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PARTISAN REVIEW
comes clear. He has written a cycle of dramas about illusion,
disil–
lusion, and consolation. And the circle is complete. For the consola–
tions of
The Tempest
are, at the very end, discarded, the singing
robe and the poetic scepter are cast into the sea, and he drinks
him–
self into his grave in the company of a couple of friends. Because
when you have written
The Tempest
there is nothing else to do. It
is a second childhood, a fable of age, the end of the beginning
of
English Poetry.
There is a curious and amusing effect produced by the study
of Shakespeare on eminent men of letters: it was first observed, to
my knowledge, by Mr. T. S. Eliot. He found that almost all such
eminent literary men evolved a Shakespeare in no way distinguishable
from themselves. And at that Mr. Eliot proceeded to produce a
Shakespeare only a little different from himself. His Shakespeare
is,
to be sure, not a publisher: but he says, "a case may be made out
for an Anglo-Catholic Shakespeare." I suppose it could. But I
sus–
pect that if Mr. Eliot made up such a case it would contain more
of the remains of Mr. Eliot than of William Shakespeare. For, as
Mr. Eliot prudently remarks, "there is no clue in Shakespeare's writ–
ings to the way in which he would have voted at the last elections."
All those ingenious and conscientious efforts of scholars to prove
from internal evidence that he wrote by inserting the pen
in
his
nostrils forget the inveterate perversity of the poetic imagination. In
its operations upon the everyday affairs of the poet's personal life,
this imagination or passion shows absolutely no respect for the laws
of possibility or propriety. For the writing of a poem comes very
near to the telling of such a colossal lie that, like those of the dicta–
tor Hitler, it will not only be believed, but the facts may thereafter
obey it. The poem is a lie in the sense that it is not to be judged
for its veracity in those terms by which you judge the truth of a
scientific statement. For the great poem-a poem like
Hamlet-gets
hold of scientific reality and wrings all the perfectly reasonable
ir–
relevancies out of it. Reality is so twisted in the great poem that it
reveals some of its secrets, just as, in
Hamlet,
the prince's exaggerated
hatred of his uncle is in fact merely the obverse of his exaggerated love
for his mother. It has nothing to do with the actual human character
of Claudius. Because, in the terms of the poem, the human character
