![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2018\/11\/Cover.jpg?resize=255%2C400&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
By David Rains Wallace Reviewed by Patricia Keeney<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n An exhaustive and complicated exploration of wild places in the Shakespeare canon, Wallace\u2019s study is also insightful and imaginative, involving meticulous research that tracks off on its own wilderness paths. Along these, the reader wanders intrigued, slightly lost but trusting, and finally emerges gratified yet surprised by the connections made.<\/p>\n Shakespeare\u2019s Wilderness<\/em> constantly begs the question: were Shakespeare\u2019s vivid evocations of the untamed imagined or experienced? If imagined, could William of Stratford, who never travelled further than London, have possibly invented them with such convincing detail? If experienced, they fit much better into the peregrinations of the aristocrat, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford\u2014 and long time contender for the authorship of Shakespeare\u2019s works\u2014than they do William of Stratford, the traditionally accepted author.<\/p>\n Exploring the derivation of \u201cwilderness,\u201d word and idea, Wallace takes us back to its Anglo-Saxon root in the noun \u201cwildeor\u201d meaning \u201cwild beast.\u201d He goes on to discuss the varying images of wilderness in early western literature through Beowulf <\/em>and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight<\/em> with excited scholarship and the imagination of a poet thrilled by the way word history reveals cultural history.\u00a0 Boewulf<\/em>\u2019s wilderness is grim and violent. For Medieval England, the wilderness was considered unpopulated waste. Courtly poetry reduced it to formal conventions \u201cwith the mannered style of tapestries,\u201d the difference being that itinerant Anglo-Saxon poets worked from an oral tradition while Medieval poets\u2014 entertaining more literary audiences\u2014had begun to work from classical and foreign sources, Chaucer being the prime example.<\/p>\n In the Renaissance, wilderness shrinks even further out of sight with Thomas More\u2019s Utopia<\/em>. But, says Wallace, an old dynamism resurfaces in Shakespeare where wilderness thrusts itself into his dramas. Quoting The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> and reinforced by such twentieth-century literary giants, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Northrop Frye, Wallace identifies \u201ca [general] sense of older things lurking behind the sparkling dialogue, gorgeous imagery and snappy plots.\u201d<\/p>\n In Shakespeare\u2019s later plays, a \u201cfolkloric groundwater springs to the surface.\u201d In his last romance, The Tempest<\/em>, Prospero\u2019s Island barely contains its dangerous wilderness. Macbeth<\/em>\u2019s witches and Lear<\/em>\u2019s terrible heath also echo the old Anglo-Saxon \u201csacred horror\u201d identified by Borges. Cromwell\u2019s Puritan revolution may have outlawed plays but it couldn\u2019t outlaw the bard\u2019s influence. Yet, he was not restored whole by the Restoration, his folkloric \u201cwood notes\u201d being regarded as somewhat barbaric, by such literary eminences as Dryden. However, the Enlightenment recognizes authorial power again with Alexander Pope applauding the originality of Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson enthusiastically distinguishes between a conventional \u201cgarden\u201d writer and the much wider ranging \u201cforest\u201d writer that Shakespeare is.<\/p>\n The Romantics embraced Shakespeare\u2019s wild side, the concept of the \u201csublime\u201d becoming an existential alternative to urban civilization, which, in its turn, was regarded as a lawless wilderness (later characterized as the urban jungle). By the time we get to Modernist giants, such as Eliot and Pound, European civilization itself becomes a ruined wasteland. At the end of the Second World War, an exhausted Europe wanted what D. H. Lawrence called \u201ca painted dome,\u201d the protection of urban artifice against \u201cever-surging chaos.\u201d Poets of Britain\u2019s Movement, led by Philip Larkin in the 1950s, craved security no matter how banal.<\/p>\n At the heart of the Wallace\u2019s study is Ted Hughes\u2019s phenomenal book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being<\/em>. In Wallace\u2019s words, Hughes was \u201cthe main post-war British exponent of restoring mythic relationships with wild nature.\u201d And, I would add, with the cosmos at large. Hughes is a myth-maker extraordinaire<\/em>, writing versions of creation\u2014animal, human and divine\u2014on an almost Blakean scale. Raised on the Yorkshire moors, Hughes\u2019s sense of the wild is deeply rooted in England\u2019s Anglo-Saxon past. For him, Shakespeare\u2019s language (\u201cdespite its Elizabethan ruff\u201d) is far closer to the \u201cvital life of English than anything written since.