The Trickster is deftly portrayed in Shakespeare’s Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. He is ‘littered under Mercury’, we are told: born in Gemini, twins of this bipolar twinning state. (The staff of Hermes, the caduceus, has two twinned snakes.) He is called ‘a wily fellow’ in Robert Greene, Shakespeare’s source, like the cartoon Trickster Wile E. Coyote. The Homeric Hymn relates how even as a child Hermes was ‘wrapped up in crafty wiles’; and Apollo calls him a rogue, Trickster and crafty-minded cheat.
This is him! I gasped when I thought about Autolycus. This is Mercury.
– Meet me at the crossroads, Mercury had said to me, and so I’d waited there, not knowing what would happen. Shakespeare happened.
At the crossroads of the mind. At the junction of writer to reader. At the intersection of time, which is the eternal present moment when Shakespeare speaks – always at the heart of now. For Mercury has dazzled many a mind before ours and the Trickster has tricked many a shepherd.
Autolycus is a hedge musician, a balladeer on the byways, following in the footsteps of the musical Mercury. Autolycus lives in his own world and within his own moral code. He needs society yet he operates as a sole trader, a soloist to the core, always on the edge, at the boundaries, and on the road, in the no-man’s-land: liminal as any Trickster. Hermes is lord of the land of sheep and a cattle-rustler, while the name Auto-lycus means ‘the wolf himself’, preying on the sheep-people who surround him as he filches from them at the sheep-shearing. (‘Sheep-shearing’ was a term for conning people, as ‘fleecing’ still is.)
There is a word in French practically invented for Autolycus or, more widely, the Trickster: voler. It means to fly, to steal, to wing, to pick, to rip off, to filch, to fleece, to hook, to crook and to convey a message. Autolycus exemplifies these: fleet of foot, stealing, winging it when he needs, picking up the unconsidered trifles, ripping off the clown, filching purses, fleecing the rustics by hook and by crook and, above all, conveying messages. Volatility permeates his role and his nature.
Autolycus is a portrait of the artist as Trickster, albeit in a comically disparaging portrayal. ‘My traffic is sheets,’ he says, punning on the ‘sheets’ which he steals from washing lines and re-sells as ribbons, and the sheets of writing paper, which were expensive and precious. (It’s quite possible that writers would steal them in hard winters to write their tales.) Another interpretation combines the two: Shakespeare famously nicked the ‘sheets’ of other writers, stealing the broad outline of their stories, cutting them to ribbons, making something far more precious and re-selling them. This is how Autolycus sells his ballads, as ribbons ripped off from larger sheets of plays, making him, quite literally, a rip-off merchant.
Autolycus is a past master of his art: ‘I understand the business, I hear it: to have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cut-purse,’ he says, and it is as true for writers in show business as it is for pedlars: it is Shakespeare who also needs an open ear, a quick eye and a nimble hand. Historically, the two professions were linked in another way: the Vagrancy Act of 1604 decreed that those who had no land, no master and no legitimate trade could be branded ‘R’ for Rogue. But, intriguingly, the act exempted pedlars and also liveried players, so while most people were subject to laws forbidding vagrancy, both a Shakespeare and an Autolycus were part of a fraternity of vagabonds allowed out on the byways, the roaming roads between towns, the Trickster places, as Autolycus sings: ‘Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way.’
Autolycus is a petty thief and conman: someone who, in Elizabethan England, used wit and snares rather than brute force in his borderline criminality. In the gleeful amorality of a Trickster, he remarks: ‘Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance,’ and he is grandiose about any divine judgement: ‘for the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it.’ Like the Trickster he is associated with traps and we hear him whisper of the Clown: ‘If the springe hold, the cock’s mine.’
