Mysticism and Myth — I: The Shakespeare Pattern

Abstract

‘The poet’, Eliot remarked once a propos of the work of Dante and Shakespeare, ‘has something to say which is not even necessarily implicit in the philosophical system, something which is also over and above the verbal beauty.’1 According to Eliot ‘the most extensive, and probably the most inscrutable’ pattern of this sort is to be found in the later plays of Shakespeare.

The essential shortcomings of modern poetry in relation to that of antiquity may be summed up in these words: we have no mythology. But let me add that we are close to acquiring one, or rather it is time that we seriously collaborate in producing one. For it will come to us in a quite opposite way from the original mythology, which was everywhere the first blossoming of youthful imagination, clinging directly to — and rooting itself in — what was most immediate and alive in the sensuous world. The new mythology must, on the contrary, be fashioned out of the profoundest depths of the spirit: it must be the most artificial of all works of art.

(Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Dialogue on Poetry’, 1800)