\u201d<\/p>\n Hughes sees Shakespeare as a shamanic figure who attempted a \u201critual reconciliation\u201d of England\u2019s great cultural and religion schism by creating a \u201cliterary Tragic Equation,\u201d first worked out in the narrative poems Venus and Adonis<\/em> and The Rape of Lucrece<\/em>, and then in the plays.<\/p>\n Of what is this national schism composed?<\/p>\n The Great Goddess is nature herself, the force and source of life worshipped in the earliest forms of religion. For Hughes, she has long been suppressed by the Great God of orthodox religion, the lawgiver, the controller who curtails instinct. In Shakespeare\u2019s time, the Great Goddess lingered ghostlike in Catholicism\u2019s Madonna, threatened constantly by the rise of Puritanism; a force held violently in check by Queen Elizabeth.<\/p>\n For Hughes, the drama of Venus and Adonis<\/em>\u2014prudish Puritan youth rejects passionate love goddess who turns ravening boar and gores him to death\u2014 animates most of the canon, the boar becoming Shakespeare\u2019s shamanic animal, the symbol of his \u201cvisionary awareness.\u201d Hughes goes on to illustrate how Shakespeare\u2019s Tragic Equation is played out through his ritual dramas (and comedies), from All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/em> through Othello, Hamlet, MacBeth, Lear <\/em>and The Tempest<\/em>.<\/p>\n Here, we approach the core idea, fully endorsed by Wallace, that the work of strong writers (Shakespeare, Hughes) grows over its creative life to build \u201ca consistent, recognizable persona.\u201d As a poet, Hughes\u2019s unique vision has been animated by nature. Such artists\u2014think also of Blake or Van Gogh\u2014see through the natural\/material world to the informing reality behind it, opening infinitely in image and dream. For Wallace, this \u201cprimal phenomenon,\u201d along with any highly specialized\/privileged access to it, whether artistic or spiritual, constitutes the shamanic. This primal phenomenon is also what Hughes identifies in Shakespeare, developing a notion articulated by Alexander Pope that Shakespeare is no mere instrument of nature but that nature speaks through him.<\/p>\n Hughes\u2019s identification of the Tragic Equation in Shakespeare is influenced by his own fraught involvement with Sylvia Plath. Wallace\u2019s analysis of this relationship is fearless and fascinating, suggesting that Hughes spent his final years writing his extraordinary Goddess <\/em>book because he found a strong connection to his own life story, a desperate one of creative\/destructive unions and suicidal wives: \u201chandsome young hunter who attracts a kind of goddess, who resists her . . . undergoes a \u2018death in life\u2019 [and is] \u2018reborn,\u2019 painfully and unwillingly as a kind of goddess-destroying monster.\u201d<\/p>\n Hughes reminds us that the pattern is familiar: the \u201cdivision of the loved and the loathed woman in the one body,\u201d loved because she is nourishing nature, loathed (and feared) because she is also strange and wild. Wallace points out that Hughes in his Goddess<\/em> introduction declares the \u201cblood jet autobiographical truth is what decides the value of a truly mythic work.\u201d Informed no doubt by his own turbulent psycho-drama, Hughes looks to the canon for the equivalent in Shakespeare.<\/p>\n What, asks Wallace, is the autobiographical blood jet truth about Shakespeare that provides the mythic beat driving his work?<\/p>\n Surely it cannot be found in the scanty biographical evidence we have on William of Stratford. Wallace spends some pages documenting that thread bare material to show how the literary reputation of small town William solidified around the First Folio and the Stratford Monument, burgeoning ultimately into Bardolatry with David Garrick\u2019s premier Shakespeare Festival at Stratford in 1769. Since then, the paucity of biographical fact has inspired biographers \u201clike a blank canvas,\u201d says Wallace, to invent the abundant lives of Shakespeare that we now have in print.<\/p>\n With ironic zest Wallace, himself a well-known nature writer, intersperses his study of Shakespearean wilderness with his own American experiences in (variously) New England, Yellowstone and Berkeley. In California, for instance, he becomes aware of crows\u2014once rustic now urban-summoning up that mythic Trickster figure of Hughes\u2019s most famous black bible, Crow<\/em> and also the well-known \u201cupstart crow\u201d reference to Shakespeare of Robert Green. In this context, the bandit bird represents the wiliness of Stratford William\u2019s dual nature as \u201cexploited writer\u201d and \u201cexploiting actor-impresario,\u201d and seems to Wallace, a fitting symbol of the very sketchy literary identity of William of Stratford.