On Ted Hughes’ “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being”

by
David Hurley

A Presentation for the Shakespeare & Modern Author’s Society 

県立広島大学 
September 2026

In 1970, while preparing an anthology of Shakespeare’s verse, Ted Hughes noticed a “basic structural pattern” in fourteen of the mature plays from All’s Well to The Tempest (p. xi).  It is this “basic structural pattern” that Hughes seeks to elucidate in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. The book took him several years of frenzied labour to write, and was published in 1992, six years before his death in 1998.

The “Shakespeare Myth” which Hughes believed he had discovered is a combination of the myths behind Shakespeare’s two early poems, Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, and it is this combination that generates the “Tragic Equation” running through the fourteen plays.

Another mythic thread woven into the Shakespeare Myth is that of “rival brothers” in which one (irrational) “brother” usurps the other (rational) brother.

According to Hughes, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece enact the mythologies of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (in its more Calvinist and Puritan manifestation), while the fourteen plays in the sequence reveal Shakespeare’s engagement with the trauma of the English Reformation. 

Hughes sees Shakespeare’s “myth” not only as a convenient model for a playwright to plot the actions and outcomes of the plays, but as an organic part of  Shakespeare himself, “embodied” and emerging from the confluence of his historical circumstances, specific biography, and psychic structure which, Hughes observes towards the end of the book, 

suggests an almost pathological psychic alienation from the culture within which his plays triumphed.

(p. 504)

Time does not permit me to explore this “daemonic” aspect of Hughes’ thinking about Shakespeare as my purpose is to describe the basic mythical patterns that Hughes detects in his plays. Before I do that, I should note that Hughes himself seems to have been daemonically possessed by his vision of Shakespeare’s Tragic Equation. At times Hughes seems to be engaged in a frenzied struggle to contain himself as he discovers more and more mythical parallels from the Ancient Egyptians to the Rosicrucians, all of which are accompanied by various technological similes and metaphors such as “equation,” “explosion,” “optics,” “circuitry,” and the devil only knows what else. It is as if Hughes were the last of the great Romantic writers in the tradition of Blake or Shelley, discovering “the similitude of things” (Defence of Poetry) in almost everything and driven almost to the point of madness by the daemonic inspiration of his vision.

As such, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being lacks much of the apparatus of conventional academic research; there is neither bibliography nor index to guide us, only the “pure, naked expressiveness” of Hughes’ “intuitive historical sense”¹ as he creates his “template” out of the two narrative poems and applies it to fourteen plays in the following specific developmental sequence:

• All’s Well that Ends Well (Mythic Equation appears in full)
• Measure for Measure (M. E. comes to consciousness)
• Troilus and Cressida (M. E. becomes the Tragic Equation)
• Othello
• Hamlet
• Macbeth (“The Crown” as Goddess)
• King Lear (Tragic Equation mutates)
• Timon of Athens
• Coriolanus (the Female survives)
• Anthony and Cleopatra (from Tragedy to Romance)
• Cymbeline (the tragic Hero reborn)
• Pericles
• The Winter’s Tale
• The Tempest (T. E. dismantled by Prospero)

This sequence differs from a chronology such as that of E. K. Chambers, which is constructed primarily from stylistic, topical, and documentary dating rather than a subjective interpretation of the development of Shakespeare’s mythic imagination.²

Across this sequence, the equation does not remain fixed. It mutates, is complicated by unexpected survivals, and is finally dismantled altogether, a trajectory I will trace as we move through the examples.

The Template of the Mythic Equation

1. Venus and Adonis (1593)

Venus has fallen in love with the mortal Adonis but, in Shakespeare’s unique twist, Adonis rejects her advances, preferring to hunt wild boar. Just as Venus fears, Adonis is gored by a wild boar and dies. A purple and white flower grows where his blood was spilled. Venus plucks it to her bosom and returns to Paphos. Adonis is “reborn” as the flower in Venus’ bosom.

