One of the books I'm reading as part of my background reading for a paper I'm planning to write about Machiavelli and Shakespeare's treatment of the Rape of Lucrece is "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being," by the poet Ted Hughes.
I picked up a first edition of the hardback in a second hand bookshop in York, England, in December 1998, just a couple of months after the author had died.
Yesterday, while reading the third part of the book, this sentence jumped out at me:
"Life itself is what terrifies living things and possesses them with their various forms of madness, and exhausts them with their struggles to control and contain it and to secure its subjective essence of joy." p.326
The thesis of the book is that Shakespeare tapped into an ancient goddess myth, or rather a connected pair of myths which first find expression in his two poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
In the first poem, passionate Venus pursues the chaste Adonis who resists her advances and in the hunt he is killed by a boar (a venutian avatar, according to Hughes). In the second poem, lustful prince Tarquin rapes the chaste Lucrece who, the next morning calls on her husband and father to revenge her, and then kills herself (triggering the revolt against the monarchy and the founding of the Roman republic).
In the book, Hughes traces this mythic pattern as it reoccurs in various forms throughout the works of Shakespeare.
Hughes combines the two myths, of Venus and Adonis and of the Rape of Lucrece into a single overarching theme in which Venus pursues and then kills Adonis, who is resurrected as Tarquin who in turn rapes - and thereby kills - the goddess in the form of the chaste Lucrece, which, he writes,
"...thereby becomes a parable of the heroic doom of all conscious organisms (no matter what the genus). In this sense, the Equation turns out to be the 'plot' of the drama of organic life: life itself is what terrifies living things... [&c]"
Machiavelli opined that "in the beginning there was terror"; Rome was founded on a series of "rape myths"; Shakespeare sends many of his heroes into forms of madness; all, it seems in the pursuit of, or attempt to recover, the essence of life, which, according to Hughes - and isn't he right? - JOY.
David Hurley
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