Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being [Paperback]

Ted Hughes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 1993

This critical work on Shakespeare attempts to show his complete works - dramatic and poetic - as a single, tightly-integrated, evolving organism. Identifying Shakespeare's use in the poems "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece", of the two most significant religious myths of the archaic world, Hughes argues that these myths later provided Shakespeare with templates for the construction of every play from "All's Well that Ends Well" to "The Tempest". He also argues that this development, in turn, represented his poetic exploration of conflicts within the "living myth" of the English Reformation. The claim is a large one, but Hughes supports his thesis with a painstakingly close analysis of language, plots and characters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For English poet Hughes, Shakespeare was "a prophetic shaman of the Puritan revolution," his plays mythic reenactments of the holy war between Catholic and Puritan fanaticism. This arcane, often farfetched study maintains that the Bard tapped into the "source myth" of Catholicism in Venus and Adonis : the myth of the Great Goddess and her sacrificed god. In The Rape of Lucrece , Shakespeare mined the rival source myth of Puritanism: the enraged Jehovan god who abhors the Goddess for her presumed treachery or whorishness. In this highly speculative analysis, Hughes follows the workings of these two interlocking myths through Shakespeare's plays, whose overall trajectory, he argues, is an attempt to escape from tragic destiny to secular freedom. In King Lear , according to Hughes, Shakespeare reinvented an ancient Egyptian cosmology to illuminate the distorting ethos of the English Reformation. And from Cymbeline to The Tempest , he argues, the Bard used the Gnostic myth about the Female who represents the hero's own soul. Hughes's ambitious critique will appeal primarily to devotees of myth and Jung.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is one of the most remarkable books on Shakespeare to appear for some time. Hughes begins by analyzing Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece , suggesting that the two myths that inform these poems--of the hero who rejects the goddess and is killed in return, and of the god who destroys the goddess--form a fundamental mythic and symbolic pattern that underlies Shakespeare's later plays, beginning with As You Like It and incorporating all the great tragedies and romances. The reader has to be prepared to follow Hughes, the noted British poet ( Wolfwatching , LJ 12/90), through some fairly obscure mythological twists and turns, but it is almost always worth it. Every page is lit up with some insight that makes one think about the plays in a new light. Scholars may be irritated by the lack of documentation (no bibliography, few footnotes, no index), but this is literary criticism of the sort we need.
- Bryan Aubrey, Fairfield, Ia.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Faber Paperbacks (March 22, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571168248
• ISBN-13: 978-0571168248
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,276,858 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Vision behind the Vision, May 27, 2000

By 

Brenton Boswell (LONDON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (Hardcover)

What makes a genius tick? What made Shakespeare tick? If Shakespeare's vision seems inexhaustible, all-encompassing, transcendental - one might say 'mythic' - then how did he manage it? Where did that vision come from? And where, while we're at it, did the *poetry* come from?

Many of the world's finest literary minds over the last 400 years have been drawn to such questions, and more than a few have made valuable strides towards the answers. But even so, you would search long and hard for a book to equal Ted Hughes' "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being" - if it's those big questions that you're interested in.

Whilst no brief summary can really do this book justice, here's a rough attempt anyway...

1. For the last fifteen plays of his career (i.e. throughout his artistic maturity), Shakespeare consistently employed the same basic prototype plot structure - what Hughes calls his "Tragic Equation". That plot structure was derived from the inspired fusion of the plots of Shakespeare's two long narrative poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". Hughes demonstrates (with staggering thoroughness) that behind every major male protagonist (Troilus, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear etc.) is the god Adonis, and behind every female figure (Cressida, Gertrude/Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Cordelia etc.) is the goddess Venus - or, more accurately, the Goddess of Complete Being.

This alone would make the book an astounding achievement of literary detective work. But there is much more to it than that...

2. By combining the two myths in this way, Shakespeare hit upon an unfailing source of dramatic (and poetic) power. Indeed, what he tapped into was virtually the power source of all human feeling itself. To understand this, think about myth and religion and what they seem to be, VIZ, the expression of our profoundest primal instincts, of our deepest psycho-biological mysteries. They are, if you like, the DNA code of our very souls. (Or to put it less ridiculously, they are the living artistic expression of everything we think and feel at our core.) Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Mary, Krishna, Shiva - and countless others from around the planet - these gods (and their experiences and sufferings) embody our brightest truths and our darkest mysteries. Their stories are the stories of our collective consciousness.

3. This explains why Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear somehow feel like gods to us too: Shakespeare was quite deliberately forcing them to live out the mythic destiny of Adonis himself. Adonis is one of the oldest prototypes of the worldwide phenomenon of the sacrificed god; as such, he is a near relative of Osiris, Dionysus, Christ, and countless others - just as Venus/Lucrece is a first cousin of Isis, Demeter, the Virgin Mary, etc.

4. Moreover, Shakespeare's *mythic intuition* was somehow greater than other writers before or since. In other words, he discovered all the mythic possibilities of these two key stories - what exactly they were expressing. (Without going into *what* they do express, which is a key theme of Hughes' book, all I shall say here is that they are born of very deeply rooted impulses in all of us, that their key cultural manifestations are what Hughes terms "the Great Goddess and the Sacrificed God", and that they express, if you like, humanity's *tragic dilemma*.)

5. Once he discovered this mythic key to his imagination (i.e. the two poems explosively combined), Shakespeare could then dedicate his entire mature career to exploring the corridors it unlocked. He harnessed all the various potentialities of those deeply rooted ancient stories for his own Elizabethan dramas. To use a rather violent analogy, his 'Tragic Equation' was a kind of dramatist's atomic bomb: once he had discovered the essential nuclear reaction, he could go on finding new ways of inducing it, ways of making the explosion bigger or smaller, and even finally - in "The Tempest" - how to prevent the explosion from occurring at all. He spent twelve years pursuing this obsession, and the results speak for themselves.

6. Indeed, Hughes goes on to show that it's always at the same particular moment in each play (i.e. when "Venus and Adonis" metamorphoses into "The Rape of Lucrece" (and in the late plays, back again)) that Shakespeare's poetry takes off to ever-greater heights. In other words, Hughes argues that by touching the primal mythic sources of the human imagination (where the two myths collide), Shakespeare gains direct access to his Muse. He touches the vision itself, and records its feel in his poetry.

"Shakespeare and The Goddess of Complete Being" is a work that forces itself upon your imagination and stays there. It is not, however, for the skim reader. It requires dedicated concentration and some considerable patience for complex, detailed argument. It also needs a fairly healthy knowledge of up to a dozen or so of the mature plays - you might need to get out your edition of the Complete Works and start revising.

Yet for all that, this book is a real joy to read. Its luminous prose could only come from a poet of Hughes' own calibre; its massive scope (compassing everything from the shamanic initiation dream of a Siberian Goldi leader to Occult Neoplatonism in Renaissance Europe) is endlessly exciting and surprising; and its ear for Shakespeare's poetry and eye for his mythological allusion is virtually unparalleled.

But it's really for the insights into the nature of genius that this book is truly unforgettable. By the time you've reached "Our revels now are ended..." (at the end of the long dramatic sequence), Hughes has shown you exactly *how* Shakespeare keeps managing to follow his Muse up to ever more dizzying heights - almost as if you're a passenger on the journey with him. And *that*, for a 'mere' work of literary criticism, is surely astonishing.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for the scholar and student of Bard, April 4, 2011

By 

GoldBalloons - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (Hardcover)

There is nothing else like this. While I don't necessarily agree with every line he writes, Hughes' viewpoint is absolutely indispensible on the Shakespeare criticism shelf.

Can't grasp Shakespeare? Can't get a handle on him? Read this and have a feast. You will come away vastly enriched in appreciation of the Bard.

It's hard to summarize and I'm not making an Olympian effort here, but he's basically saying that there's a theme running through nearly all Shakespeare's works, and it begins with the two early poems, Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece. Two responses to "the Goddess," ie to sexuality or to women. He hauls in neoplatonism, myth, psychology, stretches the point wrt some of the plays, but all in all it sheds a light like no other. There's hell to pay if you reject the goddess, and there's hell to pay if you force her.

Hughes shows how it plays out in the various works, and tries to show how it evolved (this is where it gets dubious). He makes assumptions as to chronology (who does not?) His theory gets too elaborate and maybe goes out of control and tries to eat everything in sight.

Nevertheless -- for heaven's sake, read it. I don't know of ANY other work on Shakespeare's output that I'd call indispensible. This is.

And while I'm at it, many thanks to Barnes and Noble for their B&N Rediscovers editions, reprinting htf works of "special merit" in affordable hardcover.

This is a book you'll return to, if you enjoy Shakespeare...and if you don't yet, this might change your mind.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rich seam of literature & reflection, July 13, 2010

By 

Duncan Mason "ash" (Currently in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (Hardcover)

A rich, rewarding book for anyone who takes the time and is able to follow Mr. Hughes exhaustively argued thesis. In some ways it is a bookend to Robert Graves "White Goddess" and those who enjoyed the one will enjoy the other. Ted Hughes mines very deep veins of poetic ore, his analysis of the thematic connections between the plays are fascinating, and whether or not we accept that Shakespeare was consciously organizing his magnum opus in the way Hughes expounds or not (it may have all been subconscious) this book reminds us once again of the enormous range of Shakespeare's poetic gifts. It is a brilliant book and just as the White Goddess has migrated from the furthest reaches of the forest of prose to the campfires of many a modern poet and writer so Hughes' book will stand the test of time and be returned to again and again. It is a powerful work and demands serious study. The sections where Ted Hughes discusses Shakespeare's "bifurcated language" and his discussion of the mythological underpinnings of the masque in The Tempest are worth the price of the book alone. Take time over this one - there is much to be savoured.