Vision 10
Presented on: Saturday, March 6, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Vision Ten and I'd like to start right away by putting us into a statement. One of the most important things that can be done for a writer is to have a critical appreciation of your character and your quality, the strategies of writing, and for Shelley, the last generation or so of readers have benefited because of a book called "Shelley, A Critical Reading" by Earl Wasserman, published 1971. Shelley had already gone through a tremendous reassessment. Many of the stereotypes that had been foisted upon him in his lifetime, and had sort of clung to him for almost a hundred years, were swept aside in the critical awakening of the 1920's. But by 1971 there was an even deeper appreciation of how great Shelley was. The old clinging misconception that he was somehow the beautiful parlor poet of Victorian limited poet tasters is completely wrong. Shelley is a remaker of the English language. And in Wasserman's book, under a title of the chapter on poetry of skepticism, he writes "But the presence of the visionary results in more than ambivalent views. It also exerts a pressure on the narrator that complicates his sense of values. Consequently although the narrator professes the total sufficiency of nature (the total sufficiency of nature), by the end of the poem he himself has acknowledged that something that exceeds it. . . . . . ." And then he goes on to speak about how vision exceeds nature. And in a way the term, the word, the vocabulary that we have in English, the term extravagance. Extra means outside, beyond. Vagance is like wandering or moving so it's like extravagance is wandering beyond. And in a way vision, all vision is extravagance. That is to say that consciousness is a wandering beyond the natural limitations. So that consciousness already is something supernatural. It is something transcendent. But what is peculiar and paradoxical is that in those kinds of definitions you have to take a bright neon red warning light and scratch out the word thing, because consciousness is not a thing. In order to give ourselves some kind of traction to speak about it we can call consciousness a dimension with a proviso that its dimensionality is a process rather than a thing. That consciousness is never a static product but is always a dynamic flow like a process. So that vision as consciousness is intimately related to myth as experience. So that there is an odd relationship that mythic experience and visionary consciousness are somehow related and they're extremely similar and one is almost reminded of that scientific breakthrough that James Watson had with the discovery of the DNA structure. When he and Francis Crick were stymied at the structure, how does this work, Linus Pauling is going to beat us to this, he's much smarter than we are, he's much more a genius than we are. And yet Watson playing around realizing that the fundamental biochemical structure of DNA was linked up with an old Hermetic problem (he didn't know it was a Hermetic problem, he'd never heard of such things). The Hermetic problem was that you have a pairedness at the root of physical reality when it takes the form of stuff. That materiality, the thingness in reality can only have a static structure when pairedness is in a polarization. That one half of whatever is a thing and the other half of that thing need to be polarized in order to hold the tension of opposites that allows for the thingness, the staticness, the materiality, the existence to be posited. Polarity posits existence. It makes it palpable, it makes of it material. The puzzle is that on that primordial level of pairedness is built immediately a higher power of existence which is the extension of primary primordial structure into development, into evolution, into the hierarchy that makes of not just primordial existence but that existence then has a pattern of building into more complexity of coming from that prime primordialness into an evolution and the first step in evolution is not that pairs occur but that pairs of pairs occur. And Watson saw it. They knew that there were four basic biochemical qualities that came together in a pair of pairs. And that the adenine and guanine always went together, the cytosine and the other always went together and that somehow one had to go beyond the pairedness of primordial structure to the pair of pairs of the first step in development of evolution of the hierarchy of existence. That existence does not stay in its primordiality but immediately takes its cue that it can come into existence and so existence grows. It continues to come into existence. In fact the earliest philosophic definition of what is existentially real comes from the classical Greek. Their term, we use physis, means physics, physical, it's physical. And in Aristotle, physis means something which is emerging. That what is real is emerging. What really exists, yes it does exist because it has emerged. It's become apparent. Its materiality has registered and continues to register and not only does it continue to register but it effects all other registries to that existence begins to work in this kind