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Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
Commonweal, Nov 6, 1992 by Frank McConnell
Hughes's method--I devoutly hope-- will earn anger and derision from the freemasons of the inarticulate who currently populate English departments. It is the kind of mythological reading that critics like that good and mourned man Northrop Frye and, yes, Harold Bloom, provide us. (In fact, for any student who really gave a damn about literature, I'd say, "Save your tuition, read SGCB, Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Bloom's Book of J, and then read everything else.") It is not embarrassed, detailing Shakespeare's mythmaking, to find similarities and hear echoes of his major theme in Egyptian religion, Welsh and Celtic tales, Gnostic fragments, Gilgamesh, and the Odyssey. Or even to suggest that Shakespeare may have known the neo-Platonist Giordano Bruno and been a member of Francis Bacon's circle of Rosicrucian adepts. At the last assertion, of course, the first impulse is to shake your head and say "Ted, Ted." And then, remembering the brilliance of everything else, you just smile, shrug, and say, "Okay--if you must."
Because, and I can't say this often enough, this is a book in love with its subject, and these days in the lit. crit. racket, that counts for everything. The mythic associations proliferate and finally all but overwhelm, but in the end we are left with a vision of Shakespeare that becomes a kind of coherent vision of world literature all together as a vibrant response to and clarification of essential human concerns: and isn't that what the business of reading and writing is finally about?
Hughes, again--unlike most academic critics--is a working writer, and the toughness of that role also informs his reading. The "tragic equation"--a phrase he uses maybe a little too often--may seem too recondite and mystical. But Hughes also understands the central paradox and scandal of Shakespeare: that he was the most sublime of poets, and that he was also a popular entertainer with all the canniness of Fred Silverman or Don King. So the arcane Equation, Hughes keeps insisting, is not just the key to the visionary poet's inner search, but also a hell of an effective gimmick for keeping the plots boiling and the customers paying. And that because Shakespeare's moment, the moment of the emerging modern consciousness, was the perfect moment for the poet's private concerns to coincide with the public obsessions of his and our day. (I think here of Maritain's great description of Dante's genius: "innocence and luck.")
For the Adonis myth, ending in the death and rebirth of the Male, Hughes associates with the dying Catholicism of Shakespeare's England, and the Lucrece myth, ending in the suppression of the life-giving Goddess, he associates with the Protestantism that, a few years later, would end in regicide and Cromwell. The Shakespearean primal scene, he writes, is "the Tragedy of Divine Love in the fallen world of the 'Puritan' ego." And from Lear to The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, our lad graphed a hopeful (and still unrealized) way of reasserting the vanishing redemptivism and generosity of the earlier world--a world we are still trying to reenter.
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