MYTHS OF THE GODDESS

When it was published in 1992 Ted Hughes's Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, the first major study by an English poet laureate of the English national bard, was greeted by many of its academic reviewers with something approaching derision, and it has hardly been better welcomed by most students and critics of Shakespeare since. Entering a world in which the most prominent modes of Shakespeare criticism were new-historicist and cultural-materialist, Hughes's vast account of Shakespeare's plays as the syncretic construction of a single unifying myth from a bewildering variety of arcane sources could hardly have seemed anything other than bizarre anachronism. It was read as comparable to the arcana of Yeats's A Vision, and as the very belated survivor of cultural-anthropological approaches to literature of the kind that had reached their apogee in Robert Graves's The White Goddess, subtitled ‘a historical grammar of poetic myth’, in 1948 (‘Shakespeare knew and feared her,’ Graves says of his goddess).

Hughes refers to The White Goddess only once but he develops some of Graves's methods and shares some of his controversial purposes: notably, pondering the difficulties involved in the treatment of the feminine in poetry by heterosexual male poets, his attempt to defend and rehabilitate non-Protestant traditions of that feminine against forms of Puritanism in the English tradition most forcefully represented by the names of Calvin and Cromwell, the anti-heroes of Graves's cultural-anthropological tale.