Shakespearean non-Oxfordian dingbattery
Goodness knows I do not, on the whole, give close attention to the Matter of Ted Hughes, but in today's Guardian Weekend Review, I discover this piece of WTFery: He believed he’d found the secret key to unlock all of Shakespeare’s work.
Do we not feel somebody should have sat him down with a copy of Middlemarch with the Casaubon sections bookmarked and perhaps underlined in red? He had plucked out “Shakespeare’s heart”, he said, and identified “the myth” within the poet’s work - the religious and psychological conflict caused by the Puritan suppression of old Catholicism in which the goddess of pagan beliefs still flourished. It was a metaphor for Hughes’s struggles with Plath’s memory after her suicide; now his writings on Shakespeare began to elucidate the “tragic equation” in which the love goddess, enraged by the Puritan suppression of sexual energy, becomes the “Queen of Hell”, and eventually the demonised boar who destroys the hero.
(Yes, my dearios, there was a hovering influence from R Graves and his White Goddess in the mix, why do you ask?)
In other related news, Unseen Sylvia Plath short story to be published in January (written when she was still a student and before that fateful/fatal union).
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And on doomed unions, I felt there was a backstory here in the 'How I Spend It' feature in the Money section: By the time I reached my early 30s, I was a director of a film post-production company, travelling the world and entertaining clients with a £2,000 a month expenses account.
But my world turned upside down when I got divorced. I didn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with something so traumatic.
I would actually be more interested in hearing what lay behind 'got divorced' than his monetary woes and how he copes, but maybe that's just me. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2836612.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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