chamber’ of Shakespeare’s complete works:
Hamlet, looking at Ophelia, sees his mother in bed with his uncle and goes mad; Othello, looking at his pure wife, sees Cassio’s whore and goes mad; Macbeth, looking at the throne of Scotland and listening to his wife, hears the witches, the three faces of Hecate, and the invitation to hell, and goes mad; Lear, looking at Cordelia, sees Goneril and Regan, and goes mad; Antony, looking at his precious queen, sees the ‘ribaudred nag of Egypt’ betraying him ‘to the very heart of loss’, and goes – in a sense – mad; Timon, looking at his loving friends, sees the wolf pack of Athenian creditors and greedy whores, and goes mad; Coriolanus, looking at his wife and mother, sees the Roman mob who want to tear him to pieces, and begins to act like a madman; Leontes, looking at his wife, sees Polixenes’ whore, and begins to act like a madman; Posthumus, looking at his bride, who of his ‘lawful pleasure oft restrained’ him, sees the one Iachimo mounted ‘Like a full-acorn’d boar’, and begins to act like a madman.16
This passage exposes both the strength and the weakness of Hughes’s reading of Shakespeare: yes, there is a recurrent pattern of madness or quasi-madness provoked by intensity of sexual and familial relations, but no, this cannot be the key to all of Shakespeare (it underplays comedy, self-conscious theatrical play, and so much more). In trying to reduce all the dramas to a single force, there is inevitably something forced. Hence such giveaways as ‘goes – in a sense – mad’. Yet the insights offered by the pattern are exceptionally rich. Richard III, Tarquin, Hamlet, Angelo, Othello, Macbeth: each of them is, as Hughes says, a ‘strange new being’, a ‘man of chaos’.17 And it is the men of chaos (‘from Aaron to Caliban’) who speak the most memorable poetry, the passages that Hughes extracts and presents in his anthology. His selection has at its centre a great riff of nearly forty sequences of high-voltage poetic madness from Macbeth, Lear and Timon.
At various points in his introduction, Hughes deploys phrases remembered from his undergraduate study of English at Cambridge. ‘Dissociation of sensibility’ is T. S. Eliot on what happened to English poetry around the time of the Civil War. ‘The Shakespearean moment’ is Cambridge-influenced critic Patrick Cruttwell’s phrase for the historical and cultural forces that came to a head in the 1590s, making it possible for Marlowe, Shakespeare and Donne to write the greatest poetry ever seen in the English language. Hughes redefines Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ as a rupture in English culture caused by the banishment of the Goddess from the national psyche. He sees the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Hopkins (perhaps), Yeats and Eliot as manifestations of ‘Nature’s attempt to correct the error, supply the natural body of things and heal the torment’.18 In this list, he is at once proclaiming a line of succession from Shakespeare to himself and offering a Gravesian reading of the Leavisite canon he studied for the first part of the Cambridge English Tripos, prior to his switch to Archaeology and Anthropology.
The copy of With Fairest Flowers that Hughes sent to Peter Brook was accompanied by a letter summarising the argument that had shaped both selection and introduction, together with an outline for a possible dramatisation that would set this argument, and Shakespeare’s work, in the religious context of his age: ‘Elizabeth and Mary Tudor go straight into the Venus lineage … Then it could be brought forward, using Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes as a continuation of Shakespeare’s series.’ There could be an epilogue in the style of the ancient Greek satyr play that followed a cycle of tragedies: rival politicians Edward Heath and Harold Wilson would be monkeys in the mask of Adonis and Tarquin, ‘Lucrece would be Princess Anne, and Venus would be a schizophrenic female gorilla in Regent’s park.’19
Though eminently capable of self-parody of this kind, Ted Hughes was deadly serious about his great Shakespearean project. Undeterred by the lukewarm critical response to his anthology, in 1973 he wrote a poem called ‘An Alchemy’ for a celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday.20 In a letter to fellow-poet Peter Redgrove (who would later visit Gravesian Goddess territory himself in both The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense and The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman, co-written with Penelope Shuttle), Hughes explained that ‘An Alchemy’ was a compacting of his anthology, in which he had sought to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s own personal psychodrama embodied the historical development of the national psyche, even the entire Western tradition: ‘Shakespeare recorded, somewhat helplessly, what was actually going on in the English spirit, which was the defamation, subjection and eventual murder of what he first encountered as Venus – the Mary Goddess of the Middle Ages and earlier.’ Venus and Adonis ‘sets up Shakespeare as the crucial record of the real inner story of the whole of Western History. But very abbreviated and in bagatelle style.’21
Hughes told Redgrove that he did not want to burden himself with an entire book, which was why he had worked out the idea in the abbreviated form of anthology, introduction and then poem. But he couldn’t let go of his desire to unlock the key to the plays. Eventually, in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, he would tell the same story in unabbreviated form and in a style that was no bagatelle.
