Prose by Ted Hughes

Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)

 Ann Skea considers the development and legacy of Hughes’s mythic Shakespearean study.

In  October 1992, as I was leaving Court Green after visiting Ted and Carol Hughes, Ted suddenly ducked back into his kitchen and emerged with a handful of typewritten papers which he handed to me saying, rather diffidently, “You may not have seen this”. ‘This’ turned out to be a copy of notes entitled ‘A Definition of Mythic in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being’. The first paragraph stated that it contained preliminary remarks intended to replace about eight pages of his original ‘Introduction’, and that it was written because a book about “the psycho-biological/religious/mystical root-system of Shakespeare’s dramatic vision”  needed readers to approach it with the “co-operative, imaginative attitude of a co-author”.

I was dismayed that the negative response of some reviewers to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (published that April) should have made Hughes so defensive. Sorry, too, that he planned to present readers with an abstract argument about the ‘mythic’ and/or ‘realist’ personalities of imaginative writers before they even began to tackle the book. In the event, these remarks were quietly incorporated into a modified introduction for the American edition of the book, published by Farrar Straus Giroux. 

The trouble was, as Hughes had told me when we discussed ‘The Doorstop’ (as he and Carol called this book), it was clear from the reviews that very few of his critics had really read it. And the academics thought he was encroaching on their territory: who was he – just a poet – to write about things they had spent their whole careers studying and teaching? He was challenging their fixed ideas.

In fact, Hughes’s credentials for writing about Shakespeare’s work were excellent.

As an eighteen-year-old National Service conscript, doing night duty in an isolated location in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Hughes had read and re-read all of Shakespeare’s plays. And by the time he was twenty-six, Sylvia Plath (no doubt exaggerating somewhat in her newly-married euphoria) could tell her mother that Hughes “literally” knew Shakespeare by heart and was shocked that she had read only thirteen of the plays.

Hughes’s fascination with Shakespeare never palled, and in 1969 he persuaded Charles Monteith (who was then his editor at Faber & Faber) to allow him to select his own favourite passages from Shakepeare’s plays, together with some sonnets and short poems, and to publish them in a “single portable Book”.

A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse was published by Faber in 1971. Hughes wrote in the ‘Introduction’ that the pieces he had “plucked from the body” of the work not only liberated the energy and the unique quality of Shakespeare’s language, they also revealed Shakespeare’s own nature and the “single fundamental idea…the symbolic fable which nearly all his greatest passages combine to tell”.  In selecting these passages, Hughes believed he had plucked out “Shakespeare’s heart” and, he went on, “if it has a black look it is well to remember that most readers have decided the plays are healthy”.

Hughes’s long ‘Introduction’ also outlined the religious and psychological conflict caused by the Calvinist Puritan suppression of Old Catholicism in which the Goddess of earlier pagan beliefs still flourished. The religious aspect of this conflict was particularly relevant during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but the universal psychological aspect of the suppression of natural human energies, especially sexual and imaginative energies, is clear to see. For the first time in Hughes’ writing the love-goddess, enraged by the puritanical suppression of sexual energies, becomes the Queen of Hell - the demonised boar which destroys the hero. 

In many ways, this first essay about Shakespeare’s ‘Great Theme’ (later included in Winter Pollen) is clearer and simpler and more powerful than the much longer exposition of Hughes’s views in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.[1]

Hughes noted in both essays that it was certainly partly true that every poet finds metaphors for his own nature – “the master-plan of their whole make-up”, as he put it – and that this is projected into their work. So, how much of Hughes’ own nature was revealed by the passages he chose and, in particular, by his elaboration of the “symbolic fable” – the “particular knot of obsessions” – which he described as the single fundamental idea holding all of Shakespeare’s work together?

Besides Shakespeare, another area of Hughes’s early reading was Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, a copy of which was given to him by his English teacher, John Fisher, when he left Mexborough Grammar School. Graves introduced him to the language of poetic myth. And what young poet could not be inspired by the idea that this magical language, bound up with ancient worship of the Moon Goddess, was the true language of poetry? So, at nineteen, Hughes addressed his early poem ‘Song’ to his ‘Lady’. And later, in 1973, after reading about the ancient vacanas (songs) of the Southern Indian poet-mystics who considered themselves ‘married’ to Siva, he experimented with writing his own vacanas: ‘You snatched me up and you carry me off / O lady / To sing’, he wrote to his ‘Lady of the Hill’.[2]

Through myth, Graves also introduced Hughes to the Goddess in her many manifestations; not only Muse, Virgin, Mother and Goddess of Hell, but also boar and serpent and many other animal forms. And he wrote of the male gods in every era who had challenged her power.

Much of Hughes’s discussion of Shakespeare’s great theme can be traced back to Graves’s arguments in The White Goddess, but the psychological aspect of Hughes’s “tragic equation” shows just how much he was also influenced by the work of Carl Jung.  