of net. And the net increases in its complexity so that you not only have protons and electrons, but then you have atoms, but that the atoms come together and you have molecules, the molecules come together and you have minerals, and the minerals come together and pretty soon you have plants and pretty soon you have animals and then you have us. So that the whole development of a hierarchy of existence, the whole reason why existentiality is practical is physical is that polarities build and the first step in that, the archetypal step is how do you get from a pair to a pair of pairs and how then, the fundamental question is, how do the pair of pairs come together and form a square, form a unity. And Watson, when he was playing, they put the pairs of biochemicals together and they knew that somehow these worked together and what threw them off is that both structures had a fantastic similarity. And Watson describes in the "The Double Helix" his frustration that Pauling was going to beat them any hour now, he's going to announce, Pauling's son was there, going to announce that he got the structure. And so here frenetically he grabs two of these structures that they had put out into a geometric plane and they were both remarkably similar, and he just threw them down. And when he threw them down the one slid and turned itself around. And immediately, because he was immersed in the vision, he saw consciously beyond the physical into the supernatural, into the consciousness, the conscious dimension. And he saw that the way that the pair of pairs went together is that one pair reversed itself and so when you put the two together you got a spin. Instead of making a static square, one half of the square was one step above the other so that you got a spiral. And he saw with this young American crass ambitious exuberance something that had eluded everyone for maybe five hundred years, they had forgotten, that the old Hermetic caduceus is the first double helix symbol in history. The pair of snakes in the Hermetic caduceus criss cross eachother just like a double helix. And this was the key to the structure, it was the visionary key. One is reminded of the way in which, hundreds of years before, a German alchemist, a chemist named Kukaully, had tried to find a vision for an essential structure of organic compounds, organic chemistry, at a time when no one really understood what this was. And in a dream Kukaully saw an ancient Egyptian snake swallowing its tail, called in Jungian psychology the Uroborus. The universal symbol of circle but circle without end. Energy, the snake energy, the serpent energy swallowing its own tail without end. And Kukaully in his visionary consciousness was able to see that all organic chemistry is based upon a structure very much like a serpent swallowing its tale, called the benzene ring. A hexagram, a hexagon of chemical structure where the carbon atoms are able, not only to work together to hold the benzene ring together, but they reach out and allow for one to build on this essential hexagram template, all of the structures of organic chemistry. They all have this, all distinctive. So that organic molecules anywhere in the universe have an alignment capability because of the reality of their structure. They relate together and all carbon based life is affine. The fact that one could use a silicon basis, it has its own affinity. It has its own pairedness. And in times to come, a thousand years or so, when our descendants run across silicon based life, they will have to find some way to put together the pair of pairs again. To have a cosmic scale of what life really is like. But this pair of pairs that Watson saw. This pair of pairs, this structure, this set of the square is so primordial that we use it here in this education. In this education we're aware that in a practical sense we began with nature. We had no other place to begin with. Any other beginning is actually an invitation to fall into a philosophic trap called skepticism. And if you begin with skepticism you always end with nihilism. You can reach a skeptical conclusion, and very frequently, more frequently than not, a skeptical conclusion is the accurate way in which intelligence unfolds a development. But you cannot begin with it. In fact you cannot begin with any 'ism' because 'isms' are made in the mind and are not there in nature. There are no 'isms' in nature at all. And so one has to begin with nature. And if you begin with nature and you come in the next step to existence, ritual. The ritual comportment is the existential action of emergence of what is. And the next step beyond that we saw is the development of experience, the mythic level. And only then with those three phases, nature, ritual and myth, does symbol come into being, does the mind tie together that whole integral cycle of nature. And that those four make a pair of pairs. That nature and ritual, myth and symbol go together. But they go together in such an odd kind of a way, in a complementarity way and yet they are polarized. So that the mind has a relationship to the body which both has affinity and also a disjunctiveness. Nature and experience also have an affinity but also a