Shakespeare and The Esoteric

by Frederick J. Dennehy

Is there esoteric meaning in Shakespeare?

We could try to select or formulate an esoteric principle and show how it inhabits the plays. But then, after seeing the plays again, I suspect that we would find that principle inadequate, and either struggle Esoteric meaning to redefine it, or give up explaining the plays is fresh, new esoterically altogether. meaning before

I think there is light to be shed, but it it becomes a comes from the other direction. There is esoteric meaning in Shakespeare. Rudolf Steiner said that all genuine art is a reflection of the something human experience of the divine. That means that Shakespeare, the most genuine of artists, can light up our understanding of the esoteric.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said that Shakespeare was “everyone and no one.” He worked in the mystery of language better than anyone before or since. His art has been described by the scholar Harold Bloom as “so infinite that it contains us; we don’t read his plays so much as they read us.” (1)

Shakespeare created meanings. He worked from inspiration to imagination, and from imagination, through explicit or implicit metaphor, to new meanings. Inspiration grasps what was not grasped before, and imagination makes new cognition comprehensible by relating it, not reducing it, to what is already known.

Esoteric meaning is fresh, new meaning before it becomes a mental habit, a possession, something for the ego to devour. Meaning “happens” in the changing from one plane of consciousness to another __ in the movement itself, in the metamorphosis. That “becoming” always takes us closer to the Origin, or the Source, before things are divided into subjects and objects. As Owen Barfield has said, there is “a very real sense” in which many of the thoughts and feelings that we have today were once meanings that Shakespeare brought into being. (2) In fact, some that have already passed from fresh meaning into habit, into our most common expressions, were first Shakespeare’s inventions.

While Shakespeare represents human nature more universally than any other writer, his characters are so individual that we often feel we know them better than we do some of our friends. There are dozens that we recognize as themselves after only a few lines. Characters in most plays are definite personalities, and they simply unfold as we watch them. In Shakespeare, character becomes. It is alive. In the mature soliloquies, for instance, we see not just the exposition of someone’s thought, but the moving, forming process of Thinking itself. Shakespeare’s men and women look back on themselves, contradict themselves, re-conceive themselves, and even create themselves. We have the sense of Thinking while it is flowing, sometimes even boiling, before it has frozen into the discrete solid ice of past, mirrored thought.

No one embodies better than Shakespeare the paradox that the more individual you are the more universal you are. This is a mystery—if we can touch it imaginatively—that can direct us to true individuality, to the source of the self. It can take us back, as T. S. Eliot said, to where we started and know the place for the first time. But there is another reason why Shakespeare sheds light on the esoteric. He lived from 1564 to 1616—at the sunrise of the Renaissance, of the Modern Age, of what Rudolf Steiner has termed the Consciousness Soul Age. The Consciousness Soul is the part of us by virtue of which we acquire a separate and independent consciousness, a separate mental existence. (3) A self-consciousness.

In Shakespeare, we have all the excitement of the emergence of that self-consciousness. We have it in the delight and the exuberance of his language, particularly in the comedies. The lack of constraint, the disappearance of limits, the shedding of boundaries. But the loss of boundaries also means the loss of finished meanings, and that in turn means the melting away of answers and the loss of certainty.

At the outset of its long journey toward maturity, self-consciousness is separated from everything familiar. The human being begins to experience the conditions of rootlessness and uncertainty. He may feel that he has to act, like Hamlet. But he finds enormous difficulty in doing that, because he no longer feels the instinctive promptings of the spirit. (4)

This whole experience of the Consciousness Soul is present just below the surface of Shakespeare’s waking consciousness. It breaks through over and over again in a volcanic eruption of new words, new feelings and even new impulses. As Owen Barfield has said, Shakespeare’s imagination was “secretly pregnant” with “the whole nature and history of the age that was to follow him. He was unconsciously the bearer of—consciousness.” (5)

It is in the mood, the whisperings, the vapors, that we find the Consciousness Soul in Shakespeare, never in exposition or analysis. There is no “occult doctrine.” 6 Shakespeare has nothing to “teach” us himself.

This is what Keats meant by negative capability—the ability to inhabit other persons, other places, and other ideas “while remaining in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts—without any irritable reaching out after fact and reason.” 7 Without judging. Without giving in to the seductions of reductionism, of one-dimensional thinking. It means a turning, a reversal of the will from grasping to receiving, enabling it to touch a universal sphere. It embodies the qualities of wonder and reverence which Rudolf Steiner sets as a precondition for knowledge of the spirit in "How To Know Higher Worlds". It is artistic selflessness to the highest degree.

The Consciousness Soul is a living idea, and so it is always being revealed in different ways. Those very differences disclose its actual unity, its universality—what it is always coming to be. And so it manifested in Shakespeare, over the quarter of a century in which he wrote plays, in different forms.

There is a very general sort of trajectory in the sequence of Shakespeare’s plays. His genres are the remnants of the myths that long ago replaced direct perception of the spiritual world. In Shakespeare (and others), they survive as narrative arcs, or, one might say, “musical keys.”

The plays are generally placed in one of four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies and romances (sometimes called tragicomedies). The histories are more of a miscellany than a separate genre. Some are forms of tragedy, others display aspects of comedy, and still others tend to be chronicles or pageants. The recurring theme of the histories, represented by the symbol of the crown, is the effort to transcend the confines of the lower self and to realize the higher self. This is the project of the Consciousness Soul. The shadow side of that theme is the question of the legitimacy of the wearers of the crown and the burden of loneliness that the crown brings.

The comedies generally follow the pattern of the Christian myth of loss and recovery. Their arc usually begins in a prelapsarian state, followed by a fall into confusion or danger, whether through a storm at sea, exile, the frustration of hopes for marriage, or an absurd misunderstanding. Then there is a return to a near-paradisal state, in which everyone (or nearly everyone) achieves what he or she wants.

Shakespeare, in the 1590s, engages this myth of a fall and a subsequent rise, which is the shape of the evolution of consciousness as Steiner describes it. He unfolds it in his brightest language, his most vivacious style. Fluid, rolling (but self-contained) metrical lines alternate with uninhibited prose. We have the joy, the exuberance, of language tumbling all over itself, playing games, inventing itself. The thrill of the new freedom of the Consciousness Soul.

These early comedies are very much about laughter. The moments of laughter happen when our free attentiveness witnesses the object self, levity’s experience of gravity. It is a lightning flash, a sudden “seeing” of the everyday world for what it is—old thoughts, finished forms and repetitive cycles. For an the instant we cease to identify with our bodies and see them as the distorted mirror images of our higher selves. This accounts in part for the rich tradition of physical humor in Shakespeare’s comedies.

Laughter marks the first stirring of escape the self that from the ego. The suddenness of the transition is crucial, because laughter is a “quick” experience in every sense of the word. The freedom of that transition is at once what Rudolf Steiner, in his 1910 talk “Laughing and Weeping,” (8) termed the “expansion of the astral body,” and the aesthetic distance we enjoy in the theater.

George Romney: "Lost in the Storm"

Verbal humor too—the unexpected change in tone, the double entendre phrase, the pun—which depend upon the quick juxtaposition of the opaque and the suddenly clear, derives its life from this feel of emergence. If weeping, which Steiner describes in the same talk as the “contraction” or “pressing in” of the astral body, is the look of heaven from earth, laughter is the look of earth from heaven.

The Great Tragedies begin after 1600. 9 In Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and others, the themes are no longer simple. The arc is no longer gentle. Where the low point in the comedies is misrule, incongruity, or absurdity, in tragedy it is bleak, empty, and infernal. The overarching conflicts of these tragedies—between light and darkness, love and hate, meaning and chaos—are even more intense because in the first manifestations of the Consciousness Soul the clear awareness of providence, and the certainty of moral truth, are no longer there.

As the themes change, so does the language. The metrical line becomes much less regular. Where the earlier style was expansive, the later style looks hard at the limits of language and tends toward contraction, exposing and anatomizing words, showing them as "bare ruined choirs." If his high Elizabethan style shows us the colors of spring, what Shakepseare is doing now gives us an autumnal feeling.

It is as though the words themselves have changed jobs. In the earlier plays they are light-bearing. But after 1600 there is a quality of darkness, of opacity, not only in the choice of words but in the phrasing. The verse sometimes calls attention to itself, exposes itself in the effort to attain a meaning that it does not attain—because it cannot. We feel we are closer to some disclosure that has been eluding us all along. But we do not get there. The words lead us to a doorway, but then they mass and crowd together, blocking the entrance. They are not giving out light, but sounding a warning. We may never get past the door. And if we do, we may find—nothing.

Where the later tragedies point to the unreliability and inadequacy of language, we may be tempted, as many critics do, to seize upon the change to say that Shakespeare shares our own age’s skepticism about the possibility of any meaning. I disagree. I think the meaning is very much there, but we have to look for it beyond the words.

If we look on them as dramas of initiation, the Great Tragedies are all about the inevitable destruction of the everyday “I”—the “me” feeling, the self that came to be after the Fall. Because the souls of the tragic heroes are so much larger than life, the spectacle of their dissolution is overwhelming. A great performance of Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth will show us something bottomless, inexhaustible.

Owen Barfield once said that even if you can only see one small part of reality, but that part is presented with absolute accuracy and without saying anything that isn’t meant, what is suggested is the whole truth. 10 In the Great Tragedies, that is what happens. In writing so starkly of despair and death, Shakespeare cannot help suggesting—but only suggesting—transcendence and resurrection. When you leave a great performance of King Lear you are exhausted, because you have just witnessed the most heartbreaking final scene in all drama. You have looked into the Abyss. But you also know that you have glimpsed—you can’t speak it, but you feel it echoing in the distance—a mystery that surpasses understanding. You sense the possibility of transcendence, but you do not enter into it.

To approach that entrance, Shakespeare had to find another form. After 1608, Shakespeare wrote no more tragedies. His way of dramatizing the problem of evil, the mystery of suffering, the question of Job, changes. From 1608 to 1611, there were four plays—Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—in which Shakespeare was either the sole or the principal author. They are usually known as the Late Romances, and they move us into a different world from the Great Tragedies. The trials and terrors of life, the vicious wrongs that human beings inflict on each other, are still present, but their final resolution is not death. It is reconciliation. Not the kind of reconciliation of the earlier comedies - one that typically transpires in laughter - and is designed to satisfy us as an audience, but one that instead challenges the boundaries of reality. The new themes of the Late Romances are recognition, repentance, renunciation, reunification, renewal and resurrection.

Couples separated for decades are brought back together. Parents are reunited with children. The masculine principle of head thinking (usually a father) is subsumed by the feminine principle of heart thinking—Sophia (usually a daughter). The old generation learns from, and is completed by, the new. Revenge—the theme of so many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and of course of Hamlet itself—is put aside. Power over others is let go. Human acts that would have been treated as unforgivable are now forgiven. These plays are called “Romances” because they are full of impossibilities and miracles. Second chances. What has fallen apart comes together, but in a new way.

These are not stories for children, not Hollywood happy endings, and not excuses for turning away from the Abyss. The inexhaustibility of the Great Tragedies is still there. But Shakespeare is beginning to work with what we might call, in the light of anthroposophy, the transformation of the Consciousness Soul into the “Imaginative Soul” (11) which gropes its way to a reunion with the macrocosm, the spirit, through the imagination’s creation of meaning.

When he turns to the Late Romances, language changes even further. Sometimes the pentameter seems almost to disappear. It becomes more irregular, more elliptical, more grammatically unfixed. Syntactically looser. More elusive and enigmatic. More primitive and pure. Above all, more strange. The lines are full of repetitions, inversions, interpolations and breakings off, and sudden changes of mind. It is unfinished, newborn, gleaming with suggestion. Closer, in other words, to the wellspring of cognition—not judgment, but cognitive feeling.