In 1978, inspired by Hughes’s anthology, a Swedish actor and director called Donya Feuer put together a one-woman show called Soundings, which interlinked an array of Shakespearean soliloquies. She started up a correspondence with Hughes, leading him to write a long letter further developing his theory by way of a detailed reading of the play she went on to stage the following year, Measure for Measure.22 They remained in touch, by post and telephone. By now he believed that the fifteen plays of the second half of Shakespeare’s career, from As You Like It in 1599 to The Tempest in 1611, formed a single epic cycle. In 1990, Feuer wrote to suggest that she might create a production that brought extracts from all fifteen together in a single narrative. Beginning on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April, Hughes sent her in return a steady stream of immensely long letters, which he eventually worked up into the book that was published two years later. Obsessively, he devoted almost all his time to the project. The archives of his papers in Georgia and London contain dozens of drafts, revisions, fragments, proofs, recordings of dictation, amounting to well over 10,000 pages of handwritten and typed material. Hughes later said that writing so much prose had given him shingles, destroyed his immune system, made him ill, almost killed him. To his old friend Terence McCaughey, he described the writing of the book as a two-year sentence in a cage in the walls of the Tower of London.23 The jaguar confined in the royal menagerie.
Faber agreed, with some scepticism, to publish the book. In the summer of 1991 it was put into the hands of a copy-editor, Gillian Bate. Each of her scrupulous and particular requests for clarification led Hughes to send great screeds of new material. Thus, in answer to a letter about routine copy-editorial matters: ‘I’m sorry to be so long returning this, but I wanted to clear up one thing that has been a difficulty from the beginning. The business of Occult Neoplatonism. One can’t just refer to this and assume that even Shakespearean scholars will understand and supply the rest. 400 years of cultural suppressive dismissal aren’t going to be lifted.’24 Six weeks later: ‘Thank you for the thousand improving suggestions. Don’t be alarmed by the enclosed …’25 The next day: ‘Dear Gillian, I’ve sent you the wrong note – in the text and as a spare copy – for page 344. By wrong I mean an early draft, a little unclear and missing the main opportunity. This is the most important note of all – clarifying every obscurity. Destroy the other one, so it can’t creep back in.’ A week after this: ‘Also, is it possible to have a note to a note. For instance, on this page 18 I would like to add a brief note to “prodigiously virile” – 9th line from the bottom.’ The note is then provided:
As the son of an occasional Butcher, and the nephew of several farmers, Shakespeare’s familiarity with pigs is not irrelevant to his myth. The imagination’s symbols are based on subliminal perception. The male, aphrodisiac, pheromone scent spray, sold in modern sex-shops, is based on a hormone extract from the Wild Boar.26
Another letter, the same day: ‘How are you getting on? This isn’t a new note, though it’s new to you. It’s an old note that I lost – and have now found. Could you tuck it in? I think it’s a Note, don’t you? If it were inserted as a para, at that point, it might be just a bit dissonant – in tone, in actual style. How does it appear to you?’ Gillian Bate sent a calm postcard in reply: ‘Dear Ted, Thank you for all your communications of this week. I am digesting them slowly and hope to be in touch middle of next week with any questions still remaining … I have to return all to Fabers end of next week.’27
Before the end of that week, another fat envelope dropped through her letterbox: ‘Dear Gillian – “What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?” This is a rewritten note – just slightly lengthened. But it struck me that the original was confused and inadequate. Just slot it in.’28 Then came a desperate plea: ‘The last bubbles of the last gasp. I know you are onto other work, that Fagin and Fagin, as my friend Leonard Baskin calls them, have cut off any more payment, and that you are ready to scream if you see that dreaded red-hot iron albatross – the word Shakespeare – ever again, but I am happy to refund you for any time this now costs: and refund you treble … Enclosed below are the last bits of wordage repair.’29
In November, Christopher Reid, Hughes’s commissioning editor at Faber, put his foot down and said that they simply could not implement the latest set of changes. This did not stop Hughes from making hundreds more corrections in proof, before the typescript was finally sent to the printer at the end of the year.