He is a rogue, yes, but not a heavyweight criminal. He steals the Clown’s ‘spice’ money but not his entire livelihood. He nicks the cash for the bawdy spice-of-life stuff but, generous thief as all Tricksters are, he gives back far more than he takes and does so in the form of the art he brings, with songs and stories. Autolycus is the link (the joint, the connecting point) between worlds, between the court world and the country world, as Shakespeare himself was; a translator who could bring the country to the court. He offers himself as ‘advocate’, or messenger, for the shepherd in the traditional go-between role of Mercury-Hermes. He makes trans-actions, movements across borders, both in the petty ways and in the greatest: as a pedlar, making iffy financial transactions, Autolycus honours Mercury as god of merchants looking after commerce of all kinds; but Autolycus also effects the grandest transactions, dealing between the worlds of the living and the dead, between the first half of the play, with the ‘dead’ Hermione and Perdita left for dead, and the second half, where life springs back, the trap released. In the role of Trickster, Autolycus sets the action going when things are stuck, he moves the plot forward. (The same role which Shakespeare, as every author, must always play.) In this wintry story, iced and stuck fast, Autolycus enters, singing of spring, changing the temperature and altering the tone.
Like the typical Trickster, Autolycus is appetitive and greedy, vital, vivid, attractive and speedy. As befits a Trickster tale, messages and the speed of messengers are all-important. The Trickster can be a personification of chance, and when Perdita is abandoned she is thrown into the realm of chance, the lap of the Trickster, as Paulina speaks of ‘the casting forth to crows thy baby-daughter’: crows are the birds of Mercury.
In the first part of the play, Antigonus obeys the orders of the jealous king and abandons the baby Perdita on the coast of Bohemia. It is thought that the same actor who played Autolycus would also have played Antigonus, embodying the Trickster’s two-in-one trick-and-treating nature. Antigonus loses Perdita, and Autolycus finds her: both finding and losing are under the auspices of Mercury. But there is more: Hermione’s name is related to ‘Hermes’ and is said to mean ‘a lucky find’, and it is also interesting that as Hermes means ‘he of the stone heap’, it is to stone that Hermione is turned until the finding of her daughter turns the play back towards life, as the turning world rolls winter into spring.
Sometimes what is most important is to ask the right question.
In the legend of the Fisher King, the knight Percival has a chance of curing the sick king if he asks the one curative question: Whom does the Grail serve? In manic depression, the difficult question, but also possibly the curative one, is this: What does it want, this madness?
Language.
In my case, specifically, poems. But it wants language in all its forms, the language of words and the tongue, the language of the body and sex, the language of music, of gifts. I know when I’m getting dangerously high: it’s when my dearest desire is to ‘learn’ Indo-European not as a source of ultimate etymological roots but almost as a language. (Flight of ideas? Grandiose plans, anyone?) I’m looking for both the arkhe and the echt of language, the primal, the basis, the arch-language and also the most specific, the most sharply delineated and defined. The language which connects the present with the past, the language which connects so many different languages to each other, the language which gives a depth of meaning to each word it remembers.
Language is a key feature of manic depression. Darian Leader notes: the ‘verbal dexterity and sudden penchant for wit and punning’, and he identifies, in all its simplicity, the medium of connectivity in the human world: ‘it is language.’ Depression, by contrast, is a kind of denotative language. It sees words flat, each word lonely, stubbornly unconnected, holding only one meaning. Puritan language. Black and white. No frills. But mania, delightfully, is a connotative language. It makes associations and friendships. It cannot walk alone but links itself lovely to others. It is playful language, seeking thrills, punning and suggestive; it
loves a good double entendre as much as the next man.
Only connote, only connote . . .
Mania can connect everything with everything, because it is inquisitive to life and its senses are connected to the world. In manic mood, I felt connected to language, people, animals – even objects. Things came alive in my hands, so my notebook had a pitiful, mewing losability until I wanted to say to it: Hold my hand when we’re crossing a road. My woodstove grinned, its shoulders heaving like a drunken old man trying not to laugh. My piano stretched itself like a luxuriously naked body, asking my fingers to play it into ecstasy. My favourite candlestick, a Wee Willie Winkie brass one, saw out the nights like a vigilant nightwatchman. It was as if the brass itself could become rubber, pliable and transformative; as if a piano could be made of elastic and stretch to my touch, the keys nibbling my fingers; and the whole world torrential with animation.
