Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Remember Alvarez’s harsh words about Assia: ‘Her only way of outdoing her dead rival was in the manner of her death.’11 By which Alvarez meant that she took Shura with her, whereas Sylvia tenderly preserved Frieda and Nick. But the other aspect of the outdoing was that whereby a Jewish woman and a little Jewish girl died in a gas oven. This was the thought that haunted Ted and that drives many of the poems in the sequence headed ‘A’, but that could not be made public. If critics had castigated Plath for evoking the Holocaust in the context of her own domestic woes, what would they have said in response to this line of writing from Hughes?

  Without the closure of publication, he endlessly revised, remembered, reconfigured. Without the discipline of print, he was able to merge verse and prose, little mundane things and potent symbols. One loose sheet in the box marked ‘A 4’ outlines memories (or poems) numbered seven to twelve, beginning from two chestnut horses rolling in a field of buttercups, their tails exploding upwards like a magnum of champagne. It then proceeds to a bitter indictment of Assia: ‘Who are you who have come to live with me, you are not my wife. You pester me worse than any public … You neglect the children. You smile bitterly. You are grief.’ And then to an equally bitter indictment of himself: ‘My torment is being five … The merry one is in jail – for life. He committed a murder. The lustful one is in hell … The studious one is in despair … The holy one waits on a bench … The reasonable one spends his whole days and nights arguing with these four.’ But it ends with an immensely tender evocation of Shura’s shoes and toys and clothes, and of how:

  Wherever I go is a little impetuous girl

  Who is not

  And her beautiful mother

  Who wrapped the whole world up

  Put it in the fire of the last day

  And left in all space only her smile

  Where flowers cannot flower, or buds break

  There was no atonement for the loss of little Shura.

  28

  Goddess Revisited

  In a letter to a fishing friend written in the summer of 1990, Ted reported that he had no news other than ‘strange tales from the depths of the Shakespearean caves, which no man wants to hear’.1 He had been exploring those caves all his literary life and now a project with a gestation period of more than two decades was coming to a head. It would be his equivalent of Graves’s White Goddess.2

  Oscar Wilde remarked that criticism is the only civilised form of autobiography, while Virginia Woolf believed that all Shakespearean criticism is as much about the critic’s self as about the dramatist’s plays. Shakespeare is a mirror in which serious readers and spectators see sharpened images of themselves and their own worlds. In this respect, the Shakespeare book was also Ted’s veiled autobiography.

  Shakespeare was the absolute centre of Ted Hughes’s sense of the English literary tradition. The plays were a major influence on his own poetry, in both linguistic intensity and thematic preoccupation. The world of Hughes’s verse is one in which, as Macbeth puts it, ‘light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood’.3 More than any other poet, Shakespeare assaulted Hughes – one of the great literary readers of the twentieth century – with the shock of the as-if-new. In a long journal note dated 22 January 1998, Ted wrote of reading with amazement (‘as if I’d never seen it before’) a line of Shakespeare: ‘Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stell’d.’4 This was during the weekend when the news of Birthday Letters was released. The line is the opening of Sonnet 24, in which the image of the beloved is held in the poet’s heart, as Sylvia’s was in Ted. This act of reading at a vital moment was symptomatic of a lifelong passion: all his days, Hughes read Shakespeare with amazement, as if he had never read him before. The key to Shakespearean acting is to speak each line as if it were being spoken for the first time, as if it were new minted from the thought-chamber of the character who utters it. In this regard, Hughes, fascinated as he was by actors and by the process of making theatre, read Shakespeare as if he were an actor playing all the parts. Which is probably how Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

  Having devoured the whole of Shakespeare as a teenager and studied him at Cambridge, when he moved to America with Sylvia in the summer of 1957 Ted re-read all the plays in what he considered to be their order of composition. He showed particular interest in the late collaborations with Fletcher, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen: ‘The Shakespeare in it is incredible in that it seems at first better than Shakespeare – but the rest, a great deal, is Fletcher. “Late Shakespeare” gets the blame for a lot of Fletcher.’5 In distinguishing between the styles of Shakespeare and Fletcher, he revealed the ear for the movement of Shakespearean verse that went along with his appetite for a big-picture understanding of the plays.

