Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE GODDESS OF COMPLETE BEING

Ted Hughes

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35, 464 pp.

Reading Ted Hughes's grand, maddening, and finally un-put-downable book on Shakespeare, I kept thinking about two propositions that have echoed in my mind for years--and feeling that in a funny way I had to wait for this book to give them their final, radiant sense. The first is the argument of my old mentor and sensei Harold Bloom, that a "strong" poet is best served only by the creative misreadings of a strong critic. The second is something one of my first graduate students, all those years ago at Cornell, dropped in conversation: "There are two kinds of criticism-- right and interesting."

Fighting words, those, especially in the current climate-chilly and overcast--of academic criticism, deconstructionist and/or new historicist, where the aim of reading great stuff (these guys, of course, would even blush to use the word "great") seems to be, mainly, to reduce the greatness to a series of tics and evasions in the service of a Eurocentric, logocentric power structure--and, coincidentally, to exalt the function of the critic over that of the creator. It's why students, shaking their heads in stunned disbelief, are walking out of English classes in droves; and they're fight.

If Hughes had done nothing more--and he does much more here--his book would be of immense value just because it refutes, at the top of its voice, the currently fashionable academic treason. At the heart of his enterprise is the poet's conviction-which also ought to be the critic's-that the only reason for reading is to save your life, and that Shakespeare, perhaps above all poets, gives life most abundantly. "Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it," said one of the rabbis about Torah, and Hughes, taking Shakespeare as a kind of secular Torah, writes what is essentially a five-hundred-page midrash on that universe of language. It is the approach that unimaginative critics (like Gary Taylor) and anti-imaginative critics (like Gerald Graff) dismiss as "bardolatry"; it just happens to be, like the kids who shake their heads at Taylor, Graff, and their tribe, right.

"I shall keep reminding myself," writes Hughes in his introduction, "that the main point is to project the...plays...as a single titanic work, like an Indian epic, the same gods battling through their reincarnations, in a vast, cyclic Tragedy of Divine Love." Perhaps midrash isn't the right word. Hughes is in fact writing a Shakespearean Kabbalah, a sometimes tortuous but infallibly rich articulation of his Shakespeare, whose visionary idiosyncracy seeks not to impose itself upon our reading, but to share itself with our reading. Miraculously, it does.

Ever since his early collections, Lupercal, Wodwo, and especially the still-stunning Crow, Ted Hughes has been the most compelling of our mythological poets, obsessed-as all mythology and all religion is--with the fate of consciousness in a world that seems at once to give it birth, nurture it, and yet deny its highest yearning for immortality. Not surprisingly, then, his Shakespeare emerges as a particularly Hughesian fellow. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, hereafter SGCB, focuses on fifteen plays--As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, the major tragedies, and the four late romances--as the "titanic work" of Shakespeare's inner quest to work out the "tragic equation" that is man's awareness of Nature as both womb and tomb of his godlike aspirations. For Hughes the cycle culminating in The Tempest is a giant tapestry, at once compellingly obvious and arcane, of the myth of all myths: man's struggle with the creating, sustaining, and destroying figure of the great goddess.

From Shakespeare's two long narrative poems, Hughes derives the polar versions of this history (this ur-story?). In "Venus and Adonis" the male rejects the blandishments of the eternal female and is destroyed for his rejection. In "The Rape of Lucrece" the male violently despoils the female and is humiliated for his perfidy. But here's the trick---once you realize that both those stories are the same story, one the inside-out of the other, you have an infinitely variable, infinitely retellable tale about the self--the male---coming to consciousness of itself only in terms of its antagonism toward the world, everything that makes, but is not, the self--the female, the goddess. You have, in other words, the tragic equation or--though Hughes for peculiar reasons never says this--the most powerful articulation since Genesis of the myth of the Fall.

By stating the thesis this briefly, of course, I make it sound either a little bit ho-hum or a little bit crazy. In fact, it is a little bit of both (as--honest, folks--is most of Kabbalah). As one of my teachers wisely said, "At this point in history, if you've got a new idea about Shakespeare. it's wrong." It is also, as Hughes applies it to play after play, gorgeously invigorating. We may not want to see as quite so central to their stories Hamlet's Adonis-like rejection of Gertrude and Ophelia, or Othello's Tarquin-like destruction of Desdemona, or Lear's sublime combination of the two myths, first rejecting and brutalizing and finally transcendentally reconciling with Cordelia: but once we have been shown these aspects, and shown how, through the whole "titanic" progress of the great tragedies and the late romances, they form a consistent pattern moving from chaos to redemption, we cannot stop seeing them.

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.

Hughes's Shakespeare is finally not yours or mine, nor should it be. As George Steiner hauntingly said of this most remarkable man, the very words with which we seek to do him honor are his. But it is a brilliant "Shakespeare," and it enters into a profligately generous dialogue with the Shakespeare you and I have to find for ourselves. I can't see how anyone, reading this book, can read our most unavoidable poet the same way ever again. And if that is not, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, the function of criticism at the present or indeed any time--well then, I can't use it.

FRANK McCONNELL, Commonweal's media critic, teaches English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.