The brain connects and communicates with itself as neurones (brain cells) ‘speak’ to each other through neurotransmitters, or nerve messengers. Like a million million Mercuries in the brain, neurotransmitters are located at the junctions (like Mercury at the crossroads) where one neurone meets another. These junctions are called synapses, from syn (together) and haptein (to fasten, join, connect). God of the joints, mischievous connecter. ‘Connect’ is, effectively, the same word but in Latin rather than Greek: con (together) and nectere (to bind or tie). While mania is an over-connected electric charge, in depression the switch is flipped and the supply is disconnected. Nothing comes of nothing, nothing goes to nothing, nothing speaks to nothing.
If normal thought includes following a line of thinking as the feet walk an iambic pentameter along a drovers’ way, in madness everything changes. Your mind has as many feet as there are infinitely discriminable points on a compass-rose. The psyche is centrifugal, not linear, and it blooms like the seed head of a dandelion. I felt I could think for miles in all directions at once.
Connections come in many forms, and social connections are created (or strengthened) in the language of gift, which, as Lewis Hyde so brilliantly describes in The Gift, are life-ful only if there is a sense of motion, so everyone must keep the cycle of gift-giving going round. But in mania, gift (and, indeed, giftedness) can be problematic, if touching. One person I know of with manic depression kicks off an episode by buying rounds of drinks, giving and giving until he is broke. A Timon of our times, he cannot afford it, but the Trickster has a hold of him, generous to others, though thieving from himself.
Seeking connection with others, many people with bipolar read the memoirs of fellow manic depressives to find companionship across the world and, indeed, across centuries. William Cowper wrote in The Castaway:
But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another’s case.
For me, it is in Shakespeare that I most keenly seek to trace the resemblances of this condition because he understood manic depression and caught its exact signature over and over again. He littered his plays with little clues, so those who came after him, mad and manic and keening to be understood, desperate to find and be found, could gather up the clues like little pebbles in a fairy tale and find their way through the forests of the mind. In Shakespeare we can see our understander: in his work we can know that we are known. Why does Shakespeare matter so much to me? Because, in his presence, I can breathe in fully. The air which animates me, he anticipated. The words by which I live, he coaxed from language.
Mania, depression, or both, affect a large number of Shakespeare’s significant characters: Mercutio, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, Jaques in As You Like It, Hamlet, Lear, Timon and Cleopatra. The subject of moods and manias permeates specific plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. Shakespeare’s love for puns and his genius for word creation, his sense of empathy and connection, his feeling for connotation and word association, his ability to say so much in so few words, all suggest that Shakespeare either experienced manic depression or understood it intimately in another. In his use of soliloquies, too, he shows the theatre of the mind (that most profound play within a play), particularly when that mind is disjoined from normal social interaction and dialogue.
We know it is common for writers to have manic depression: we also know it is an illness that asks for audience, a state of mind which is in itself a theatre; it is a communicating, messenger-driven state of mind.
Charles Lamb wrote: ‘It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare,’ but I would say that, while it is hard to think of Shakespeare writing while experiencing madness, it seems only too possible to conceive him writing after – or between – episodes. Shakespeare, in Sonnet 147, describes a feverish, dangerous love-sickness as an illness akin to what we’d now call manic depression. The sonnet’s protagonist loses his reason, seeing his thoughts and words ‘as madmen’s are’, and interprets his beloved in acute polarity, angelizing and demonizing her; he is death-obsessed and sleep-deprived with reckless energy; of this Shakespeare writes five words which stand as a deft description of mania: ‘frantic-mad with evermore unrest’.
The word ‘frantic’ meant ‘insane’ from the mid-fourteenth century. From the late fifteenth century, it picked up a more specifically manic definition: ‘affected by wild excitement’. It carries meanings of frenetic, frenzied, disjointed or chaotic, and was used later by William Cobbett, describing ‘a man of violent and frantic disposition’.