  Again and again, Shakespearean characters find their way into Hughes’s own creations. A poem in Lupercal is written from the point of view of ‘Cleopatra to the Asp’. A verse sequence drafted in the Eighties under the title ‘Court Cards’ offers readings of works ranging from Venus and Adonis to The Tempest, by way of the major tragedies and the relationship between Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV.6 ‘Setebos’ in Birthday Letters casts Sylvia as Miranda, Ted as Ferdinand, Aurelia Plath as Prospero, Ariel as the aura of creativity shared by the lovers, and Caliban as their dark secret inner life. An unpublished poem among the Birthday Letters drafts refracts Plath’s anger against her father through Timon of Athens’s rage against the world.7

  Although his responsiveness to Shakespeare in both verse and prose was lifelong, it was only in 1969 that Hughes began to write systematically about the plays. In 1968 he had edited A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse for a Faber and Faber series. His editor Charles Monteith asked him to undertake a similar volume of Emily Brontë, a poet close to his heart. Hughes replied that he would think about it, but that what he really wanted to do was a selection of Shakespeare’s verse for the series. He suggested that it would be novel and interesting to treat Shakespeare as poetry, not as drama. Monteith was extremely enthusiastic, immediately seeing a ready market. He proposed a decent advance (£150 on delivery) and a royalty of 10 per cent on the hardback, 7½ on the paperback. Hughes could do the Brontë as well, but the Shakespeare was infinitely more important.

  Ted set to work. But the coming three months, March to May 1969, was the traumatic period of Assia’s and Shura’s deaths, then his mother’s. It was the introduction to his Shakespeare anthology that he was wrestling over, dismayed and disappointed with it, when the phone rang on the morning of 14 May and Olwyn told him that their mother was dead. The gestation of the Shakespeare book was inseparable from the shock of Assia’s death and his belief that the terrible news of her suicide had killed his mother.

  Despite the anguish of these days, he managed to deliver the typescript of A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse to Monteith towards the end of June, explaining in a covering letter that he had written a long introduction, but was sending a short one. He was not satisfied. Throughout the summer and autumn, he reworked both the selection and the introduction. In early December, from Lumb Bank, he sent Monteith a new version with a more detailed introduction – and the information that there were enough rejected drafts of it to fill a small suitcase. He sent the collected Crow poems at the same time.

  The Shakespeare project, then, had its origins at a time not only of extraordinary personal trauma but also of his first major poetry collection for several years. Hughes sometimes introduced public readings of the Crow poems by explaining that Crow’s quest was to meet his maker, God. But every time he met Him, it was a Her, a woman, an incarnation of the Goddess. Each time, Crow was unsatisfied and had to move on to another encounter.8 Hughes read Shakespeare’s career in the same way that he read his own Crow: the argument that begins to emerge in the introduction to A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse and that is articulated at enormous length in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being is that Shakespeare’s developing art unfolded through a series of encounters with this s
ame Goddess.

  Some time after writing his own Goddess, Hughes provided the enquiring enthusiast Nick Gammage with an account of the formative influence of Graves’s. Here he recalled that he felt a little resentment on his first reading of The White Goddess, since Graves had taken possession of what he considered to be his own ‘secret patch’. He recapped the book’s argument that the same Goddess who presides over birth, love and death was worshipped under different names in the mythologies of the Greeks and the Egyptians, the Irish and the Welsh, and countless other ancient cultures. Beautiful, fickle, wise and implacable, she later becomes the Ninefold Muse, patroness of the white magic of poetry. Shakespeare, Graves mentions in passing, ‘knew and feared her’: we see playful elements of the Goddess in Titania, a more serious approach in Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, her ultimate manifestation in the absent but forceful deity of Sycorax, Caliban’s mother in The Tempest.9 Hughes assured Gammage that Graves’s syncretic method – his yoking of Middle Eastern material with Celtic – was already familiar to him from his own researches in arcane mythology, which had begun in his early teens. What really struck him in the book were ‘those supernatural women. Especially the underworld women’. He reminds his correspondent that he had already begun to work out a relationship to chthonic female deity in ‘Song’, which he always considered to be his first important poem.