Various titles were considered: ‘The Silence of Cordelia’, perhaps, or ‘The Boar with the Flower in its Mouth’. Privately, Ted thought of it as his Dark Lady Book, but there was a Gravesian propriety to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Published on 9 March 1992, the book was an attempt to read the whole of Shakespeare (though very much weighted towards the second half of his career) through the argument that had been aired in the introduction to the anthology and expanded across Hughes’s writings in prose and verse, on poetry and on myth, in the intervening years. ‘The idea of nature as a single organism is not new,’ he had written in a book review back in 1970, while the anthology was at press. ‘It was man’s first great thought, the basic intuition of most primitive theologies. Since Christianity hardened into Protestantism, we can follow its underground heretical life, leagued with everything occult, spiritualistic, devilish, over-emotional, bestial, mystical, feminine, crazy, revolutionary, and poetic.’30 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being presents itself as an excavation of the occult, the underground, Shakespeare. It is an aria upon those aspects of Shakespeare’s works that are most spiritualistic, devilish, over-emotional, bestial, mystical, feminine, crazy, revolutionary and poetic. Dipping one moment into cabbala and hermetic occult Neoplatonism, gnostic ritual and alchemy, the next into biographical speculation about Shakespeare’s relationship with the Earl of Southampton, and the one after that into the historical clash of Catholic and Protestant – ‘Shakespeare was a shaman, a prophet, of the ascendant, revolutionary, Puritan will (in its Elizabethan and Jacobean phase) just as surely as he was a visionary, redemptive shaman of the Catholic defeat’31 – it maps the Venus/Adonis/boar (sex/will/death) triad across the works, while also sketching a secondary theme of the Rival Brothers (another key Hughesian preoccupation, and one with autobiographical origins).
At several crucial moments, Hughes breaks one of the cardinal rules of twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism: he links the plays directly to the life. It is unimaginable, he suggests, that when Shakespeare came to plot All’s Well that Ends Well he could have failed to recognise ‘just how closely the story tracked his own domestic life, and particularly that most decisive move he ever made – his first flight from his wife (for whatever reason). And his continuing to stay away, except for those visits.’32 Pursued by an infatuated woman, forced by her powerful guardian to marry her, haunted by her image when he thinks himself in an adulterous liaison with another woman: this is Hughes’s reading of both the character of Bertram in the play and William of Stratford in real life. ‘When Shakespeare was writing All’s Well that Ends Well the autobiographical secret sharer must have been breathing down his neck. To avoid it with a different plot, if he had wished to, would have been the simplest thing. But he must have searched out that specific plot for that specific reason – to deal in some way with that heavy breather.’33
Wilde and Woolf may assist again: this is Ted Hughes dealing with his own heavy breather, the ‘autobiographical secret sharer’. We have no way of knowing whether or not Shakespeare’s flight from Stratford and Anne Hathaway some time in the mid- or late 1580s was ‘the most decisive move he ever made’. But we know for sure that the whole course of Ted Hughes’s future life was decided by his flight from Sylvia Plath and Court Green in 1962.