In Romeo and Juliet Mercutio plays a burlesque spirit-messenger as he cries, staccato:
Nay, I’ll conjure too:
Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover!
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream those terms have modulated from ‘madman’, ‘passion’ and ‘lover’ to ‘lunatic’, ‘lover’ and ‘poet’ – a threesome familiar to manic depression – as Shakespeare seems to find the common denominator of all three in the frantic frenzy of polarizing moods.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.
In part, this follows the Renaissance honouring of furor poeticus as Plato and Aristotle understood it: the madness of the poet, the mark of divine inspiration, the ‘fine madness’ ‘which rightly should possess a poet’s brain’, in the words of Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with a portrayal of the rational mind firmly in the world of flat fiat, predetermined lives and predictable laws, the Court of Athens, mean-lipped with its doling-bells, the world of judgement and the awful demand to be only part of yourself.
But it swiftly moves to show the mind’s states where dream, imagination, passion, poetry and madness rule, and mania has its day: ‘A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine!’ We are in the world of Puck the Trickster, the ‘mad spirit’, wings at his heels, putting a girdle about the Earth in forty minutes, as fast as mania can trippily switch to depression. He guides and misguides, misleads people in his realm: ‘I am that merry wanderer of the night.’ When Shakespeare decided to give his lead female character the name Hermia, he was giving us the clue that we are in Hermes’ Trickster territory, and the punning language is a constant reminder of the swirlingly irrational psyche, as when, for example, Demetrius describes himself as ‘wood within this wood’, where the first ‘wood’ means wōd, mad or frantic.
Looking, finding and seeing are themes of the Dream; eyes are crucial. The play conjures a way of seeing which is like the dizzyingly volatile world of mania. Everything is mutable. Puck is a shapeshifter; Titania has a changeling child; lovers alter their loves under an inconstant moon. Everything at every moment is springing, curling, unfurling, grimacing, gurning, clowning. Ye
t, like the faerie sleight of sight, you can’t quite catch anything in the moment of its transformation, but rather you are aware, from the corner of your eye, that something shimmers and glistens, the play of light on water, a scent-shadow of bluebells at dusk, the essence of escence, as it were: something within the very process of its being: iridescence, effervescence, oscillescence, the beauty of instability. But then, imagination, having run riot and created havoc (‘now are frolic’), makes its peace with reason at the end. Returning to one’s normal self is like reawakening into the ordinary and looking back on an episode of madness: one sees it ‘But as the fierce vexation of a dream’.
Many people who have known mania and hypomania have a longing for it; it has seduced them, and they miss it when it is gone. The Dream conjures precisely that sense of nostalgia for the mind in its less ordinary states; it reminds me specifically of the nostalgia for mania when an episode is over. Once one has been possessed, temporarily beguiled and bewitched, one may well want to return to the wōd woods but must re-enter the sensible Court of Athens, though always taking a peek back over one’s shoulder to see if that naughty Puck is still playing a trick or three.
Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is a famous example of causeless depression arising of itself, but Solanio introduces the idea of bipolarity, swearing ‘by two-headed Janus’ and remarking the extremes of human nature, from the manic characters who would ‘laugh like parrots at a bagpiper’ to those who will not, cannot, smile.
Janus, the bi-psyche god, had one face which smiled and one which frowned, as if bipolar were etched in his image. (The jester’s marotte, the head on the stick, would often be carved with the two faces of Janus.)
As You Like It locates polarities of temperament in the two people in fool position: Touchstone and Jaques. The name Touchstone is interesting: something which tests the true nature of metals and, equally, tests the true mettle of human nature, as manic depression seems to sound out and detest what is fake, untrue or inauthentic. The role of the jester, of course, is similar: a tester of the fake and a touchstone who has the privilege – and capacity – to speak home truths. Touchstone – merry, mad and wearing motley – represents mania. Jaques – melancholy, philosophizing and dressed in black – stands for depression, as the play notes:
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