  Gammage asked Hughes whether The White Goddess had been his first exposure to the religious context in which Shakespeare’s imagination was formed. He replied that he was not sure how clearly or consciously he saw the pattern at the time, but that the idea of ‘Goddess-centred matriarchy being overthrown by a God-centred patriarchy’ was indeed most likely something that he first really grasped in the Graves. ‘In giving me that big picture fairly early, yes, The White Goddess had a big part – and it was the Graves maybe that made the link directly to that lineage in English poetry – from the Sycorax figure to La Belle Dame [of Keats] and the Nightmare Life in Death [of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’]. Made it conscious and obvious.’10 Woman and Goddess, sex and death, the underworld and the hidden current of nature worship in opposition to patriarchal monotheism: this was the network of associations that Hughes took from Graves and brought to his reading of Shakespeare.

  When he was putting the anthology together in 1969 he knew that such associations would raise the eyebrows of academic Shakespeare experts. On New Year’s Day 1970, he explained to Monteith that the argument of his introduction had to be understood as an imaginative rather than a scholarly idea. It wouldn’t appeal to the scholars. Disarmingly, Hughes added that he hadn’t read any Shakespeare criticism, except for A. C. Bradley long ago.

  Because of various complications and delays at Faber, together with anxieties over the timetable for publication of a series of titles in different genres by the ever-prolific Hughes, the Shakespeare anthology did not appear until the autumn of 1971. It was overtaken into print not only by a privately printed text of the introduction accompanied by a quietly self-revelatory poem called ‘Crow’s Song about Prospero and Sycorax’,11 but also by an American version of the entire book with a variant title, foisted on Hughes by the publisher: With Fairest Flowers while Summer Lasts. This was a quotation from Cymbeline, one of the lesser-known plays with which he was especially fascinated.

  Peter Brook was the Shakespearean whose opinion Hughes valued most highly. It was Brook, he later wrote in the dedication to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, who ‘provided the key to the key’. Tellingly, Hughes made a point of sending Brook the American as opposed to the British version of the anthology. Faber had decided to tuck away most of the introduction, to which he had devoted so much effort through so many difficult months, at the back of the volume. The American version had the virtue of presenting it up front.

  The introduction to With Fairest Flowers while Summer Lasts remains the most lucid and economic summary of Hughes’s hypothesis about the key to Shakespeare’s imagination. In reading Shakespeare, he proposes, we periodically come upon passages of white-hot poetic intensity. When he extracted these passages and put them together in an anthology, he discovered that many of them had a structure of feeling in common, a ‘strong family resemblance’. They were all hammering at the same thing, ‘a particular knot of obsessions’. By reading these passages as short, self-contained lyric poems, we simultaneously ‘look through them into our own darkness’ and find ourselves ‘plucking out Shakespeare’s heart’ – which, we discover, ‘has a black look’.

  ‘The poetry has its taproot’, Hughes claims, ‘in a sexual dilemma of a peculiarly black and ugly sort.’ Belittling as it might seem to boil Shakespeare down to a single idea, if the idea is big enough it can prove itself the key to his imagination. After all, for all his vaunted variety and impersonality, Shakespeare was finally ‘stuck with himself’. The works are the expression of his own nature. The greatest passages constitute Shakespeare’s recurrent dream. In them, his imagination ‘presents the mystery of himself to himself’.12 Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf would no doubt say at this point that the heart, the nature, the dream, the imagination into which Hughes was gazing as he wrote this were not Shakespeare’s but his own.

  In the early 1590s, during a period when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare wrote two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (goddess of love attempts to seduce reluctant virginal male youth who is more interested in hunting and ends up being gored to death by a boar) and The Rape of Lucrece (royal-blooded Tarquin attempts to seduce, then rapes, virtuous woman Lucrece, who commits suicide, such is her shame). Here, ‘where nothing but poetry concerned him’, argues Hughes, Shakespeare produced two versions, one light and the other dark, of his core fable. The same structure can, however, be seen in many of the plays, for instance in ‘the polar opposition of Falstaff and Prince Hal’ in the Henry IV plays or the encounter between Angelo and Isabella in Measure for Measure.13 In each case, one figure represents the earth, submission to the body and the forces of desire, while the other stands for the heavens, purity of spirit and the repression of desire. Venus and Falstaff are figures of capacious and celebratory desire, embodiments of the Goddess, while Tarquin and Angelo represent destructive sexual possessiveness turned against the Goddess.