disjunctiveness. And so it takes a kind of an excerpting. An excerpting away from the disjunctive qualities that are there naturally and to emphasize the conjunctive qualities and only then does the mind put together what we have called a square of attention. The frame of reference. The picture of the world which we can trust because we know it works this way. Nature does its part, the ritual existence does its part, the experience does its part and our symbolic powers of mind does its part and all of this fits together and we have a frame of reference. We now, we know what we're looking at with four corners of the world. We have a square of attention that gives us a frame of reference. Even the language is indicative of the structure. A frame of reference, a square, a four square. And we know that the pairedness which is fundamental to the integral structure of the composition of nature allows us to explore the wholeness of nature by taking an angle of vision. And the first angle of vision is always the diagonal of the square. So that what you come up with is a pair of triangles. A pair of Pythagorean triangles. A pair of triangles whose dominant focus is the right angle, the ninety degrees. So the first geometrical understanding, the first geometrical idea of exploring the wholeness of natural integration of everything, of exploring the universe, is to put this kind of triangularity of the right angle, the ninety degree triangle into operation mentally. And so the first 'ism' in a way, is this kind of right anglism. Pythagoreanism is the first time that the human mind learns to see into the structure of nature. But when we're able to look into the structure of nature, the very act of looking into the structure of nature separates it unity. And the first separation is the separation into a pair of triangles. So that triangularity becomes, in its separate pairedness, the first analytical tool that intelligence has vis a vis to understand, to open up the structure of looking into nature. And when one looks into nature in this way, when the mind is able to make a cut in the wholeness of nature, even though it's a mental cut originally, the mind is so affine, in its development over millions of years, to the hand that the hand very quickly takes the lead. And not only are we able to see into nature, to crack the unity of nature analytically, through a geometrical analysis, but the hand follows very quickly and makes tools that do this in physical reality. And one understands right away that this quality opens up a gap in the universe that was not there before. Nowhere in nature was there this opening. Because that opening is due to the action of our mind, to the action of symbolic insight and what is released in the gap, in the space that is made is like a dimension which we call consciousness. A quality a phase a further phase which we call vision. And so no longer is there just the four levels of nature but there's a quintessence a fifth essence which goes beyond nature. It goes into the transcendent, into the supernatural. It goes into consciousness. It's like the phrase in theater, the fifth business. It's the mysterious element of what happens when you take the whole composition, you put it into motion. And right away the area that discloses that something new has happened is the ritual level. Existence right away knows, it's like a baby, right away knows it's different. something else has happened. And so the first place that records consciousness in a way that can be grasped, appreciated is in dramatic language productions like theater. And so that very first generation who benefit from the Pythagorean insight make Greek Tragedy. Aeschylus, the very first beneficiary, twenty-five hundred years ago. Because it's in the fifth business of dramatic action that one notices that existence which before was whole is now fractured and something else is loose that we never found before and we're up against that. And Greek Tragedy is all about that. It's all about the release of conscious energy because the form of the universe has been cracked by the mind's power of drawing a geometricity through it. The lightning of the diagonal has released a gap in nature that was never there before and that gap is like who knows how big it is. How big the yawning chasm of possibility now is, who knows. And of course the animal quality of us is afraid of that. Not only afraid of falling into that, that primordiality, that fear of falling. Or that fear of unknown, who knows how wide that is. But there's a deeper more profound fear and that is that we ourselves have done this and there's a fear of ourselves. There's a fear of the symbolic power of ourselves that gets out of hand. That spins us off into a supernatural terror and so we become afraid of ourselves. And this phobia against our higher powers makes of us in compensation a clinging to the old fundamental primordialities that we do not fall off the shattered edge of nature into a gulf made by our own precocious conscious adventuring. And so men fear vision for good reason and outlaw it by codes. You shall not go beyond these limitations, otherwise we'll throw you out, we'll exile you, we'll banish you.
