A completely unedited spew of a beginning of my Shakespeare paper

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as a spiritual journey



What is a spiritual journey? And in the context of The Winter’s Tale, who is taking this journey? From some evidences one could argue that it is Shakespeare taking a journey, a reconciliation of the Catholic traditions of old Europe against the Puritan groundswell of dissent that after Shakespeare’s death irrupted into a violent Puritan Authoritarian State that was worse than the old Royalty. An athanor is the crucible of the alchemist, and in the inner tradition the athanor is your own body.

(and Shakespeare may have been raised Catholic, a fanatical underground Catholicism that under the reign of Elizabeth I was ever under suspicion, and after the death of Shakespeare and Elizabeth erupted into a violent Puritanism). But Ted Hughes has written his book on Shakespeare’s spiritual journey, and I wonder who else is undergoing a spiritual journey. One answer – the audience – leads to myself, does experiencing The Winter’s Tale take me on a journey, solo, as I read the play, or an ensemble, as an audience member. Myself, as I try on each character and see glimpses of someone else, not a mythic cypher, but living embodiment of a principle or archetype of the spiritual journey.


There is a sense reading Shakespeare that one is playing each rôle, perhaps true of other great dramatists – my reading has been in various ghettoes of literary science fiction and the Eco’s and Calvino’s, the Donald Barthelme. I cannot speak of that which I don’t know. What kenne is looking for in story is that mythic dimension that irrupts into the ordinary. Try L.A. Lafferty – a conspiracy to take over the world is centered in Tulsa OK. A bar in the novel has a brass plaque proclaiming that place to be the exact center of the Universe. In Shakespeare, a character like Leontes becames the center of the world. As Yeats wrote of the 20th century “the center does not hold” Leontes reflecting on his conviction that he is cuckolded “No, if I mistake
In these foundations which I build upun,
The center is not bigh enough to bear
A schoolboy’s top.”

The following line is “Away with her to prison!”