Shakespeare and his Goddess of Divine Being, a note from our Artistic Director
It’s the autumn of 1592. Plague sweeps through London as it has done so off and on for decades. All public places are closed and a certain young playwright is suddenly unemployed. As the story goes, the stage is now set for one of the least known – yet most important – creative periods in Shakespeare’s development as an artist of monumental import. He becomes a poet for hire.
The upshot of this enforced career change were a series of shockingly revealing sonnets, along with two remarkable long narrative poems – The Rape of Lucretia and Venus & Adonis – works together that were to serve as a blueprint for all the great plays that were to follow in the years ahead upon his return to the stage.
Venus & Adonis was the first fruit of this outpouring and upon publication in 1593 was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, ending up with 16 reprints during Shakespeare’s life alone. Witty, erotic, accessible and yet mysterious, it shimmers with dramatic intent and a wild beauty that empowers it with an extraordinary electrical charge. The playwright in him just couldn’t help but dramatize this ancient tale of the great love goddess and her errant lover with the same sense of intensity, passion and immediacy that marked out his later dramas for greatness.
The poem works like a mini-play – with a narrator setting the scene and filling in or commenting but with the bulk of the work as dramatic dialogue between the two lovers as they go at each other hammer and tong. That’s why it transfers to the stage with such gusto – its drama first, poem second.
And what of the protagonists? What is there fight all about?
Even though Shakespeare’s plays are filled with a wide range of pagan, Christian and classical allusions, this is the only purely mythical tale that Shakespeare ever wrote. He took his inspiration from a number of sources including Ovid’s Metamorphosis but it’s what he did with these that made his work stand apart from untold years of tradition.
You see Venus, the Roman goddess of love, was but a late flowering of an image within the human heart that goes back millennia beyond count; she wielded many names as each culture took up her mantle (it may surprise you to know that before about 3,000BC, Goddess figures were the only source of reverence in the religious mind). Whether as Innana, Ishtar, Isis, Cybele, Aphrodite, etc, in her many forms and representations she came to symbolise the great out pouring of creative life, the never ending beneficence of the universe, the bounty of all things, the wholeness from which we, her sacred child, emerge. This figure of the mother goddess and her son reaches us even in the figure of Jesus and Mary, although the power relationship has changed and the great goddess neutered of her sexual and procreational force.
What Shakespeare did, however, was utterly revolutionary in the history of their drama – for throughout time, the son of Venus (who also happens to be her lover. I know this sounds strange to us but it’s a symbol of how we humans are both her offspring and the consummator of a life pact which makes us creators of life through our children) is never anything but a loyal and loving suitor. With one vital twist, Shakespeare set off a time bomb that had lain dormant in all these ancient myths and reignited their dramatic potential.
He made her lover utterly reject her.
And through this terrible act – one that threatens to break apart the very fabric of the eternal order – Adonis reappears as the rapine figure of Tarquin who sets out to destroy her in The Rape of Lucretia, the myth that formed the bedrock of the foundation of the aggressive and militarised empire of Rome. Think of Hamlet railing at Ophelia; Lear at Cordelia; Othello at Desdemona, etc – all of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes go on a journey of discovery by first rejecting the very thing – divine love – that would make them whole if they could only reconcile it with their ego fears.
‘I hate not love but your device in love
That lends embracement’s unto every stranger’
Venus & Adonis – Adonis
Shakespeare spent the rest of his career trying to reconcile this moment and turn it into a form of final redemption.
Back in 1996 when I first read the poem and experienced the thrill and shock of its suggestion, (I won’t give everything away but in the very last lines of the poem the goddess of divine being plans to hide herself away, to be ‘immured up’ which means literally to be enclosed, hidden, even bricked in!) I felt compelled to stage the work myself and the paths of discovery it opened up inspired much of my thinking as I went on to direct a number of his more famous plays.
For whilst the piece is wonderfully playful, funny and always beautiful to behold, it also speaks intently of a profound problem that haunts our world even today; the separation of our being from a divine natural order that our over developed, rationally dominating and desacralized modern ego has wilfully created. Like Adonis we think we can go it alone and dictate to the universe our own destiny free from its objective purpose for us. Well that way madness lies – just ask Hamlet, Othello and King Lear; their anguished cries of loneliness and despair are echoes of our own. They have to go on a long and painful journey to re-discover that being part of a divinely loving cosmic order is the only way to become a true human being.
Looking around at our war-torn, nature raping, divided world, it seems we have lost our way, and like Adonis, if we don’t find our way back soon to her welcoming arms, the ‘goddess’ may well judge us as severely as I think Shakespeare judged Adonis.
Nothing better sums up his perspective than the great sonnet number 116 and I’ll leave you with these profound and challenging words.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
Michael Barker-Caven
Artistic Director
