Hughesshak

An unpublished appreciation of Ted Hughes's Shakespeare and the Goddess of Supreme Being.

It is given to very few men to change the world.

Some might give it a nudge, if that.

In the modern era, Leonardo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Jung have all profoundly altered man's view of himself in relation to his world.

In Literature, it was Shakespeare.

In his extraordinary book, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, more than anywhere else, Ted Hughes sought, through the supreme example of Shakespeare, to open a huge perspective on the creative genius and spirit in man.

The parallels with Jung are perhaps most evident, with the desire to identify the personal equation and to operate on a cosmic level.

It may be that some of the arguments are forced, and that some of the pieces of the puzzle did not fit as neatly as he might have wished, that the book is as much about Ted Hughes as it is about Shakespeare. But nothing can detract from the monumental struggle of one man to expose the greatest gift and aspiration of man -- that which lends him aspects of the gods -- his creative genius. That is what Ted sought to do and it will come to be recognised that he largely achieved his ambition. [At one time he even considered putting the whole Plath story on the stage of this book -- behind the scenes even -- using it as a metaphorical ground rather than writing Birthday Letters.]

It is an extraordinary and deeply revealing fact that Ted undertook this titanic battle while his whole immune system was in crisis and collapse, because that is what doctors tell us shingles represents. Shingles possessed his right eye when he was writing about the King who had lost an eye. If prose killed him, as has pathetically been claimed, then it lost the war and the peace. Like Laocoon, Ted fought to his valiant end. Part of his great legacy is to have revealed for us, through Shakespeare and on a Jungian scale and dimension, man's essential spirit.Through the prism of his own gift, his insight, and sheer hard labour (for that was an integral part of his whole life and particularly of this struggle) Ted also gave us some of the most marvellous expressions of that wonderful spirit.

He resented Death. The untimeliness of it robbed him and us of what would have been his true place in Literature -- alongside his beloved Shakespeare.

Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being shows us that he himself had identified and understood his real destiny as an artist. What he undoubtedly did achieve in writing that book was to give others access to its comprehension. In that sense he changed the world.