Shakespeare's Muse An Introductory Overview

Recent interest in who Shakespeare's Muse may have been prompts one to come forth
to dispel the drastically simplistic notions that have been brought forward.
In this essay John O'Meara suggests where our concern with Shakespeare should
actually lie or what form of Muse we can suppose it was that commanded his
development the way it did.

Shakespeare was fated for a certain experience from which he could not extricate
himself, even if he had wished to. Highlighted is his struggle with Martin Luther's
injunction to imagine human depravity to the fullest, with which O'Meara compares
the route travelled by Christopher Marlowe. The challenge was laid down to
Shakespeare to imagine the worst of human tragedy, which finally focuses for him in
the precipitated death of the loved one.

But it testifies to the enduring power of Shakespeare's Muse that She has 'borne' this death
with him

John O'Meara was born in Canada and educated in England, at the University of East Anglia where he became a Shakespearean. In my writing career he developed a neo-Romantic approach that allowed him to explain, among other things, how Shakespeare could evolve out of his deep tragic period into his triumphant late plays (sometimes called "romances"). Naturally, this neo-Romantic position drew him more and more intensively also into the study of Romantic and post-Romantic literature, and the result was a series of studies collected under the title "On Nature and the Goddess". Because of his background he was also able to refer this literature back to Shakespeare who now became a measure and touchstone of what many authors were claiming is possible in our relationship to Nature and the Goddes.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ iUniverse

Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 5, 2007  

Print length ‏ : ‎ 52 pages

ISBN13 ‏ : ‎ 9780595422296