Jung’s writings are well represented in Hughes’ library archive at Emory University and in 1977 he told Ekbert Faas that he had read all of Jung’s works as they appeared in translation but had “tried to avoid knowing them too well”.[3] Clearly this did not work, since he frequently referred to Jung in interviews and in his writing. 

Nor should we be surprised, since Shakespeare and the Goddess deals very thoroughly with the many different ways in which Shakespeare explores the workings of the subconscious, that those who are very familiar with Jungian theory are also familiar with it in Hughes’s work. In 2006, I was unexpectedly invited to participate in a conference on ‘Psyche and Imagination’ run by the International Association for Jungian Studies. I have only a limited knowledge of Jung’s works, mostly those associated with Alchemy and symbols, but the topic interested me, so I accepted. At the conference, I was impressed by the frequency with which Jungian analysts and scholars referred to Hughes’s work and to Shakespeare and the Goddess in particular. Frustration was also expressed that the book was no longer in print and, at that time, it was quite hard to obtain, except as expensive first editions offered on the internet. 

Graves and Jung were seminal influences on Hughes’s work but so too was his early passion for the poetry and the occult interests of W.B. Yeats.  One critic dismissed Hughes’s interest in the occult as his “dotty beliefs”, and another writer described them as “endearingly bonkers”.[4] Hughes was unmoved: “You will be laughed at / For your superstition”, he wrote in the opening poem of Capriccio and, again, in the final poem of Howls & Whispers,where he adds “Let them laugh / At your superstition”. [5] And in a letter to Keith Sagar, he wrote scathingly of Auden’s dismissal of:

the whole of Eastern mysticism and religious philosophy, the whole tradition of Hermetic Magic (which is a good part of Jewish Mystical philosophy, not to speak of the mystical philosophy of the Renaissance) the whole exploration of spirit life at every level of consciousness, the whole deposit of earlier and other religion, myth, vision, traditional wisdom and story in folk belief... [6] 

Mysticism, magic, Occult Neoplatonism, Hebrew and Christian Cabbala, Gnosticism and the myth of Sophia, all were things Hughes studied seriously and understood well, and he discerned all of these in Shakespeare’s work and explained them coherently in his argument in Shakespeare and the Goddess.  

Hughes was well aware that Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being was a difficult book:  difficult to write and, for some readers, difficult to read. For anyone not very familiar with the plays, the “whirl of names”, he suggested, might sound like “a betting shop in the basement of the Tower of Babel”. [7] At least one ordinary reader was so incensed by Hughes’s re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s work that she wrote to him, and Hughes’s reply to her letter vividly suggests the vehemence of her attack. [8] On the other hand, five New Zealand women were so inspired by the book that they created a tapestry which was hung backstage at the opening of the new Globe Theatre in 1997.

To say that Hughes’s own knot of obsessions informed and guided his study of Shakespeare’s opus does nothing to negate the importance of what he divines in “Shakespeare’s heart”. Rather, it suggests that Hughes was uniquely qualified to recognise an underlying theme which others had never noticed. He was not just someone who knew Shakespeare’s work exceptionally well. 

In 1979, Donya Feuer, a Swedish actor and director at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, wrote to Hughes about a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure which she was planning. She asked for his view of the work, and this began a discussion through which, in a series of letters in 1990, Hughes consolidated what he described to a friend as “strange tales from the depths of the Shakespearean cave, which no man wants to hear”. [9]  These ‘tales’ became Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which he revised and rewrote compulsively until it was published in March 1992.

As he was writing, he was also reading widely and discussing his ideas with others, as his letters to Keith Sagar and his dedication to Roy Davids at the front of the book indicate. Most importantly, he was a poet bringing his poetic sensibilities to the work of another poet; and in the whole body of Shakespeare’s work he recognised a progressive exploration of many of his own beliefs, difficulties and questions. 

To return to Hughes’s vision of the ideal reader of Shakespeare and the Goddess: this reader would, Hughes hoped, regard his argument “as a sort of musical adaptation, a song” – an imaginative and unified re-staging of the whole body of Shakespeare’s work. In 2012, The Globe Theatre staged all of Shakespeare’s plays. They were performed by different companies of actors from different countries and in different languages. I wonder whether Hughes’s argument would have given them an easily recognisable ‘Great Theme’ had the directors all read Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.

Ann Skea is an independent scholar whose work on Ted Hughes has been widely published. Her Ted Hughes website is archived by the British Library and can be found at https://ann.skea.com/THHome.htm. She first met Ted Hughes in 1982 when he invited her to visit him and his wife Carol at their home in Court Green. Her memoir about their subsequent friendship can be read at https://ann.skea.com/THmemor.htm.  

Notes

 © Ann Skea 2021