Shakespeare and the Gods

Virginia Mason Vaughan

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474284288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

Shakespeare and the Gods examines Shakespeare's many allusions to six classical gods (Jupiter, Diana, Venus, Mars, Hercules and Ceres) that enhance his readers' and audiences' understanding and enjoyment of his work. Vaughan explains their historical context, from their origins in ancient Greece to their appropriation in Rome and their role in medieval and early modern mythography. The book also illuminates Shakespeare's classical allusions by comparison to the work of contemporaries like Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and Thomas Heywood and
explores allusive patterns that repeat throughout Shakespeare's canon. Each chapter concludes with a more focused reading of one or two plays in which the god appears or serves as an underlying motif. Shakespeare and the Gods highlights throughout the gods' participation in western constructions of gender as well as classical myth's role in changing attitudes toward human violence and sexuality.

1

Contexts

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,

They kill us for their sport.

(KL, 4.1.38–9)

Princes … should live like gods above,

Who freely give to every one that come to honour them.

(Per, 2.3.60–1)

The Roman philosopher and politician Cicero contended that the stories collected in Homer, Virgil and Ovid are the ridiculous ‘dreams of madmen’, especially

with their portrayal of the gods as fired with anger and maddened with lust: they have set before our eyes their wars and battles, their conflicts and wounds, their hatred and divisions and disagreements, their births and deaths, their plaints and outbursts of grief, their uncontrolled lusts, their adulteries and the bonds combining them, their sexual intercourse with humans, and their begetting of mortals from their immortal seed.

(2008: 18)

These myths, Cicero opines, reduce the gods ‘to the level of human frailties’ (2008: 72). Yet, human frailties are the stuff of drama, and it is no wonder that Shakespeare relied so heavily on the stories that Cicero dismissed.

Similarly, Shakespeare’s first readers and earliest audiences were, by and large, familiar with the gods of ancient Greece and Rome – they knew about the gods’ love affairs, their quarrels and their interventions in human life. Few twenty-first-century readers and playgoers share the same literary background; most, I suspect, are baffled by Shakespeare’s allusions to ancient deities. Shakespeare and the Gods addresses this contextual gap with an overview of the discursive resources that recounted the classical gods’ nature and activities and were available to early modern readers, including Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s baseline was the Metamorphoses – that compendium of ancient myths compiled by the Roman poet Ovid in the first century CE. The dramatist knew this work well, both in the original Latin and in Arthur Golding’s English translation (1567).¹ Between 1571 and 1579 young Shakespeare attended King Edward’s New School in Stratford, where he studied the major Latin poets, historians and rhetoricians, especially Ovid, Virgil, Livy, Cicero and Quintilian, as well as John Lyly’s Latin Grammar (Wolfe, 2012: 519). Each day the boys studied five or six lines of the Metamorphoses, reading them out loud, translating them into English, examining their context and style, and discussing their moral implications. After two years of Ovid, the students moved on to Virgil’s Aeneid. By the time Shakespeare finished school he would have encountered all of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and at least the first six books of The Aeneid (Taylor, 2000: 1). And of all the texts Shakespeare absorbed as a grammar school boy, Ovid remained the mainstay throughout his writing career.

Shakespeare’s references to Icarus in the Henry VI plays illustrate how the Metamorphoses shaped his thinking about human psychology. Icarus’s father Daedalus crafted wings of feathers and wax to escape Minos’s Cretan labyrinth. Eager to join his father aloft, Icarus made his own wings but ignored his father’s advice not to fly too close to the sun. When the wax melted, Icarus fell into the sea and perished. Geffrey Whitney’s 1586 collection of emblems includes an image of Icarus’s fall; the accompanying text encapsulates the conventional wisdom about Icarus: ‘Those which past their reach do mount / Who seek the things to mortal men denied, / And search the Heavens’, should consider their own weaknesses ‘Lest as they climb, they fall to their decay’ (1586: 28).

Christopher Marlowe reiterated this simple moral in the Prologue to Dr Faustus. The Chorus explains that when Faustus became ‘swollen with cunning of a self-conceit, / His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspired his overthrow’ (1974: Prologue, ll. 20–2). By alluding to Icarus’s fall, the Prologue establishes a sense of foreboding – the aspiring Faustus is doomed. His quest to become a ‘demigod’, to rise above the status of mortal man, to fly too high, will inevitably fail.

