In July 2018 Robert McCrum delivered the Ted Hughes Memorial lecture as part of the Ways with Words Festival of Words and Ideas at Dartington Hall.
For those who weren’t lucky enough to hear this lecture in person, there is now an essay version available on the Guardian website.
This is a lucid and helpful charting of the many complex pathways through Hughes’s Shakespearean labyrinth, and would make a great starting point for anyone contemplating starting in on Hughes’s longest work, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.