Similarly with his account of the interplay of love and lust in the character of Troilus: ‘this new factor, the larval or introductory phase of the hero’s idyllic (idealistic) love, enables Shakespeare to connect his Mythic Equation to the impassioned enigma of his own subjectivity (as the Sonnets revealed it) in a way that is impossible to ignore … This helps to give Troilus and Cressida its autobiographical feel.’34 A bomb is exploding here. In short, ‘the loved and loathed woman in the one body’ is the beautiful, the desired, the unashamedly adulterous Assia Wevill just as much as it is Shakespeare’s Cressida.35 Hughes has thought deeply but above all feelingly, from experience, about heterosexual desire and its relationship to death in this play. He has less to say about the homoerotic dimension of the Greek camp – the question of same-sex desire is a conspicuous absence from nearly all Hughes’s work, which cannot be said of Shakespeare’s.
From All’s Well’s Helen, the bold and fatherless traveller who prefigures Sylvia, Hughes’s Shakespeare – or rather the Shakespearean Hughes – has proceeded to the dark, complex figure of Cressida/Assia (even the names echo each other), at once seductress and victim, on an inevitable path to a terrible end. Later, with King Lear, comfort will be found in the form of a very different woman, younger, de-eroticised and above all discreet. One of the book’s epigraphs is a quotation from Ann Pasternak Slater’s Shakespeare the Director: ‘Cordelia is the quiet absolute … her very silence is the still centre of this turning world.’36
Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being was condemned by most academic critics as an extended eccentricity. Professor John Carey of Oxford University set the tone in the Sunday Times, accusing the book of fundamental self-contradiction, in that the ‘goddess-worshipping stance’ purported to ‘celebrate the female principle, fluid and fertile, as against the logical and scientific male ego’, whereas Hughes had adopted a pseudo-logical, pseudo-scientific and very male approach that extended even to his metaphors (‘comparing the plays to rockets, space capsules, nuclear power stations etc’). The eccentricities of the Hughesian brain were concoctions at complete odds with ‘the anarchic welter of his imagination’. Fortunately, though, his ‘poetic dynamism’ did at one point ‘break free from the rhapsodic muddle of Shakespearean exegesis that mostly entangles him’:
In a long footnote on page 11 he describes a huge matriarchal sow, gross, whiskery, many-breasted, a riot of carnality, with a terrible lolling mouth ‘like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with overproduction’. Although smuggled in as a hermaphroditic version of the mythic boar, this sow has absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare, and everything to do with Hughes’s violently divided feelings about women. A magnificent late-Hughes prose-poem, the footnote is worth all the rest of the book several times over.37
Dr Eric Griffiths of Cambridge University was moved to wonder whether Hughes had been rewiring his house, such was the profusion of imagery regarding Shakespeare’s voltage, poetic current, flashpoints and the like. As it happens, builders were in Court Green, turning the house upside down as Ted wrestled with the Goddess. Griffiths concluded that there were ‘28 pages worth reading in this book (beginning at p. 129). In those pages, Hughes pays attention to what Shakespeare wrote. The effect is wonderful.’38 The pages in question are indeed a masterclass in the close reading of a particular technique of Shakespearean verse, namely the rhetorical figure of doubling known as hendiadys. The analysis of one example from All’s Well, ‘the catastrophe and heel of pastime’, is especially brilliant.39
Hughes was stung but not deterred. He penned an essay called ‘Single Vision and Newton’s Sleep in John Carey’, which gave him the occasion to set off on his Gravesian mythical-poetic journey once more: ‘my Crow is Bran of the Tower Ravens. Bran who was Apollo (a Crow God) plus his son, the Crow demi-god Asclepius the Healer (whose mother was the white Crow Goddess Coronis), was the god-king, a crow god, of early Britain, where he was also the llud who was Llyr who was Lear. More mumbo jumbo to make [Carey] smile.’40 His reply, and a further counter-blast from Carey, were printed in the Sunday Times, which loved a good old literary spat.