In the early years of Shakespeare’s career when Marlowe was his sometime collaborator and chief competitor, it is hardly surprising that he should also allude to Icarus. The Icarus myth’s rise-and-fall pattern seems particularly appropriate for the Henry VI plays and Richard III, where ambitious men who seek the crown reach the pinnacle, then precipitously fall. But, in contrast to Marlowe, Shakespeare exploits the story of Icarus for an altogether different purpose. In Act 4 of 1 Henry VI, the English hero John Talbot valiantly battles French forces who seek to retake their country from the English. Alongside him fights his young son John. Surrounded and doomed to defeat, the father and son argue: Talbot wants his son to escape, but young John insists that he will stay and die with his father. Talbot identifies himself with Daedalus: ‘Then follow thou thy desperate sire of Crete,’ and addresses his son as ‘Thou Icarus’ (4.4.109–10). After young John is killed, Talbot reiterates the theme. John thrust himself

Into the clustering battle of the French,

And in that sea of blood my boy did drench

His ever-mounting spirit, and there died

My Icarus, my blossom in his pride.

(1H6, 4.4.125–8)

Shakespeare alludes to Daedalus and Icarus again in the third part of Henry VI after King Henry has lost his final battle and learns that Richard, Duke of Gloucester, has killed his son Prince Edward. Richard contemptuously boasts

Why, what a peevish fool was that of Crete

That taught his son the office of a fowl!

And yet for all his wings the fool was drown’d.

King Henry further extends Richard’s allusion:

I, Daedalus; my poor boy, Icarus;

Thy father, Minos, that denied our course;

The sun that seared the wings of my sweet boy,

Thy brother Edward, and thyself, the sea,

Whose envious gulf did swallow up his life.

(3H6, 5.6.18–25)

Here Prince Edward is killed in the attempt to maintain his father’s right to the throne, while in 1 Henry VI young John Talbot refuses to leave his father and dies on the battlefield.

In these allusions Shakespeare eschews the simple moralism of Whitney’s emblem and Marlowe’s prologue and draws instead upon the pathos in Ovid’s account of a son who perishes emulating his father. The allusions are more about the father’s grief than the son’s failure, and they capture Ovid’s interest in the father’s psychology. Ovid describes how tenderly Daedalus helped his son to fasten the wings, warning him of the perils in flying too high; ‘His aged cheeks were wet, his hands did quake, in fine he gave / His son a kiss the last that he alive should ever have.’ After the wings begin to melt, Icarus calls to his father, who cannot intervene in time to save his son:

His wretched Father (but as then no father) cried in fear:

O Icarus, O Icarus, where art thou? Tell me where

That I may find thee, Icarus. He saw the feathers swim

Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spited him.

(8: 284–311)

As this passage demonstrates, Ovid’s compilation of myths consistently emphasizes the ways extreme passion effects physical changes in his mythical characters. As Jonathan Bate explains, throughout his career Shakespeare rewrote those physical changes ‘in the form of mental transformations’ (1993: 74). His allusions to Icarus in the Henry VI plays consequently underscore the tragedy of a father’s loss of the son he loves.²

The backstory

Whether in the original Latin or Golding’s translation, Ovid’s Metamorphoses crystallized for Shakespeare’s England the identity of gods who had evolved through 1, 100 years of Greek and Roman history. The Metamorphoses depicts hundreds of these divinities, many of whom underwent transformations from god to mortal and vice versa. Ovid narrates myths that had been told and retold, transmitted from community to community and eventually written down.

What we now know as ancient Greece began as separate communities on the Pelopennesian peninsula and along the coasts of the Aegean Sea, including the west coast of modern Turkey. The Greeks were a seafaring people, and as they travelled the eastern Mediterranean, they discovered a host of locally worshipped divinities in disparate cities and villages. Greek traders and settlers gradually adapted and repurposed many of those deities. As early as 1100 BCE, poets’ accounts of local gods spread orally from one community to another; over time, multi-regional cults emerged.

Exchanges between the Greeks, Phoenicians and Near Eastern cultures occurred on the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. The Greeks who settled there around 900 BCE adapted many Near Eastern beliefs (Woodward, 2007: 92). The myth of Aphrodite’s (Venus’s) birth, for example, began on Cyprus. Britomartis originated as a local goddess in Crete and was later subsumed in the cult of Artemis (Diana) (ODCMR, 2003: 90–1).

After the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, c. 900 BCE, myths that had been spoken and sung for generations were compiled in manuscripts. Few of the earliest survive, but two poets’ work, written down sometime between 750 and 700 BCE, provided a foundation for the classical literature that followed. According to the fifth-century (BCE) historian Herodotus, Hesiod and Homer ‘created the theogony for the Greeks, gave the gods their title, distinguished their roles and skills, and indicated their appearance’.³ Any discussion of the ancient Greek deities must begin with their work. Accordingly, the chapters that follow frequently draw upon Hesiod’s Theogony and Homer’s Iliad to establish the gods’ origins.

Hesiod exemplifies the impact of immigration across the Aegean. According to his own account, his father was a sea trader who moved from the city of Cyme on the coast of Asia Minor to Boetia on the Peloponnesian peninsula. In the Works and Days, Hesiod offers insights into his experiences on his father’s farm and advice for a life based on honest work. The Theogony is more relevant to this book’s purposes, for in that poem he outlines the Olympians’ complicated origins and recounts their genealogy.

Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are better known. While Homer focuses primarily on mortals like Hector, Achilles and Odysseus, the gods frequently intervene in the action. The Iliad is based on events that occurred around 1200 BCE during the Greeks’ ten-year siege of Troy, located in Asia Minor. The Odyssey narrates the adventures of the Greek king Odysseus as he travelled back to Greece after the fall of Troy.

Five of the six gods featured in Shakespeare and the Gods – Jupiter, Venus, Diana, Mars and Ceres – are among the many Greek gods who appear in Hesiod’s and Homer’s accounts. Those five gods resided on Mount Olympus and were often known as the Olympians, the most powerful gods in the Greek pantheon. The sixth deity, Hercules, was not originally an Olympian. As a demigod – the son of Jupiter and the human Alcmena – he lived on earth but ascended to Olympus after his death. Although Hercules is something of an outlier, he resonated strongly in the early modern period and appears prominently in Shakespeare’s plays.⁴

Countless other gods besides those discussed in this book are mentioned in the works of Hesiod, Homer and Ovid. Many served to explain natural events – the constellations’ movements, the changing moon, the rising sun, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters. Mythological monsters, such as the Centaurs who were half man, half horse, or the chimera, a triple-bodied creature composed of lion, goat and snake, were frightening amalgams of the human and the bestial. Humans could also be made immortal and worshipped as gods. Heroes who died fighting for their communities were often deified and formed an intermediate class between gods and men. Theseus, the legendary king of Athens and companion to Hercules, is such a semi-deity.

Today we think of the Greek gods mostly in terms of the stories – the myths – that have survived. But throughout ancient Greece, the gods, particularly the Olympians, were objects of religious devotion. By the fifth century BCE, the Greeks had constructed temples across the eastern Mediterranean. The Parthenon, a temple dedicated to Athena (Minerva) that stands on Athens’ Acropolis is the best known today. Inside the Parthenon stood a huge statue of Athena, and displayed on its walls were colourful friezes depicting battles and images of the other Greek deities.

Within the temples or sanctuaries, Greek communities offered ritual sacrifices to the gods. The temples also served as storehouses for the gods’ possessions. Worshippers left ‘votives’, or gifts, whether in gratitude or in hope of a favour. Archaeologists have unearthed innumerable votives, including coins, jewellery, textiles, cups and ceramic vases. Offerings might also include figurines depicting a particular god.

From the surviving artifacts, as well as the formulaic phrases repeated by the poets, we know that gods were often identified by their attributes. In The Nature of the Gods Cicero’s interlocutor Cotta lists many of them: ‘[F]rom childhood onward we identify Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo and the other deities with the features which painters and sculptors have decided to plant on them’, including ‘the equipment they carry, the clothes that they wear, and their time of life’ (2008: 31). Zeus (Jupiter) was known by his thunderbolt; Athena (Minerva) by her helmet; Apollo by his lyre; and Artemis (Diana) by her bow and arrows. Some were accompanied by a particular animal, and their chariots were drawn by specific beasts or birds. Juno rode on peacocks, for example, while white swans drew Venus’s chariot. This iconography enabled the creators of cups and vases to paint specific gods and represent their myths in ways that worshippers would recognize.

In the second century BCE, when the Roman Republic began its conquest of Greek territories, invading armies that assimilated local gods renamed them and established their own worship practices. In the Metamorphoses Ovid codified the Roman versions of ancient Greek myths.

While it would be difficult to overestimate Ovid’s importance to Shakespeare’s imaginary, the playwright-poet also drew on wide reading in other Latin poems, from Ovid’s Fasti and Amores to Virgil’s Aeneid, and, in the latter part of his career, Homer’s Iliad. In the chapters that follow, Shakespeare and the Gods explores these and many other classical texts to show how the six gods Shakespeare mentions most often and most substantially – Jupiter, Venus, Hercules, Diana, Mars and Ceres – were conceived. Each serves as a real character or underlying presence in at least one major work.

And the other seven Olympians? Shakespeare does not treat them with the same complexity as these six. Some he barely mentions, others served only as shorthand references to a particular entity or quality. The final section of Shakespeare and the Gods, Afterthoughts, includes a brief overview of the dramatist’s allusions to these other deities, but a detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this book.⁵

Shakespeare’s allusive power

Allusions recall persons, places, events or literary figures that raise associations in the reader’s or hearer’s mind. They illustrate or enhance what is being said, but they can also suggest a discrepancy (Abrams, 1993: 8). The diminutive boy Moth’s hilarious appearance as the gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Contexts
• 2. Jupiter
• 3. Venus
• 4. Hercules
• 5. Diana
• 6. Mars
• 7. Ceres
• Afterthoughts
• Appendix: Names of the Gods
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint