The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [466]
What above all made Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies unique was how they sprung from a vision of the world which was so completely unified. From his sense of the fundamental patterns governing human behaviour down to the unerringly exact observation of his individual images, the essence of his greatness lay in his ability to portray the world as it is, unclouded by any subjective notion of how it might be. `Life with Shakespeare' as the writer Christopher Hollis put it, `is not a debate on principles. The principles are settled. Life is the pageant of men living up to them or failing to live up to them.' To Shakespeare those principles were the outward expression of a living framework of order which equally encompassed personal morality, the social order and the natural order of the universe, all making up a harmonious whole which can only be flouted at ultimately fatal risk. And the reason he was able to see the world so clearly was because, more than any other author, he was so instinctively at one with the values of the Self.
In that famous speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare showed that he had just as comprehensive a sense of a universal order as anything conceived in the Middle Ages.
The same kind of order governed the affairs of mankind. Yet when its balance becomes disturbed, `when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander', then:
When human affairs thus become disintegrated, nothing reflects this more clearly than the way in which each component part rebels against the whole: that unleashing of the power of individual and collective egotism which Shakespeare so vividly portrays in each of his tragedies:
until:
Nowhere else in his plays does Shakespeare so explicitly summarise the fundamental world-view which underlies them all. Ulysses's speech sets out that cosmic polarity between the Self and the ego which informs almost every line Shakespeare wrote, and which no other writer has ever explored with such penetrating depth. And he did so, not with the aid of some external, projected model of the kind which had provided the inspiration of the Middle Ages, but because, more than any other storyteller, his conscious mind was so instinctively at one with the objective unconscious within him: that `Secret' which `sits in the middle and
In this respect Shakespeare's plays demonstrate how, as it emerged from the constraints of the mediaeval world-picture, it was possible for the consciousness of Western man to reach a depth of psychological understanding which hitherto would have been impossible. In Shakespeare's perception of human nature, the fourfold components of totality, strength, mind, heart and soul, could still be held in perfect balance. But within 20 years of his death the French philosopher Descartes gave an early indication of the way the consciousness of Western man was now moving when he proclaimed `I think, therefore I am'. He did not say, as the Middle Ages might have had it, `God thinks, therefore I am'. For Descartes, the greatest riddle in human nature was to unravel the distinction between body and mind. For him the heart and the soul had begun to drop out of the picture. As Western civilisation moved still further from the Middle Ages, consciousness centred on the ego was now beginning to split off from the unconscious in a way which was wholly new.
In the later seventeenth century Newton's