<\/p>\n In a chapter called \u201cLord Boar,\u201d Wallace declares that, at the time Hughes was writing his Goddess <\/em>book, renewed interest in the authorship question had also developed, particularly with Mark Anderson\u2019s 2005 biography of de Vere, Shakespeare by Another Name.<\/em> He reminds us that the de Vere authorship question was first seriously posed by an English schoolmaster, Thomas Looney in 1920 in his book, \u201cShakespeare\u201d Identified<\/em>, outlining the tempestuous life of the Earl of Oxford that provides the baseline of the Oxfordian argument for de Vere as the author of the Shakespeare canon. The comedies and romances are seen as reflections of de Vere\u2019s travels and affairs, while Hamlet <\/em>is cited as the play that most closely parallels de Vere\u2019s life and experiences.<\/p>\n For Wallace, \u201cThe Tragic Equation theme of men chosen by goddess-like women and then driven to destructive behavior pervaded de Vere\u2019s life. He was Adonis-like in his youth . . . and attracted the era\u2019s Great Goddess embodiment, Queen Elizabeth . . . [vacillating] between adoration and impudence . . . [his] Tarquin side emerged as he rejected his wife, plotted against the Queen\u2019s allies, and impregnated her maid, Anne Vavasour.\u201d Hughes\u2019s Goddess <\/em>model illustrates howthe Tragic Equation imbues most of the Shakespeare canon.<\/p>\n Wallace calls on British historian, Hugh Trevor Roper, to provide a pertinent little dialogue on Shakespeare and the natural world, asking, \u201cHow did this sensitive creature [Shakespeare], so sympathetic with the hunted\u2014so acutely attuned to wild nature\u2014survive the rough and tumble of the Elizabethan age?\u201d The answer is that he did not survive it intact (as de Vere did not), except by becoming the great tragic poet of the mature plays, where, even here, Shakespeare\u2019s feeling for wild nature softens the drumbeat of horrors in Macbeth or Lear<\/em>. Citing passages from these plays, Wallace points out that de Vere, not William of Stratford, knew the wilderness they describe, knew Scotland and Dover (as Hughes knew the Yorkshire moors that infuse so much of his poetry).<\/p>\n For Wallace, Hughes\u2019s characterization of Prospero\u2019s place as \u201cthe rocky, storm-beaten island of a terrible dead witch and her devil-god,\u201d in The Tempest<\/em>, is truly an evocation of sacred horror. According to Richard Roe\u2019s The Shakespeare Guide to Italy<\/em>, it is based on \u201ca volcanic islet off Sicily\u2019s northwest coast,\u201d containing lava caves, perfect for Ariel\u2019s\u00a0 hiding of the King of Naples\u2019 ship and for habitation of Prospero in his cell. Its Mediterranean flora and fauna match descriptions in the play while references to foul smells, filth and even to strange noises can all be associated with the island\u2019s volcanic origins.<\/p>\n Hughes speculates that his reading of Shakespeare \u201cmight form . . . a new kind of Shakespearean production . . . a single Titanic work, like an Indian epic.\u201d One remembers that Hughes collaborated with Peter Brook, that great director of ancient epics. The Shakespearean epic that Hughes outlines tells, \u201cthe story of the mind exiled from human nature [and] is the story of Western Man . . . [looking for] a substitute for the spirit-confidence of the Nature he has lost.\u201d For Wallace, Hughes\u2019s suggestion that by exploring a personal Tragic Equation, Shakespeare may have realized how the real \u201csea change\u201d is one that associates \u201cwealth [and status] with death and the loss of it with life.\u201d William\u2019s story does not follow that course. Edward de Vere\u2019s does.\u201d<\/p>\n Wallace\u2019s book argues passionately for the value of poets like Shakespeare, Hughes and Plath who let the wilderness in. They bring us right up to the present and, I would add, to a film such as The Shape of Water <\/em>that stunningly warns of the risk we take in suppressing elemental forces, in turning \u201cthe well of life into more bathrooms and factories that pollute it.\u201d The pulse of the wilderness is a \u201csavage god,\u201d to borrow the title of critic A. Alvarez\u2019s major 1972 study on suicide (featuring a long memoir by Sylvia Plath). It is the engine that drives Shakespeare\u2019s work.<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>295 pp.\u00a0 Privately Published<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2018\/11\/Patricia-Keeney-Author-150x150.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/88x31.png?resize=88%2C31&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\n