So that the dramatic poet is always the first person banished when consciousness takes its first steps. And someone who uses a poetic visionary language is always the first sacrifice to something new. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
BREAK
So our frame of reference turns out to be like the Pisces sign. It turns out that not only can you have a square but you can have a pair of triangles that in one sense can align to give you alignment, or you can have a polarity, a complementation that cinches together. So that when you look to see the classical Greek symbol of wholeness of the universe, you find the interlocking hands. You find that geometricity of the square spirals that interlock and that's the classical Greek Frieze. And it's the ribbon of the continuity of existence in its wholeness which is capable of being objectified by the mind in this geometricity. The geometric ribbon of the interlocking squared spirals becomes the symbol of classical Greece. When you look at the Parthenon, that symbol runs like a ribbon as the foundation base. And it isn't the classical friezes up above so much, but that great geometric ribbon that founds the way in which the mythological frieze fits into the mind's structure and they're held together because that geometrical frieze becomes a characterization of the rational continuity of experience that feeling can be put into a form of continuity and held securely. What is that form? For the classical Greeks it was visual. But for the pre-classical Greeks (phone rings in background) it was audio (laughs). You have to work AT&T in, it's 1999 and they're everywhere. We're probably under surveillance. So that for the classical Greeks there was a sense of security in the fact that sound can be put into a harmonic. And the most powerful sound to the Greeks was the way in which the thunder of nature could be distilled to the power of the human voice. And nothing was more powerful in that symbolic universe of the classical Greeks than the controlled modulation of a great human voice. Bringing language into that geometricity of the continuous ribbon of complementarities, of polarities held in balance. And so right at the beginning one finds in the classical Greek theater, the single voice of the protagonist becomes the diagonal that both cuts nature into its fragmented surreality. Its supernatural diagonal is revealed but it's the ongoing voice that bridges and sews that gap so that the two parts fit again. So that the classical Greek theater, Greek tragedy, the theater of Aeschylus becomes the prototype, the archetype of the symbolic wholeness of the universe that's reinstated. Reinstated over a fracture not caused by nature, but caused by man in the first place. So that man evens the score, he balances out, he has caused, he is powerful enough to cause a fracture in nature, to let the supernatural, to let the surreal, to let the transcendent loose. But he is also great enough and balanced enough to be able to sew over, to bridge over that fracture and bring wholeness back again. It's called the disease and the cure. And the ability to bring the cure in, to bridge over again is the ability to use vision, to use visionary consciousness, to use the language of visionary consciousness, to make that wholeness come back again. And when one looks for a prototype for that, for some kind of archetypal figure, in a very prosaic way to look for the mythic figure who does this is Prometheus. Prometheus. He steals for man the gift of fire. But that fire is not in the form of like a torch, like the Olympic torch that one could carry and hoist and pass on, the torch which is passed on, the Olympic torch, that comes later. That's a development from the primordiality, the primordiality is that the fire is only there in the spark. The spark is shielded by the narrowed confidentiality of a single reed. That the spark of transformational fire is carried as the spark in the reed and this is Prometheus' gift to man. And with this the Olympic Gods are doomed. They're on a time line. They will be eclipsed by man. And it's interesting to note that the most primordial transform for our species is fire. Fire is the first symbol transform. The species of man before the discovery of fire, before the ability to hold fire as a tool, had a very severe constriction to the limits. In fact when we use symbolic informed consciousness, we can't so much call it limits but we call it liminality. And then instead of having boundaries drawn by lines, we have liminal thresholds which we can approach and slowly cross over. The idea of a boundary being a line which one can draw is a later invention and is the invention of the classical Greeks. The Greeks look for the simple line shape of objectivity and that's a mental phenomenon, it's a symbol phenomenon. When you look to existence, to existent things they do not have line boundaries. They have liminalities, they have thresholds of energy. They have concentrations of dynamic movement, they have time and space in these kinds of juxtapositions, but they don't have lines drawn around them. So that a realistic artist like Rembrandt does not draw line figures and then color them in. Whereas the most prized artist for the classical Greeks was Homer because he draws in his language clear simple lines around things. And the early Greek philosophic idea of a definition is to be able to follow the line of the boundary around something and then you have it. But when that ability got to be large enough so that one could draw a line around the universe, you drew a square, and you said well I have it, and at that precise moment came the power to fracture that square and release the gapping lightning gulf of the supernatural. This happened visually for them. so that when you look at a Greek Tragedy like Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, right away at the beginning we're shown a desolate landscape which is the edge of the world. We've come to the liminality of where men and women are familiar beyond this threshold, no one knows what there is. Prometheus is chained to a rock at the