I want to reject received critical opinion about this book, namely that it is a slightly deranged example of Shakespearian hermeneutics, which would never have been published were it not for Hughes' reputation and so Faber's acquiescence. One knows one might be fighting against the tide however when the best that even a generous, fair. and extremely perceptive critic such as Seamus Perry can say is that this is a book of 'reckless charm'.

Nevertheless: you can reject the book's central framework of the 'tragic equation' (an actually quite complex linking of ancient myth to the tumultuous repercussions which were still being felt in Shakespeare's lifetime of England's move from being a Catholic state to a Protestant one, with 'Venus and Adonis' the first expression of the 'catholic' part of the equation and 'The Rape of Lucrece' its counterpart as the myth of Puritanism) if you want but that still shouldn't then obscure the fact that this book is deeply original and contains some of the most interesting writing on Shakespeare produced in the thirty or so years since its publication. In saying this I also note how easily one slips into and reproduces the language Hughes uses - starting of course with 'equation' - but again this is just terminology which oughtn't distract. As he said in a letter just prior to the publication of the book: 'my concepts are like philosophical or mathematical terms...but the book grew as an imaginative work'

So, brilliant, striking, innovative, creative. In places. Especially the first half of the book. The main problem for me is that second half of the book becomes extremely repetitive and Hughes' obsession with tying in more and more of the equation does start to wear, especially as the equation itself starts to expand and become a 'theophany' (and this part of the book is the only reading - of 'The Winter's Tale' - which I think especially perverse). But Hughes on 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' is brilliant, as is his analysis of so called 'problem plays' such as 'All's Well that Ends Well' , 'Troilus and Cressida' and 'Measure for Measure'.

Hughes famously gave up reading English at Cambridge and switched to Anthropology after a vivid dream which changed slightly in his various tellings and recollections but which is immortalised in 'The Thought Fox'. In the dream a large fox walked into his room (after Hughes had fallen asleep failing to complete an essay), laid a bleeding paw on the page where Hughes was writing and said: 'Stop this – you are destroying us.' This book is a tantalising example of criticism and analysis freed from the Leavisite approach Hughes was being taught, which the fox decried, but also anything that has come since. It shows simply the possibilities of an open, widely read, mind[^1]. Does it matter that it becomes dogmatic and outstays its welcome? Not to me, I would not be without its living witness to Hughes vital iconoclasm, realised in 1992 in this book over 30 years after 'The Thought Fox', some of whose lines might have been added to the collection of epigraphs the book already has:

.Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head. ( )

Over a year! Goof grief! Proper review to follow when I'm less tired...maybe. ( )

Not always clear about its direction, but worth it from a John Fowles point of view. ( )