The Mythic Equation part 1

When Venus is rejected by Adonis, she gets her revenge by assaulting him in the form of the Boar. The key to the “mythic equation,” Hughes asserts, is that the Boar = the goddess appearing on the lower, animal, plane. 

Hughes argument is that Venus literally becomes the Boar, or the Boar acts as an avatar of Venus in her destructive aspect. In the plays, this mythic mechanism, the “charge of the Boar,” is internalized in the hero’s descent into crisis (as, for example when Lear falls into madness), and exteriorized in symbolic events (such as the storm that presages Lear’s madness).

Venus herself manifests in the mythic equation in three forms throughout the plays, two of which operate on the higher plane (as “the Goddess of Benign Love”), and one on the lower plane (Goddess of the Underworld):

1. Mother (Venus carrying the reborn Adonis as a flower on her bosom)

2. Consort (Wife) / Lover (Venus pursuing Adonis)

======

3. Boar = the Queen of Hell (attacking Adonis)

(Note: Venus is one of several incarnations of the “Great Goddess.”)

2. Lucrece (1594)

Prince Tarquin lusts after Lucrece, the chaste wife of his kinsman Prince Collatine, and rapes her. She calls for revenge and commits suicide. (Her kinsmen and friends arouse the Roman citizens to expel the Tarquins.)

Tarquin’s usurpation of Collatine’s marriage bed also sets the model for the “rival brothers” (here, they are cousins) in which the “rational brother” (Collatine) is usurped by the “irrational brother” (Tarquin).

The Mythic Equation and the Boar: Melding the Two Myths into a Single Template

If, as Hughes argues, the Boar is a manifestation of the enraged goddess in Venus and Adonis, in The Rape of Lucrece it is Tarquin who enacts the Boar; his assault is analogous to the charge of the Boar, so that from Lucrece onwards, “the Boar” is no longer literally present, but becomes an archetypal force of irrational destruction, a mythical expression of the usurpation of the “rational brother” by the “irrational brother,” or of the rational mind of the hero by irrational forces beyond his control.

The Double Identity of the Boar

The Boar, it turns out, carries a double identity, tied to two different mythic sources. Hughes traces the first back to the “Cyprian” version of the myth of Aphrodite (Venus) and Adonis. Born from a myrrh tree, the infant Adonis is entrusted by Aphrodite to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Persephone falls in love with him and refuses to give him back. When Aphrodite finally reclaims Adonis for herself, Persephone’s rage takes the form of a boar, which kills him.

The second source is a parallel myth in which Ares (the Roman “Mars”), Aphrodite’s jealous lover, takes the shape of a boar and kills Adonis himself, driven by jealousy rather than by loss. Hughes does not cite a source for this version, though it is preserved in Nonnus’s Dionysiaca. ³

Between these two myths, the Boar can be either goddess or jealous god, either the rejected female principle or the usurping male one:

This double identity of the Boar is consistent throughout the fourteen lives of Shakespeare’s tragic hero.

(p. 8)

Hughes finds the clearest example of this “Mars” identity in Troilus and Cressida. Diomed, the “usurping brother” who replaces Troilus as Cressida’s lover, is the great-grandson of Mars according to one tradition. Mars’ son Meleager slew the Calydonian boar, sent by the goddess Artemis to punish the Greeks for neglecting her shrine. Meleager, 

took the Boar as his armorial crest, passing it lineally to Tydeus … who passed it in turn to his son – Diomed. 

(p. 189)

The boar’s crest thus carries a second goddess into the equation alongside Persephone: Artemis, punishing neglect with the same animal that Persephone used to reclaim Adonis. Diomed inherits this crest, and with it, the Boar’s charge against the “rational brother,” Troilus.

Thus, the same animal form of the Boar can be occupied by the female chthonic/destructive principle (Venus / Persephone / Artemis) or by the jealous male / irrational brother principle (Mars / Tarquin / Diomed).

With all that in mind, the “single template” of Shakespeare’s mythic equation looks something like this:

• Venus loves Adonis.
  
• Adonis rejects Venus.
  
• Adonis is killed by the Boar = Venus as the Queen of Hell.
  