As Russ McDonald notes in "Shakespeare Late Style", lines and sentences are often suspended. Their meaning is withheld to the very end. Closure is prolonged. The use of language plays together with the driving excitement of the plots of the Romances. As Cecily puts it in Oscar Wilde’s "The Importance of Being Earnest", “The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” (12) The impossibility, the obvious fairy tale quality of that ending is very much there, but at the same time there is an acceptance, even a welcoming, of the unreality, an acknowledgment of mystery, and a willingness to see into and believe the incomprehensible life of things.

We feel lifted into another realm that is consciously unreal, deliberately theatrical, and a place of wonder. The whole focus of the drama sometimes vanishes from what is said to what is not said—into vision and music. Song and spectacle are everywhere. But Shakespeare is not just pleasing his audience. He is grappling with the fundamental question of the transforming Consciousness Soul: In what way is Imagination true?

Rudolf Steiner has shown that every true ascent is preceded by renunciation. And the heart of imaginative truth reached through renunciation implies forgiveness. When it is unexpectedly granted, we feel a strange, sweet shock. It suspends the old law of cause and effect and creates a new one. The delight in taking offense, the instinct for blame and revenge are dismissed as manifestations of the need to experience ‘myself.’ Forgiveness is not a prescription we follow. It is a reality that we recognize, that we realize as the unhidden truth. It is the mysterious alchemy of the Late Plays.

Esoteric meaning is cold and dry without the touchstone of life. Shakespeare’s plays, as Ben Jonson said in his introduction to the First Folio, are “rammed with life.” Life (in Greek, “zoe”) emerges in art when the artist is able to put aside his own ego and see clearly (clairvoyantly) what was formerly hidden, i.e., what is true. Because Shakespeare was able to do that more intensely than any other writer, his meanings are esoteric in the most genuine of senses.

Fred Dennehy is an attorney in practice in New Jersey, serving as General Counsel to a large law firm and specializing in professional responsibility. He earned a PhD in English and in recent years has performed in more than a dozen Shakespeare plays. He is a classholder in the School for Spiritual Science and editor for reviews in being human.

Notes

1 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead, 1999), p. 27.

2 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Wesleyan, 1973), p. 137.

3 Rudolf Steiner, On The Altered Conditions Of The Times.

4 See “The Form of Hamlet” in Romanticism Comes of Age, p. 109.

5 Id. at 110.

6 At the time Shakespeare was writing, esoteric tradition was strong in England. There was an esoteric society, sometimes known as the School of Night, consisting of noblemen, occultists and poets, that met in London in the 1590s. George Chapman, the translator of Homer, and Sir Walter Raleigh, were both associated with it. Shakespeare was also writing as the dawn of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment was breaking. We have no way of knowing whether Shakespeare studied in an esoteric school or whether he gave much credit to them. He seems to have made fun of them in his early comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost. But it is likely that esotericism in some form was part of the atmosphere that Shakespeare breathed.

7 John Keats, in a Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817.

8 See Transforming the Soul, volume 2, Lecture 7, pp. 25-43.

9 These comprise certain tragedies composed after Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar.

10 “Of the Consciousness Soul,” in Romanticism Comes of Age, p. 84

11 Owen Barfield, in “Of the Consciousness Soul,” (in "Romanticism Comes of Age", p. 102) speaks of the evolution of the Consciousness Soul to what Rudolf Steiner once called ‘The Imaginative Soul.’ After an earlier version of this essay had been presented as a talk, I discovered that John O’Meara, in "Othello’s Sacrifice", also sees a transformation from the Consciousness Soul experience to the beginnings of the Imaginative Soul in the Late Romances. Mr. O’Meara views "Pericles", "The Winter’s Tale" and "The Tempest" in terms of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. While I have great respect for Mr. O’Meara’s vision of the plays, I do not see the workings of anthroposophy in Shakespeare at such a precise level. Nor do I discern in the chronology of the plays a parallel initiatory experience of Shakespeare himself. I also find that while the Late Romances explore a world which is at an evolutionary advance from the Great Tragedies, they are not for that reason better dramas.

12 Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style, (Cambridge 2006), p. 168.