arts & ideas dwell in possibility. He makes a hearth of enfolding arms. and whisperingly he asks— Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. You may author the unsung scene where she and he — this once-then-unclothed-king-turned-mother— sing as two birds in their gilded cage. You may see him prepare a table he— a wayward father has never yet prepared. He makes a sacred altar where the choler— his readied sulfur—combusts. And here he dares what he must. His heart—in hers—and ours in his—finds its abyss and breaks. Elaine Maria Upton is a Shakespeare scholar and an awardwinning poet with extensive experience teaching in South Africa. She is an associate editor of being human and has contributed a book review, poems, and reflections.
Study for The Death of Cordelia, detail of a sketch by George Romney (1734-1802); Folger Shakespeare Library
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 esomental habit, teric meaning in Shakespeare. Rudolf Steiner a possession, said that all genuine art is a reflection of the something human experience of the divine. That means for the ego to that Shakespeare, the most genuine of artists, devour. 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. Inspira1 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead, 1999), p. 27. 26 •
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tion 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, 2 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Wesleyan, 1973), p. 137.