edge of the world. Beyond which is unknown, it's not a part of the universe. The first words of Prometheus Bound here in Gilbert Murray's translation "Here at the furthest verge of earth we stand. The sivien pale, a lone ghostly land" and it goes from there. This is the edge of nature and what was scary was that in terms of previous experience, in a more primordial easier simpler time, that boundary was like a warning zone but by the time of Aeschylus it had become a razor sharp line so that one was afraid to take one more step forward because you could fall off. The world of nature had a sharp edge beyond which only ghostly unknown occurred and existence ended. Only something beyond existence was there and the deepest association with that was death. So that the geometric drawing of lines, of boundaries, the making of shapes that would have an identity, that you could identify something because you knew its shape because you could trace its boundary produced a mental fearfulness underneath it all. And one became afraid not of wild animals but of the wild talents of the human mind, and that's a deeper fear. You can face a lion with a spear. You can even in that great Hellenistic frieze like Alexander the Great, in the mosaic of the frieze one sees Alexander facing the most fearful predator on the earth, his rival King Dorias, who looks in mortal fear, his eyes are huge with fear because the young man is relentlessly cutting his way through all of his army exactly towards him. This was at the battle of Gongomilia. Dorias had an army of, it was estimated almost a million men. Arranged in a battle line that was so long, it was almost fifteen miles long. Alexander the Great had ten thousand men. Except that he didn't face the form of the arrayed power of the Persian Empire, he went off to one end of the line where there were only several thousand men at any one time and he chewed his way up the line and that long fifteen mile line became completely disarrayed. He simply devastated the fixed shape of power that the old world had with the mobile shape of power which Alexander had. Because someone who is faster and more mobile will always beat out the larger ones. The big cumbrous dinosaurs all died off, the little tree shrews that were our ancestors lived because they were mobile, because they had this ability. And consciousness adds a mobility that is so quick that the conscious time space being completely outdistances the capacity of anything natural. And so the supernatural always wins, the transcendental always wins, the conscious, the vision always wins. And so the visionary is always the harbinger for the end of the old. And one can tell that the old is finished when some new vision has already occurred. There's no contest whatsoever. It's inevitable. Prometheus brings the vision of the new, the vision that is no longer mythic gods who will structure nature, but it's visionary conscious man who will come because he can transform nature. He learned to do it half a million years before by fire, now he uses a kind of a Divine gift of creative insight power, creative fire. So that he will transform the nature which the old gods like Zeus ruled but it will no longer be the same nature and so his rule is over and Zeus the god of lightning and thunder resents this. He's used to having his exclusive masculine patristic Olympian power because if you contest him he will throw the lightning at you. The lightning which is that diagonal power which would exile you from nature into the realm of death and beyond except that he is powerless when you control more diagonal cutting conscious space than his lightning can throw at. That's a little bit of Shakespeare language for you. That's how he used to write it.
The Tempest begins. "A temtuous noise of thunder and lightning heard." Old Zeus is still at it, except that he doesn't realize that for a couple thousand years already his number is up. But here's Shakespeare, the mature Shakespeare, a ship's master and a boatswain and in just a few snippets of conversation you hear already the theme of the whole play, the theme of Shakespeare's work. Shakespeare as the bookend to Aeschylus. What began with Aeschylus, what began with his Greek tragedy comes in Shakespeare's tempest to a full two thousand year period. And Shakespeare matures Aeschylus to an ultimate point. What point is that? Of taking it so that the drama now goes to an area that was visionary and prophetic in Aeschylus' time and becomes an actuality in Shakespeare's time. That in that two thousand year period, man does mature so that he brings to the table no longer the fearfulness of Zeus' lightning, but the conscious capacity to put more of a gulf around the lightning of Zeus than Zeus has any ability to adapt to. Man has control of more space in his person than Zeus did in his godhead two thousand years before. Shakespeare is all about the emergence of man the person, the renaissance man who is capable of doing this, he's much stronger than Zeus. Zeus becomes a carnival icon that you can set on the shelf. The master calls out "Boatswain" the boatswain replies "Here master, what cheer". This is Elizabethan mariner talk. "Good speak to the mariners, fall to yarley or we run ourselves aground. Bestir, bestir. High my hearties, chirley, chirley my hearts, yar yar. Take in the top sail, tend to the master's whistle." And then he says to the storm, right after he says to the crew, "don't listen to the storm, listen to the master's whistle", because he's choreographing a way which will cut through the storm, cut through the tempest and bring us all to shore. And then the boatswain, after he says "tend to the master's whistle", he says to the storm, "blow till thou burst thy wind if you have room enough". Hollywood beginning, right? If you know what's going on, if you get the dimensions, if you get the thousands of years of strategy going on and how does Shakespeare come to this? Isn't he supposed to be a country bumpkin? And indeed he's always portrayed as the country bumpkin: These plays couldn't have been by Shakespeare, could they? Uh, they were.
When Shakespeare was twelve, his father who made gloves, he was a glover, his father took him over to one of the neighboring Warwick towns where came one of these late medieval troops of people who put on spectacles, and they dug out this little lake and in the middle of this lake as the center of the spectacle they had a boy on a dolphin. That this boy on the dolphin this Ariel would be spouting water and words and this would be a transformational symbol which the twelve year old Shakespeare always carried with him and remembered. It was about the only time his father ever took him anywhere to see something. And he got infatuated with the whole idea of classical antiquity having all these mythic images and the fact that they had such a deep effect on someone and he began teaching himself well enough to read, in Latin with the English crib, his first favorite author, Ovid. And his first favorite book, "The Metamorphosis". And if you look at Golding's translation of Ovid was about the time that Shakespeare was born, about when he was one year old, 1564 he was born, by 1565 Golding's translation was out. Later to be eclipsed by the great translation by George Sandis, who incorporated a Shakespearean language into his translation of Ovid, about 1632. But for the young Shakespeare, by the time he began to really understand Ovid, in "The Metamorphosis", the years between twelve and seventeen, those five years had passed, had brought him to a certain maturity, and he found himself with a pregnant woman who was eight years older than him and he had to get married, Anne Hathaway, and he had to support himself somehow, and because he was a minor he had to get his parents permission to marry and so Shakespeare became a village school teacher with just a few little nibs of experience. With just a little bit of hedge of knowing just a little bit more than the younger people that he was teaching. And for about seven years Shakespeare lived that kind of life. He had a daughter and then he had twins the next year so he had three children by the time he was twenty-one. He was happily married, he loved Anne. She was, she was worth it. And in those years Shakespeare was like a self taught individual. And he found that there were keys for him in antiquity and the keys were especially the Latin authors. The Roman authors that had a particular kind of humane panache to. He liked Ovid, he liked Plautus and he liked Seneca. He liked Ovid because he was the first and he talked about the transformations in existence, about how on the mythic level of the gods existence always goes through metamorphosis. And that when the existential things that metamorphose in myth become mental things they also can go through a metamorphosis with consciousness. That while physical things metamorph in myth, mental things metamorph in vision, in magic. And so Shakespeare began to see that there was like a parallel of myth in magic. Mythic energy metamorphoses existence, but magic energy metamorphoses symbols. And he learned that this great river of language has two banks, it has one bank in myth and one bank in magic. One bank uses images to metamorphose natural things and the other bank uses magic talismans to metamorphose the conscious qualities and shapes. And so Shakespeare learned his language from Ovid, his language from Plautus. Plautus was the great Roman comic author, he wrote plays: "Funny Thing Happened To Me On The Way To The Forum" is a modern version of one of Plautus' plays. They're always around because they're always characteristics. When he wrote his first comedy, "Comedy Of Errors" he would take a couple of Plautus' plays, he would excerpt characters from both and put them together. From the "Menacne Twins" and from "Anthatron" and put these together and it became his first comedy. But he also like Seneca. Seneca was the sour literary commentator on the throne times of Nero. Seneca was the most brilliant man at Nero's court and he saw first hand how absolutely stupidly cruel power on the level of Nero's Caesar was. He was there when Nero burned the entire city of Rome to get an inspiration for a song. And so in Seneca's dramas one finds this kind of wit, subtle disguised, stoically disguised, deeply penetrating wit, satiric wit. And you find in Shakespeare that Senecan quality of acerbitity (is that too big a word? It's a twenty-five dollar lecture, you have to have some words). A Senecan acerbitity with a Plautian complicated playfulness, with an Ovidian (not Branch Ovidians), with an Ovidian sense of transformation. And the first play that he put together, before "Comedy Of Errors" was "Titus Andronicus". He wrote it in Stratford and when he had finished it, like a new playwright, he had something, where you going to take it, he went to London. Took his play and went to London. And he got there and of course it's just like, No, no one wanted to hear him. They didn't want to hear about it. You don't have any name, who are you, you're from Stratford? But Shakespeare was Shakespeare and so he figured out an angle of vision that no one had figured out. It was so simple that it's absolutely genius. The