• The literal charge of the Boar that brings about Adonis’ “death” in Venus and Adonis is transposed, in Lucrece, into Tarquin’s assault and, in the plays, into the madness of their heroes.
  
• The rational brother, embodied by “Adonis,” is thus supplanted by his irrational counterpart, “Tarquin.”
  
• In his “Tarquin” phase, the hero turns against his brother and the Goddess/Female, here manifest as “Lucrece.”
  
• In destroying the Goddess, he destroys himself. (She is his soul.)

That is why, according to Hughes, the crisis facing each hero is never only external. When he moves against the Goddess, as when Othello smothers Desdemona, he is also moving against the source of his own coherence (his “soul”), so that the external violence and the inner collapse are one and the same event.

Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the English Reformation 

To understand this historical dimension of Hughes’s mythic template, we need to recall briefly the course of the English Reformation. Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s brought England out of papal jurisdiction, but the religious settlement remained deeply contested. Under Edward VI, the Reformation moved in a more extreme Protestant direction; under Mary I, England was briefly reunited with Rome; and under Elizabeth I, the religious settlement of 1559 established the Church of England as a Protestant national church.

The Elizabethan Church sought a middle way between what it regarded as the errors of Rome, and the more radical Protestantism of Geneva and the non-conforming Puritans. It rejected papal authority and a number of Roman doctrines and practices, while retaining episcopacy, a liturgical tradition, and forms of worship inherited from the medieval Church. The result was not the simple triumph of one side over the other, but an uneasy settlement between competing versions of the Reformation.

Seen against this background, Venus and Adonis may be read as a Protestant account of the rejection of the old Catholic religion:

• Venus = Mary, the Catholic Goddess ⁴
• Adonis = the Protestant/Puritan rejection of the cult of Mary and Roman Catholicism
• Boar = the Catholic Goddess transformed into an agent of violence against Protestantism

The rejection of the Goddess thus provokes her transformation into the destructive boar, which kills Adonis.

If Venus and Adonis offers a Protestant perspective on the English Reformation, Hughes suggests that Lucrece recapitulates the same mythic conflict, but with the direction of violence reversed:

• Tarquin = the Puritan
• Lucrece = the chaste, desexualised Goddess, figured through the Virgin Mary
• Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece = the Puritan iconoclastic assault on the cult of Mary and on the Roman Catholic Church more broadly

In Venus and Adonis, the rejected Goddess becomes the agent of violence against the male principle. In Lucrece, the violence has passed into the male principle itself, which now turns against the Goddess. The boar has become Tarquin.

Venus and Adonis	Lucrece
Venus	Lucrece
Goddess/Mary/Catholicism	purified, desexualised Goddess/Mary
Adonis	Tarquin
rejection of the Goddess	violation of the Goddess
Boar’s violence against Adonis	Tarquin’s violence against Lucrece
Catholicism reacts against Protestantism	Protestantism attacks Catholicism

Hughes comments:

Shakespeare had unearthed here the psycho-biological law of the Reformation, in a usable form that captured its energies and anticipated its conclusions.

(p. 175)

From Myth to the Plays

Having established the basic structure of Hughes’ “Shakespeare Myth,” we can now turn to the plays themselves and see how it operates in dramatic form. Hughes does not claim that the myth is simply repeated unchanged from one play to the next. Rather, the underlying “equation” develops as Shakespeare’s treatment of the male and female principles becomes increasingly complex, and as the conflict between them produces different forms of crisis, destruction, and regeneration. The fourteen plays therefore constitute successive stages in the transformation of a single mythic structure.

