Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being

by Ted Hughes and David Birrell Ted Hughes

Book Overview

Publisher: First published in 1992, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being has subsequently taken on a mythic life of its own. Dismissed at the time by some scholars, this audacious adventure... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374262047
• ISBN13: 9780374262044
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 524 Pages
• Weight: 2.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Best book on Shakespeare!

Everyone who has read this book has said it was the best book on Shakespeare they have ever read. So why is it still out of print? This book needs to be republished with a new cover (possibly with the goddess instead of the boar?), and it needs an index, perhaps instead of the outline form table of contents. It is a classic!

The Vision behind the Vision

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 al