  For Hughes, a great poet is, as Ben Jonson said Shakespeare was, the soul of the age. The opposition is accordingly read not only as Shakespeare’s personal dilemma, but also as a perfect representation of ‘the prevailing psychic conflict of his times in England, the conflict that exploded, eventually, into the Civil War’. The repression of the Goddess by the forces of radical Protestantism took its distinctively English form in the extirpation of the cult of Mary. Though the process was temporarily slowed by the cult of Queen Elizabeth as a kind of substitute Mary, the rise of Puritanism amounted to a dragging into court ‘by the young Puritan Jehovah’ of ‘the Queen of Heaven, who was the goddess of Catholicism, who was the goddess of medieval and pre-Christian England, who was the divinity of the throne, who was the goddess of natural law and of love, who was the goddess of all sensation and organic life – this overwhelmingly powerful, multiple, primeval being’.14 The forces that drive Hughes’s own poetry – the implacable but vital law of nature, woman, sexual desire, sensation, organic life, sacramental royalty – are overwhelmingly those associated with the Goddess.

  For Hughes, Shakespeare’s distinctive twist on the myth is his imagination of figures who attempt to ‘divide nature, and especially love, the creative force of nature, into abstract good and physical evil’. Nature, being unified (the Goddess of complete being), will not let them do this, with the result that love returns in the destructive form of rape, murder, madness and the death-wish. An ‘occult crossover’ occurs, causing a ‘mysterious chemical change’ in which ‘Nature’s maddened force’ takes over the brain that had rejected her.15 This was what he called the Tragic Equation. In a single sentence of wild reach and energy, Hughes sketches how the equation operates
as the key to the ‘powerhouse and torture chamber’ of Shakespeare’s complete works:

  Hamlet, looking at Ophelia, sees his mother in bed with his uncle and goes mad; Othello, looking at his pure wife, sees Cassio’s whore and goes mad; Macbeth, looking at the throne of Scotland and listening to his wife, hears the witches, the three faces of Hecate, and the invitation to hell, and goes mad; Lear, looking at Cordelia, sees Goneril and Regan, and goes mad; Antony, looking at his precious queen, sees the ‘ribaudred nag of Egypt’ betraying him ‘to the very heart of loss’, and goes – in a sense – mad; Timon, looking at his loving friends, sees the wolf pack of Athenian creditors and greedy whores, and goes mad; Coriolanus, looking at his wife and mother, sees the Roman mob who want to tear him to pieces, and begins to act like a madman; Leontes, looking at his wife, sees Polixenes’ whore, and begins to act like a madman; Posthumus, looking at his bride, who of his ‘lawful pleasure oft restrained’ him, sees the one Iachimo mounted ‘Like a full-acorn’d boar’, and begins to act like a madman.16

  This passage exposes both the strength and the weakness of Hughes’s reading of Shakespeare: yes, there is a recurrent pattern of madness or quasi-madness provoked by intensity of sexual and familial relations, but no, this cannot be the key to all of Shakespeare (it underplays comedy, self-conscious theatrical play, and so much more). In trying to reduce all the dramas to a single force, there is inevitably something forced. Hence such giveaways as ‘goes – in a sense – mad’. Yet the insights offered by the pattern are exceptionally rich. Richard III, Tarquin, Hamlet, Angelo, Othello, Macbeth: each of them is, as Hughes says, a ‘strange new being’, a ‘man of chaos’.17 And it is the men of chaos (‘from Aaron to Caliban’) who speak the most memorable poetry, the passages that Hughes extracts and presents in his anthology. His selection has at its centre a great riff of nearly forty sequences of high-voltage poetic madness from Macbeth, Lear and Timon.