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Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
Commonweal, Nov 6, 1992 by Frank McConnell
SHAKESPEARE AND THE GODDESS OF COMPLETE BEING
Ted Hughes
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35, 464 pp.
Reading Ted Hughes's grand, maddening, and finally un-put-downable book on Shakespeare, I kept thinking about two propositions that have echoed in my mind for years--and feeling that in a funny way I had to wait for this book to give them their final, radiant sense. The first is the argument of my old mentor and sensei Harold Bloom, that a "strong" poet is best served only by the creative misreadings of a strong critic. The second is something one of my first graduate students, all those years ago at Cornell, dropped in conversation: "There are two kinds of criticism-- right and interesting."
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Fighting words, those, especially in the current climate-chilly and overcast--of academic criticism, deconstructionist and/or new historicist, where the aim of reading great stuff (these guys, of course, would even blush to use the word "great") seems to be, mainly, to reduce the greatness to a series of tics and evasions in the service of a Eurocentric, logocentric power structure--and, coincidentally, to exalt the function of the critic over that of the creator. It's why students, shaking their heads in stunned disbelief, are walking out of English classes in droves; and they're fight.
If Hughes had done nothing more--and he does much more here--his book would be of immense value just because it refutes, at the top of its voice, the currently fashionable academic treason. At the heart of his enterprise is the poet's conviction-which also ought to be the critic's-that the only reason for reading is to save your life, and that Shakespeare, perhaps above all poets, gives life most abundantly. "Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it," said one of the rabbis about Torah, and Hughes, taking Shakespeare as a kind of secular Torah, writes what is essentially a five-hundred-page midrash on that universe of language. It is the approach that unimaginative critics (like Gary Taylor) and anti-imaginative critics (like Gerald Graff) dismiss as "bardolatry"; it just happens to be, like the kids who shake their heads at Taylor, Graff, and their tribe, right.
"I shall keep reminding myself," writes Hughes in his introduction, "that the main point is to project the...plays...as a single titanic work, like an Indian epic, the same gods battling through their reincarnations, in a vast, cyclic Tragedy of Divine Love." Perhaps midrash isn't the right word. Hughes is in fact writing a Shakespearean Kabbalah, a sometimes tortuous but infallibly rich articulation of his Shakespeare, whose visionary idiosyncracy seeks not to impose itself upon our reading, but to share itself with our reading. Miraculously, it does.
Ever since his early collections, Lupercal, Wodwo, and especially the still-stunning Crow, Ted Hughes has been the most compelling of our mythological poets, obsessed-as all mythology and all religion is--with the fate of consciousness in a world that seems at once to give it birth, nurture it, and yet deny its highest yearning for immortality. Not surprisingly, then, his Shakespeare emerges as a particularly Hughesian fellow. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, hereafter SGCB, focuses on fifteen plays--As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, the major tragedies, and the four late romances--as the "titanic work" of Shakespeare's inner quest to work out the "tragic equation" that is man's awareness of Nature as both womb and tomb of his godlike aspirations. For Hughes the cycle culminating in The Tempest is a giant tapestry, at once compellingly obvious and arcane, of the myth of all myths: man's struggle with the creating, sustaining, and destroying figure of the great goddess.
From Shakespeare's two long narrative poems, Hughes derives the polar versions of this history (this ur-story?). In "Venus and Adonis" the male rejects the blandishments of the eternal female and is destroyed for his rejection. In "The Rape of Lucrece" the male violently despoils the female and is humiliated for his perfidy. But here's the trick---once you realize that both those stories are the same story, one the inside-out of the other, you have an infinitely variable, infinitely retellable tale about the self--the male---coming to consciousness of itself only in terms of its antagonism toward the world, everything that makes, but is not, the self--the female, the goddess. You have, in other words, the tragic equation or--though Hughes for peculiar reasons never says this--the most powerful articulation since Genesis of the myth of the Fall.
By stating the thesis this briefly, of course, I make it sound either a little bit ho-hum or a little bit crazy. In fact, it is a little bit of both (as--honest, folks--is most of Kabbalah). As one of my teachers wisely said, "At this point in history, if you've got a new idea about Shakespeare. it's wrong." It is also, as Hughes applies it to play after play, gorgeously invigorating. We may not want to see as quite so central to their stories Hamlet's Adonis-like rejection of Gertrude and Ophelia, or Othello's Tarquin-like destruction of Desdemona, or Lear's sublime combination of the two myths, first rejecting and brutalizing and finally transcendentally reconciling with Cordelia: but once we have been shown these aspects, and shown how, through the whole "titanic" progress of the great tragedies and the late romances, they form a consistent pattern moving from chaos to redemption, we cannot stop seeing them.
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