The Myth as a Single Sequence: All’s Well That Ends Well

All’s Well is the first play, Hughes notes, in which both parts of the “Mythic Equation” are found together, though only loosely associated, with their “explosive potential” not yet fully worked out, but consisting of these parallels:

• Helena pursues Bertram as Venus pursued Adonis
• Bertram rejects Helena as Adonis rejected Venus
  

Then,

• Bertram heartlessly pursues Diana as Tarquin pursued Lucrece

However, because Bertram is not a Puritan, and Helena’s passion is not driven by lust, the Queen of Hell does not appear – only her “proxy” Parolles. Hughes explains:

Because there is no doctrinal razor of the Puritan manifesto in Bertram’s act of rejection, there is no Queen of Hell, and therefore no ‘double vision’, therefore no charge of the boar, therefore no convulsive transformation of personality into madness…

(pp. 124-5)

Hughes sees the character of Parolles as evidence of how, 

the Tragic Myth imposes its design. Parolles is a free-floating, cynical reflection of the Queen of Hell, much as Lucio will be in Measure for Measure, Thersites will be in Troilus and Cressida and Iago in Othello – a peculiarly sinister form of the irrational ‘usurping brother’ who operates by suggestion and osmosis rather than by forthright assault.

(p. 125)

The “Tragic Myth” imposes its design without Shakespeare appearing in Hughes’ mind to be fully conscious of what he had discovered until the next play in Hughes’ sequence, Measure for Measure.

Measure for Measure: the Mythic Equation Comes to Consciousness

When the plot structures of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece are connected, both the male and female principles play “two diametrically opposite parts” (p. 168), and this “structural formula” of the Mythic Equation becomes fully evident in the plot of Measure for Measure:

“Isabella’s plea for sexual licence corresponds to Venus’ plea for the same”	“Angelo’s Puritan, judgemental rejection of her plea corresponds to Adonis’s rejection of the same”
“Angelo [like Tarquin] finds himself suddenly possessed by uncontrollable lust for the body of Isabella.”	“Isabella [like Lucrece] recoils into outraged defence of her sacred chastity.”

Hughes comments,

where the two poems become one drama, the Angelo who behaved like Adonis has somehow – without blood, without visible rending of the flesh – been abruptly supplanted by the Angelo who behaves like Tarquin. Behind Angelo’s face, Adonis has become Tarquin.”

(p. 170)

We are then treated with some vintage Hughesian rhetoric:

What emerged unsuspected, through the quietly labouring months between summer 1593 (publication of Venus and Adonis) and summer 1594 (publication of Lucrece), now arrives in a premonitory shiver, and awed whisper. And as Angelo stares at Isabella, astonished, and murmuring:

She speaks, and ‘tis

Such sense that my sense breeds with it…
II.ii.141-2

the Boar hits him, slashes open the Puritan ego, pulls him on like a body mask and somersaulting across the gap between the two poems, from Heaven to Earth, from the mythic plane to the real, stands up as Tarquin, still wearing the mask of Angelo, while Isabella, studying his face in vain for some flicker of a sign, has not blinked.

(p. 173)

However, the mythic equation, though now fully manifest, is not yet tragic because the Duke, like Baldric in Blackadder, has a “cunning plan” to catch Angelo in a replay of the bed-trick and marriage sequence of All’s Well that Ends Well.

Troilus and Cressida: The Mythic Equation Becomes the Tragic Equation

Ted Hughes places Troilus and Cressida after All’s Well and Measure for Measure in his chronology because he sees in Troilus a new development, a tragic potential that is absent in Bertram and Angelo, but present in every play in the sequence hereafter.

Unlike the previous plays in the sequence, Troilus and Cressida explores,

the preliminary phase of disillusioned, exalted love.

(p. 180)

Hughes asserts that this “preliminary phase” explains where the depth of male loathing for “the Female” comes from, whether it is Angelo’s loathing of the lust of Vienna, or Adonis’ loathing of the lust of Venus:

These heroes loath the Female because they loved her (and love her) too well – too ‘totally and unconditionally’ – in some other, mythic dimension (in childhood perhaps).

(p. 179)

This preliminary phase is explored on stage for the first time in Troilus’ unconditional love for Cressida. When the Boar (in the form of Diomed) attacks, the Hero suffers the “double vision” and a new form of madness:

Where formerly this madness seized heroes who were previously loveless, and directed them with uncontrollable sexual desire against a woman all but unknown (and even forbidden) to them, now it seizes the hero of a ‘total and unconditional love’ and directs him, not in a sexual but in a homicidal frenzy, against his own beloved.