As for Griffiths, he was an academic. Hughes did not pretend to be, nor in his worst nightmares could have imagined himself as, such an etiolated creature. He approached the plays, he said in his riposte, ‘like an industrial spy, not for the purpose of discursive comment, but with the sole idea of appropriating, somehow, the secrets of what makes them work as fascinating stage events, as big poems, and as language, so that I can adapt them to my own doings in different circumstances’. So it was that ‘Griffiths spends his days thinking and talking about scholarship and criticism. I spend my days, as I always have done, inventing and thinking about new poetic fables which, though vastly inferior to Shakespeare’s in every way, as I do not need to be told, are nevertheless the same kind of thing.’41
The one serious reviewer who seemed genuinely to understand and appreciate the book was Marina Warner, novelist, critic and devotee of myth, cult, folk story and fairy tale. Ted was deeply grateful to her, and struck up a rewarding correspondence.
The American edition, meanwhile, provided an opportunity to add some extra material, including a key sequence that Hughes had unaccountably forgotten to include for Faber, in which he worked out ‘The Tragic Equation in The Two Noble Kinsmen’ – taking him back to his early perception about the power and significance of that last play, written in collaboration with John Fletcher.
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being remains sui generis, and certainly cannot be recommended to students as an introductory critical study of the plays. But it does not now seem quite so eccentric in its entirety. Hughes always regarded the poet as shaman and prophet, and there is indeed something ahead of its time, something prophetic, about several aspects of the book. At the time he was writing, mainstream Shakespearean criticism was almost entirely secular. In subsequent years, there was a huge revival of interest in the playwright’s engagement with religious questions and in the possibility of a hidden vein of Catholicism running through his imagination.
Secondly, the proscription against biographical reading of the plays – shaped by Cambridge-style ‘new criticism’ – began to break down in the early twenty-first century. Hughes’s hunches about the possible autobiographical element in such plays as All’s Well and Troilus anticipate a string of subsequent speculations in which critics and biographers have linked details in the plays to everything from Shakespeare’s sex life to the social climbing suggested by his pursuit of a coat of arms to his political associations with the circle around the Earl of Essex.
Thirdly, in a remarkable excursion linking the Tragic Equation to the differing impulses of left and right brain,42 Hughes proves himself to be a John the Baptist heralding the advent of a new and very twenty-first-century genre: neurological literary criticism that benefits from developments in scanning technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging in order to ask questions about what exactly might have gone on in Shakespeare’s brain as he wrote, and what really happens in our brains as we read or listen to his extraordinary language.
Ultimately, though, on Wildean and Woolfian principles, the spectacle of Hughes reading Shakespeare is less interesting than that of Shakespeare reading Hughes. The ‘Tragic Equation’ involves AC (‘Total Goddess’), ‘A(c)’ (‘The Woman with virtuous, loving aspect dominant’), ‘B(d)’ (‘Tragic Hero: Adonis phase, with puritan censor dominant’), ‘(a)C’ (‘The Woman with infernal aspect dominant’) and ‘(b)D’ (‘Tragic Hero: with Tarquin phase (Boar Madness) dominant’). The use of astrological terms such as ‘dominant’ and ‘aspect’ is Hughesian, not Shakespearean. It may or may not be the case that in Shakespeare’s narrative poems ‘A(c) loves B(d), but B(d) is distancing himself from A(c), actively rejecting her sexual claim with puritan disapproval,’ at which point ‘Shakespeare intensifies the situation with B(d)’s “double vision” – in which he sees (a)C superimposed on A(c), and rejects both in loathing.’43 But it is certainly the case that the tangle of love and sexual claim, desire and loathing, possession and rejection, overshadowed by familial ‘puritan disapproval’, was Ted’s own story of A (Assia), B (Brenda) and C (Carol) in the late Sixties.