first playhouse in London was built in 1576 when Shakespeare was twelve years old. It was called The Theater because it was the only one there. London used to have seven gates and one of the gates is called Bishops Gate on the far East. And outside of Bishops Gate were fields and then there were like slums, Shoreditch area. And there in Shoreditch, James Burbage, the father of Richard Burbage, the great actor built the first theater in 1576, and they were so successful and they were making bucks so they put up another little theater just a couple hundred yards away called The Curtain. There were no curtains in Elizabethan theater, it was called The Curtain because the land around there had curtain in the name. And so when Shakespeare came to London about twelve years after they had opened The Theater and The Curtain, with his new play and no one would read it or talk to him or anything, he was twenty-five years old, very capable, Shakespeare at twenty-five was very capable. He just didn't know the form. He didn't know how to write for them. Because plays were written by university wits, guys who had M.A.'s from Cambridge. Guys like Richard Green, guys like Philip Marlowe, guys like Thomas Nash. I mean big time guys, Gabriel Harvey, the name boys, they got an M.A. and have been to Cambridge and can speak the language. You're from where? And you're writing about who? So Shakespeare took an unbelievable angle into the theater. He realized that the powerful people did not walk out of Bishops Gate to the theater, but they rode their horses cause they were rich. So Shakespeare set himself up in business, because here was some opportunity, so he would take care of the rich peoples horses while they were enjoying the play and he did a fantastic job. Spent all the money that he made hiring guys to groom these horses and get the saddles all polished and when they came out they started to notice that this guy really handled business well. So they started to speak to him and discovered that the guy could speak rather well and also that he would flash to them that he was writing plays. He was writing certain kinds of plays, he was taking these university wits' plays and doing them better. And one of the very first plays that came out along with "Comedy Of Errors" was a couple of parts of a play that he was working on about Henry the Sixth. And eventually it would be a three part drama. Because Shakespeare understood the idea of trilogy and later on he understood that trilogy that triangles that triads that that kind of shape that's there is brought to a conclusion by a fourth. That while polarity is annealed by resolving third it's brought into form by a fourth. So the old wisdom tradition was, give good students three corners. If they can't find the fourth corner themselves then they're not good students. Never give them the whole form. If they can't find the fourth corner themselves then they're not worth it. So what you do is you present a trilogy and then you put the fourth element way out there and let them make the connection. So Greek tragedies were always in trilogies but there was always a fourth play called the Satyr play. Because it had a Satire element. It had an element of insight that was not in the tragedy mode, it was outside the tragedy mode, it was beyond, it was extravagantly beyond the limitations of the tragic mode. And so the satyr play was always the concluding element. And for Shakespeare, when he finished the three parts of "Henry VI", he had a comedy all set that was like, it was like a satyr play of the intellectual mode and it took him awhile to bring it into being, but he finally was able to write his "Two Gentlemen Of Verona". In the meantime, there was so much money to be made by the late 1580's, by the beginning of say 1590, 1591, plays had been going on for about fifteen years. The Burbages were getting rather wealthy and the actors of course, being actors wanted a part of the action, like more money, so they decided to set up their own theater. Edward Allen financed a theater called The Rose across the Themes, they call it Bankside. And The Rose began pulling all kinds of people across there. One went across London Bridge, or was ferried over by water taxi and The Rose was a brand new playhouse, really fantastic. Meanwhile Richard Burbage, coming along in his father's footsteps decided that we have to have The Curtain and The Theater brought together and we have to have really new productions, new writers and Shakespeare became a part of that new combine. He became the bright new writer because he could do something no one else could do. He could write a dramatic structure that could hold its own dramatically so that you didn't have to have buffoonery, you didn't have to have acrobats, you didn't have to have bear bating in between the scenes to hold peoples attention. Their attention was held because the language was visionarily alive, it was a magic poetic language that they hadn't heard before. And the first play that shows that is "Taming Of The Shrew". The kind of language that's there. There are times when Petruchio is giving a soliloquy where he starts