Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being

First edition. Thick royal 8vo. Pp. xv-[xx], 517, [7 (blank)]. Navy cloth boards, lettered and ruled in gilt to spine. Jacket cover drawing by Andrew Davidson. Uncommon.

A critical magnum opus by the late poet laureate, attempting to present Shakespeare's Complete Works – dramatic and poetic – as a single, tightly integrated, evolving organism. In 1969, Hughes asked his then Faber editor, Charles Monteith, if he could make an anthology "of Shakespeare's shorter pieces". Monteith thought it "a very exciting idea indeed", and immediately commissioned him for £150. Over the next two decades, Hughes became consumed with the goal of cracking the elusive code with which to unlock all of Shakespeare's work – years of "staying up to 3am and 4am" – and "a short introduction" became a doorstop.

The effort expended on the project and the [mostly] negative critical responses upon its publication exacted a fearful toll on the author. "Exit, pursued by a boar," was the Observer's succinct headline above Anthony Burgess's baffled review. While in the Times, Terry Eagleton summed up the scholarly consensus that: "The Shakespeare who emerges from this book is uncannily familiar. He is a poet of primitive violence, animal energies, dark irrational forces and incessant sexual strife – a mirror image of the poet laureate."

Shortly before his death, Hughes confided to a friend his conviction that this lifelong fixation was to prove fatal. "Writing critical prose actually damaged my immune system", and "[I am] not sure I've ever got over it". In the aftermath of this debacle, Hughes put "critical prose" aside, and returned to his muse. In January 1998, months before his death, he published his award-winning collection, Birthday Letters, to [near] universal acclaim.

[Sagar & Tabor A97a.1; Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2007)]