Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was an English poet with a deep sense of the "shamanic" power of myth. He believed he had uncovered a structural mythic pattern in fourteen or fifteen of Shakespeare's mature plays. He believed that this mythic pattern consisted of two parts, which first appear in two of Shakespeare's narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (part one), and The Rape of Lucrece (part two). Hughes called this two-part mythic structure Shakespeare's "tragic equation." It is this "tragic equation" that he sought to elucidate in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (Faber & Faber, 1992).
I bought my copy of the book in a second hand book shop in York, England, in 1998, just a couple of months after Ted Hughes had died; it's the first edition, hardback with cover.
Although I've dipped into it several times over the last 28 years, and especially when researching my recent paper on Shakespeare's poem, The Rape of Lucrece, this is the first time I've actually got around to reading it from cover to cover; well, not yet from cover to cover as I'm not yet half way through.
I'm reading it in preparation for a presentation I'm to give to an academic circle of English literature professors that meets once a year here in Hiroshima to discuss topics around "Shakespeare and Contemporary Literature." It was to this group that I presented my paper on Lucrece last year. This year I decided to take the "easy" route of simply offering to review Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being rather than do any fresh research.
What is Shakespeare's "Tragic Equation"?
The "key" to Shakespeare's "tragic equation" is found, according to Ted Hughes, by splicing the plots of Shakespeare's two early narrative poems together to reveal a mythic pattern that taps into the trauma of the English Reformation. The mythic pattern of the first plot produces the mythic pattern of the second.
The two poems are (1) Venus and Adonis and (2) The Rape of Lucrece.
Venus and Adonis (1593)
Venus has fallen in love with Adonis but, in Shakespeare's unique twist, Adonis resists her advances, preferring to go and hunt wild boar. Just as Venus fears, Adonis is gored by a wild boar and dies. A purple and white flower grows where his blood was spilled and Venus plucks it to her bosom and returns to Paphos; Adonis is "reborn" as the flower in Venus' bosom.
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)
Roman prince Tarquin has the hots for Lucrece, the chaste wife of Collatine, and rapes her. She summons her kinsfolk, calls on them to take revenge and commits suicide. They incite the outraged Romans to expel the Tarquins and the Roman Republic is born.
Extracting the Mythic Pattern from the Poems
Venus, the Goddess of Love pursues her beloved, who rejects her and is killed by the Boar. Venus and the Boar are, according to Hughes, two manifestations of the same female divinity, who can manifest as the Goddess of Love or as the Queen of Hell in the shamanistic form of a Boar. In short, the Boar is the jealous goddess in another form, getting her revenge on the one who rejected her.
What does this have to do with the English Reformation?
Well, the "rejected goddess" is now the Virgin Mary who has been rejected by Adonis the Puritan. We might think of the Boar as the Whore of Babylon in animal guise and all the danger she poses to Puritan sensibility from Spenser to Bunyan (and beyond).
We might say that Venus and Adonis embodies the Protestant experience of rejecting the "idolatrous" veneration of the Virgin Mary, and the dangers that such a rejection entailed.
But just as the goddess has various faces (divine lover, bride, holy mother, queen of Hell), so too does the Boar. One manifestation is the bestial form of the female goddess of the underworld. Another is found in Hughes' interpretation of the mythic pattern of the second narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece.
Here we have two princes, Tarquin and Collatine, just as in several of Shakespeare's plays there are two "brothers" or close friends who fall out. Tarquin rapes Collatine's wife Lucrece in a frenzy of lust. On the mythic plane, Tarquin the jealous, usurping "brother" is the equivalent of the Boar that gores Adonis. Now, Tarquin "gores" Collatine by raping his wife.
In the context of the English Reformation, Tarquin represents the "Puritan" who seeks to destroy the goddess, so that The Rape of Lucrece can be read as the Catholic experience of the destruction wrought by the English Reformation on the body of the church, and on the status and statues of the Virgin.
The Goddess as the Soul of the Hero
On another level, the goddess is the soul of the hero, and what the hero is rejecting when he rejects the goddess is a sudden perception of her hellish aspect, which we might liken to the Jungian "shadow." Originally, Adonis reciprocates Venus' unconditional love, but something causes the hero to suffer a "double vision" which splits the goddess into her constituent parts - divine consort and/or divine mother / queen of hell. He rejects the hellish aspect and falls into madness. At this point the Adonis figure may metamorphose into a Tarquin figure and destroy the goddess. If he does so, then he too will die since he has destroyed his own soul. Think of Othello murdering Desdemona and then killing himself.
The Tragic Equation and Hamlet
The "tragic equation" works itself out in different ways across about fifteen of Shakespeare's plays beginning more or less with All's Well That Ends Well and ending with The Tempest. In the case of Hamlet, the "goddess" who is Hamlet's "soul" appears in three guises in the play:
Ophelia = the divine consort = unconditional love
Gertrude as Hamlet's mother = the divine mother
Gertrude as Claudius' wife = the queen of Hell
One important point is that Shakespeare does not deal directly and transparently with the mythic content of his plays. Hughes compares Hamlet to the ancient Greek tragedies of Aeschelus - the Oresteia trilogy. In those plays the hero, Orestes, always operates on the mythic plane, whereas in Shakespeare's plays the characters operate on a "realistic" plane and represent "real" characters in realistic situations while the mythic plane moves (forcibly) in the background.
Thus, Orestes must obey Apollo and revenge his father's murder by killing his mother, but in doing so he will incite the fury of, well, the Furies, but if he fails to kill his mother then he will displease the god. In Hamlet's case, he has seen a ghostly vision of his father but like any "modern" person, has doubts about it and vacillates like the best of us.
However, the mythic plane runs its course. Hamlet sees (or is shown by the Ghost) the double (or treble) vision that split the goddess (his soul) into the its constituent parts, and he then rejects the hellish aspect of his mother as the usurping brother's whore, and falls into madness (which at the "realistic" level of the plot is explained as feigning madness to protect himself from Claudius, as David feigned madness to protect himself from his Philistine hosts). But the goddess, his soul, is ONE, which is why, Hughes suggests, he treats Ophelia with such contempt as to drive her mad (her madness mirroring his); she and Gertrude are two faces of the same goddess. Then Hamlet "dies" with her in the grave scene, only to "rise again" (already dead) as a wrathful and vengeful Tarquin/Boar to destroy and die the second death.
Preparing my Presentation
As I read Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being everything seems to make sense and I think I understand, but the real test of comprehension is in one's ability to convey the ideas clearly. I'm not sure I've done that here, and I have left a lot out for the sake of brevity, but writing this blog post has certainly been a useful exercise, as it turns out that while the essential mythic pattern that Hughes saw is relatively straightforward, explaining it clearly is rather more challenging.
Actually, I see Hughes work as a passionate poetic vision of Shakespeare rather than a dry academic analysis. At times he struggles to contain himself as the frenzy of the vision seems almost to overwhelm him, and that is what I appreciate about his work. I too feel the thrill of the insights he provides because in the end, great literature is poetic and taps into the perennial mythologies of the human consciousness - it is "news that stays news" as Ezra Pound put it, or as Shelley asserted, it is "the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth."
Cheers!
