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Poet and Shaman
| Article
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21926 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1993 |
2,401 Words |
| Author
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John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
SHAKESPEARE AND THE GODDESS OF COMPLETE BEING
Ted Hughes
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992
524 pp., $35.00
THE ESSENTIAL SHAKESPEARE
Selected by Ted Hughes
Hopewell, N.J., Ecco Press, 1992
230 pp., cloth $18.95, paper $8.00
SHAKESPEARE
His Life, Work, and Era
New York: William Morrow and Company, 1992
460 pp., $23.00
Would that he had blotted a thousand" is the well-known judgment of Ben Johnson on the fluency and fluidity of Shakespeare's line. Though Shakespeare may never have blotted one of his lines, they undoubtedly are variable in quality and a selection out of them of "the essential Shakespeare" requires a boldness and nicety of judgment that few can claim.
Ted Hughes, the English poet laureate, has courageously chosen more than two hundred poems, speeches, and songs from the writings of Shakespeare, arranging them in an alternating sequence that makes manifest the purity of the poetry. This emphasis on poetry in The Essential Shakespeare is strengthened by the absence of any source for the individual selections; identification is made through an index. This may sound cumbersome and, in a way, it is, but it works well if the reader is willing to consider a selection on its own merits as poetry, and not as an element in a dramatic scene or sequence or as belonging to a well-known character such as Lear or Prospero or Lady Macbeth. Hughes undoubtedly is correct in his insistence that the great speeches, when taken out of context, are no more difficult to understand than other major poems; and in many cases they are easier.
Inevitably, it is easy to quarrel with the selection--a favorite sonnet or a speech that has moved us deeply may not be included--but I find Hughes' choice satisfying, even as it prompts me to remember other poems or speeches that I prefer. Suggesting additions way easy, but deleting from Hughes' choice was not-which argues well for his selection. One element of the book's succession is its persuasive invitation to consider and reconsider the selections simply on the basis of their intrinsic poetic merit.
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