Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being

In this momentous adventure in criticism, one of the leading poets writing in English argues that our profound response to Shakespeare's great late plays is prompted by a mythic, symbolic structure that inheres in each of them, and indeed binds the entire Shakespearean corpus into one huge, complex, ever-evolving work. Ted Hughes sees Shakespeare's early poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece as embodying two great myths of the archaic world, that of the hero who rejects the love of the Goddess and is killed in revenge by a boar; and that of the king, or god, whose crime is rape and whose punishment is banishment. These two complexes merge as Shakespeare's work develops into what Hughes calls the Tragic Equation, a flexible formula through which the poet was able to tap into the innate power of these myths to enliven his own imagination - and through him the imagination of Elizabethan England, in which the conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism in the "living myth" of the English Reformation never lay far from the bloody surface of events. With his characteristic mixture of erudition and immediacy, Ted Hughes traces this idea in a close reading of Shakespeare's entire work. This text originally grew out of correspondence with dramatists, and anyone for whom intimate attention to the plays is important - scholar, student, actor, or common reader - will profit greatly from Hughes's loving, intensive, engrossing, and radical analysis of the greatest writing in the language. British poet Ted Hughes with full name Edward James Hughes served as poet laureate from 1984 to 1998; people note his work for its symbolism, passion, and dark natural imagery. He, the brother of Gerald Hughes and husband of Sylvia Plath, fathered Frieda Hughes and . Most characteristic verse of this English writer for children without sentimentality emphasizes the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. The dialect of native west riding area of Yorkshire set the tone of verse of Hughes. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern a number of his poems reflected. In 1956, he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple made a visit to the United States in 1957, the year of publication of The Hawk in the Rain , his first volume of verse. Other works quickly followed. The couple earlier separated, and following suicide of Plath in 1963, Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for almost three years but thereafter published prolifically, often in collaboration with photographers and illustrators, as in Under the North Star (1981). He wrote many volumes for children, including Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world of his childhood. From 1965, he co-edited the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in London. Winter Pollen (1994) published some of essays of Hughes on subjects of literary and cultural criticism. After decades of silence on the subject of his marriage to Plath, Hughes addressed it in the poems of Birthday Letters (1998).