(p. 180)

The Constant Factors of the Tragic Equation

As Hughes traces the development of this new “Tragic Equation” through the major tragedies he detects some “constant factors” which leave the characters “demythologized human individuality” helpless before their “mythic destiny” (p. 211-212).

Those factors are:

• The Female as Goddess of Divine Love is identified with the Hero’s soul.
  
• The Charge of the Boar. Puritanical fear is awakened in the Hero,
  
  • either by the Female’s action (Cressida, Gertrude)
    
  • or by the Hero’s delusion (Othello, Lear)

leading to…

• The Double Vision of the Goddess as Sacred Bride/Divine Mother but also as the Queen of Hell
  
• The Hero rejects the Queen of Hell but cannot separate what he loves from what he loathes

• The Hero descends into madness directed against the Female. Adonis-the-Puritan dies and is reborn as Tarquin-the-Destroyer.

The Triple Goddess and Hamlet’s Madness

In Hamlet the Goddess appears in her three forms as:

1. Sacred Bride = Ophelia
2. Divine Mother = Gertrude as Hamlet’s mother
3. Queen of Hell = Gertrude as Claudius’ queen

On the “demythologized” plane of the plot, Hamlet’s madness is feigned as a strategem to protect himself from Claudius, but on the mythic plane of the “Tragic Equation” Hamlet’s puritanical madness is induced by the ghostly vision of the Female as the Queen of Hell. Viewed through the lens of the Tragic Equation, we can see why Hamlet’s madness is directed not only against Gertrude but also against Ophelia, since hers is one of the three “faces” of the Goddess.

The Puritan Hamlet-as-Adonis, who has been resisting his mythic fate for much of the play, “dies” in Ophelia’s grave and is reborn as Tarquin the destroyer, just as Othello “dies” as Adonis when he faints, and is reborn as Tarquin the destroyer when he recovers.

Tarquin as Saint: Macbeth to Anthony and Cleopatra

It may be more difficult to see at first glance how the Tragic Equation applies to the plot of Macbeth. The key, according to Hughes, is to see Lady Macbeth as a manifestation of the Goddess becoming the Boar. 

The enraged Goddess possesses Macbeth, whose inner life unlike that of any other tragic hero in the sequence, becomes the life of the Boar as he, “with Tarquin’s ravishing strides” (Macbeth II. i. … ), murders Duncan, claims the crown, and goes mad. Now it is the Crown of Scotland that takes the place of Lucrece.

There is another new development. When the Hero is transformed by the Boar,

he overflows with inner riches,

(p. 253)

which emerge in his poetry. This Boar-induced enrichment begins with Macbeth, becomes more expansively expressed in Lear, and emerges as the main concern of the action from Anthony and Cleopatra. Hughes sees in this development evidence that the Hero is now

Tarquin the ‘saint’ – the spiritually reborn, redeemed one, beloved of the Goddess.

(p. 253)

Speaking of the Goddess, in Coriolanus she survives for the first time. Hughes sees Coriolanus as

the last of the tragedies proper,

(p. 298)

yet places Coriolanus before Anthony and Cleopatra, which he considers to be a “bridging work” (p. 298) between the tragedies and the romances. Yes, Anthony and Cleopatra die but they both,

transcend their tragic fates (and their deaths) by rising together above the Tragic Equation (and the rival brothers), on to a sharply defined, higher, metaphysical plane, where such worldly sufferings are redeemed.

(p. 298)

This redemption anticipates the various “theophanies” of the Romances; it 

enacts a love god’s liberation from the armoured confinements of the Roman/Puritan ego and his reunion with the Love Goddess beyond tragic division.

(p. 302)

The Tragic Equation Transformed in the Last Plays

• In Othello and Hamlet the Female is already dead when the Hero is corrected.
• In Lear, Cordelia is still alive – but dies.
• In Coriolanus, the Female survives.
• In Anthony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s death is transcendental.