from being a kind of sensualous glutton wanting to just have Kate's father's money, he becomes challenged by the fact that this woman won't behave and by god he will be man enough to face up to this and figure out how to get her attention to obey him and Petruchio lines become more and more enthused with this kind of conscious lightning of creative insight that he can transform the dynamics, that he doesn't have to remain Petruchio as he was at the beginning of the play, he can transform because of the challenge of Kate, into the renaissance man Petruchio, who has a loving fantastic wife that no other man can live with. Because she has a language that has acerbitity. Chews the ear off everyone, including her father. And her father, by the end of the play, by the end of "Taming Of The Shrew", realizes his fortune is safe in Petruchio's hands, he's managed Kate hasn't he. No one in the world is going to be as difficult. And so with "Taming Of The Shrew", Shakespeare comes into his own as someone who can hold a dramatic consciously active play all the way through to its end. And you find then in those plays the beginnings of the Shakespeare that we would recognize and know and right at that moment the plague hit London and closed the playhouses down. Nobody could, they were closed, you couldn't go, there were no plays, no work. And so Shakespeare, staying in London, did what a Shakespeare would do. He used the occasion and the time to write fantastic poems like Venus And Adonis, The Rape Of Lucrecia, The Sonnets and he made friends with these poems, these fantastic, the kind of poetry that had not been seen since Chaucer. Shakespeare's Sonnets are a new level beyond Chaucer. And he made friends, he made friends with the Earl of Penbrook, William, the Earl of Penbrook and with Lord Southampton. So that when the playhouses opened a couple of years later, 1595, what three plays, three plays in one year, Shakespeare puts out on the boards. He put out "Love's Labour's Lost", "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream", all in the same year, 1595. It just poured out from him. And by the time you get to "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Shakespeare is not only head and shoulders, but he's also waist and ankles above any other writer at the time. Because in that lull, Marlowe had died. The only man who probably could have given him a run for his money. I know four hundred years later, Bernard Shaw said I'm going to give Shakespeare a run for his money. But in that age the only man who could have done it was Marlowe. But the peculiar thing is is that in that time period when Marlowe died there was also a scandal, a minor scandal, but a literary scandal that caused all kinds of consternation vis a vis the young Shakespeare. A man named Richard Green, it's like an accursed name, Richard Green. There always seems to be a Richard Green around. This Richard Green who was university wit and had dissipated himself. His pride as a university wit was that he could be buddies with the worst scoundrel in London, a guy named Cutting Ball. I don't know if that's vulgar or not, but that's what he was called. And Green took up with his sister and the sister was worse than the brother. Anyway he died in a desolute slum in London and his last dying thing, he wrote a little pamphlet called "A Groats Worth Of Wit" which branded Shakespeare as an upstart crow. That here the university wits had made all this gorgeous colorful language and fantastic mythic characters brought to the English stage and here this upstart crow puts on our plumage and says it's his. The curious paradoxical thing is that Green was that figure, not Shakespeare. Green's only play that is still worth remembering, it's not worth putting on, is called "Friar Bungay and Friar Bacon". Green, being a university wit, found out that his competitor university wit, Marlowe was writing "Doctor Faustus", and by word of mouth, "Doctor Faustus" was going to be Marlowe's greatest play, and it is. And so he thought that he would get a book, a play on magic out before Marlowe. And Magic's play, that Marlowe magic play of Faustus, he brought out an alchemical play "Friar Bungay and Friar Bacon", the Bacon is Roger Bacon, the great alchemist from the twelve hundreds. And so Green thought he would upstage Marlowe. Of course Marlowe's Faustus just blew him out. But Shakespeare remembered this and when he was set to retire, he wrote "The Tempest", partly in homage to Marlowe and partly to put a high water mark in English drama that has never been reached since. The Tempest is the greatest play in the English language. It's a play about someone who knows about magic, Prospero, the protagonist has this magic wizards mantle that when he has it on, his magic language commands the elements. But he must learn to take his mantle off and let nature take its course because his daughter Miranda falls in love. And he realizes she has a right to natural love without the complications of her father's magic making a supernatural dimension to the world all the time. More next week.
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