Shakespeare with his supposed double life, as married country gentleman in the shires but lad about town in London, is Hughes. Shakespeare with his supposed Goddess-worship, and the capacious libido that goes with it, is Hughes. Shakespeare was at once a court poet and a man who knew about ‘dark ladies’ and sweating tubs for the treatment of sexual disease. Hughes dined privately with members of the royal family (the Queen Mother told him that she was especially fond of Lupercal), but he was also intrigued by the London demi-monde (‘That elegant woman you have just been speaking to’, he once said to a friend at a party, ‘is the most expensive prostitute in London’).44
Above all, Shakespeare with his supposed mythic method of composition is Hughes. Shakespeare did not think about boars in the way that Hughes thought about bulls. He wrote many plays about male rivalry but he never thought in terms of the Theme of the Rival Brothers. Shakespeare made frequent allusions to classical mythology, but always in the poetic or dramatic moment, never in an effort to build a system.45 The systematising belonged to Hughes, under the influence of Graves.
In trying to make sense of Shakespeare, he was really trying to make sense of his own creative life. And in so doing he heard once more the call of Plath. The Goddess is many; one of the many is Plath. Sometimes, then, the manuscript drafts of the Shakespeare book veer away from the ostensible subject. A fragment headed ‘A Working Definition of Mythic, in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being’ includes a lengthy excursion concerning ‘the role of two obsessive but minatory images (actually two related myths) in Sylvia Plath’s basically mythic oeuvre’:
She was obsessed by the story of Phaeton (the earthly son of the Sun-God, who takes the realm of his father’s Sun-chariot, loses control and is wrecked) and the story of Icarus (the son of the wizard artificer Daedalus. Escaping from Crete on wings constructed by his father, Icarus flew too near the sun, which melted the fixing wax and plunged him into the sea).46
Breughel’s painting of the Fall of Icarus, he remembered, was on her wall.
He went on to point out that the title poem of Ariel was Plath’s version of the Phaeton myth and that ‘Sheep in Fog’, the poem that he analysed in more detail than any other, was its reverse: they were two opposite poems about riding the same horse over the same moor. In Plath’s final corrections of ‘Sheep in Fog’, he explained, ‘the speaker, who in “Ariel” had been a Phaeton urging the flying horse into the sun (triumphant, albeit “suicidal” and doomed to fall), suddenly becomes an Icarus, whose melting world threatens to let her through “into a heaven” not of the sun and freedom, but “starless, fatherless, a dark water”’. The Icarus allusion was no ‘pedagogic ornament’ or ‘dip into the myth-kitty’. The brilliance of Plath was that her finished poems showed no overt signs of the myth: ‘nothing in her simple, final correction of the last three lines of “Sheep in Fog” suggests that she was conscious there of the Icarus myth that supplied both verbs, both nouns, and all three adjectives, as well as the situation’. But the deleted drafts were a giveaway: ‘the scrapped chariot and the dead man lying on the moor’. Hughes concluded that ‘Sheep in Fog’ had a quite extraordinary power to move the reader because it was ‘obviously drawn from that subjective, visionary, mystical experience’, Plath’s mythic personality’s relationship to her father, which was then ‘in crisis’.47
That ‘obviously’ was obvious only to Hughes, because he was more versed than any other human being in Plath’s work and its relationship to her life. His method of studying Shakespeare – the search for mythic archetypes buried beneath images and movements of thought that do not overtly allude to myth – yielded him rich rewards as a reader of Plath. He argued that her transformation of Phaeton into Icarus was ‘the crucial episode of her soul’s myth – in the most literal sense a life and death emergency trying to communicate itself’. With a great author, whether Shakespeare or Plath, the core myth is ‘worth searching out’ because ‘This blood-jet autobiographical truth is what decides the difference in value between a myth (or any other image) as used by the realist and the mythic image as it appears in a truly mythic work.’48
In this reading of Plath, as in his reading of Shakespeare, Hughes has found the myth beneath the realism in order to come to the core of the ‘evolving struggle’ in the artist’s ‘own psyche’. But really the struggle and the myth are his own. He is supposed to be writing a book about Shakespeare but he cannot stop writing about Plath. And in writing about the crisis in her relationship with her father, he is writing yet once more about her relationship with her husband. He is edging ever closer to his own ‘blood-jet autobiographical truth’.