Then, in the Romances, the charge of the Boar fails. Adonis may become Tarquin, but his assault on the Female fails. Imogen in Cymbeline and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale are still alive when the Hero returns to his senses.

In The Tempest, Hughes sees Shakespeare finally dismantling the Tragic Equation. Prospero is the first hero who does not become Tarquin (p. 380). The charge of the Boar is neutralised because Prospero recognises the destructive logic of revenge and refuses to act it out. Instead of destroying the Female, he restores what the earlier tragedies have destroyed: the human relationships through which the Hero recovers his own coherence. The Boar is, in this sense, hunted out of Shakespeare’s imaginative world.

Yet this is only a provisional solution. Prospero can renounce the Boar, and bring about a “sacred marriage,” but he cannot simply erase the history that produced the Boar. The pattern has been generated through the repeated conflict between the male and female principles, and Hughes connects that conflict to the deeper psychic and historical trauma of the Reformation. What The Tempest achieves is therefore not the discovery of a final escape from the myth, but a conscious refusal to repeat it.

The fourteen plays thus trace not merely the repetition of a tragic formula but Shakespeare’s gradual discovery of how to dismantle it. Prospero’s renunciation is the culmination of that process: the Boar has been hunted down, and the Hero reunited with the Goddess, at least for now.

Bibliography

Hughes, Ted, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Faber and Faber, London, 1992.

Notes

1. Tom Pauline, in his review for the London Review of Books in April 1992, observed that,
   
   “this is mythic criticism issuing from a marvellously intuitive historical sense, and no matter how fixed, reductive, tedious and obsessive the applied template of the myth eventually becomes, it is the relentless hurrying drive of its communication – its ‘pure, naked expressiveness’ – that counts above all… His huge study of Shakespeare, more than ten years in the making, is an unprecedented act of critical witness that spills out of an energy – a tragic energy – which has all but disappeared from current professional critical practice.”
   
   https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n07/tom-paulin/protestant-guilt
   ↩︎
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Shakespeare’s_plays
   
   https://www.britannica.com/biography/list-of-plays-by-Shakespeare-206968
   5
   ↩︎
3. Hughes does not offer any sources for the alternative myth of Mars (Aries) appearing in the form of a boar and killing Adonis, but there is indeed such a myth:
   
   “ADONIS A prince of Kypros (eastern Mediterranean) loved by the goddess Aphrodite. Ares, jealous of their affair, turned himself into a boar and slew the youth. (In other versions of the story it was Artemis who sent the boar).”
   
   https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/AresWrath.html
   
   
   Here are a couple of examples from Nonnus, Dionysiaca:
   
   “Ungentle Ares has assailed another gentle Adonis after the bold son of Myrrha – forgive me, Cythereia! He assailed him and touched his rosy flesh, now once more the blood of all the Loves has trickled from a thigh on the ground.”
   Nonnus, Dionysiaca 29. 101
    
   “With calm face ever-smiling Aphrodite rang out her unfailing laugh, when she saw the birthday games of the happy beasts. She turned her round eyes delighted in all directions; only the boars she would not watch in their pleasures, for being a prophet she knew, that in the shape of a wild boar, Ares with jagged tusk and spitting deadly poison was destined to weave fate for Adonis in jealous madness.”
   
   Nonnus, Dionysiaca 41.v194
     ↩︎
4. It should be noted, however, that Hughes’s identification of the Goddess with the Virgin Mary reflects the cultural perspective of post-Reformation England rather than orthodox Catholic theology. Orthodox Roman Catholics would reject the description of Mary as a “goddess.” She is venerated as the “Mother of God,” but is not herself divine. At the same time, Hughes should not be characterized as a Protestant thinker. His poetry and criticism draw extensively upon pagan mythology and his his mythic reconstruction of Shakespeare folds the religious conflicts of the English Reformation into a symbolic vocabulary in which Catholicism, Protestantism, paganism, and the “Goddess” become
   interconnected.
   ↩︎