HUGHES, TED, 1930-1998.
Ted Hughes papers > Writings by Ted Hughes > Prose > Book-length prose

Scope and Content Note

The subseries contains manuscript and types drafts of book-length prose by Ted Hughes from 1967-1995. A large part of this subseries consists of works relating to Hughes's interest in William Shakespeare. The introduction Hughes wrote for A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse was the genesis of his ideas on Shakespeare and myth, which eventually came to fruition in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, published over twenty years later. Hughes's selection of Shakespeare's verse was first published in 1971 in America by Doubleday (as With Fairest Flower While Summer Lasts: Poems from Shakespeare) and then six months later by Faber (as A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse) in the UK. TH's introduction was the same for both editions, although arranged differently. Twenty years later, the selection was republished, first by Faber (as A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse), followed quickly by the Ecco Press in America (as The Essential Shakespeare). Hughes revised the introductory essay for these 1991 editions, but again, they are the same for the US and the UK editions.

As with much of Ted Hughes's work, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (SGCB) went through an exhaustive drafting process. Its beginnings were in the introduction he wrote in 1971 for his selection of Shakespeare's verse, and indeed TH included in the SGCB archive some initial rewrites of his Essential Shakespeare introduction. "[T]his rewrite eventually developed – through these manuscripts" (TH's index note, Box 21) into a series of letters Hughes wrote to Donya Feuer from 23 April to 14 June 1990. In a note attached to the archive, TH writes that "Danya Feuers [sic] works with Ingmar Bergman in the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. She is an old friend who has done a great deal of work with Shakespeare – a great deal of work, toe [sic], in developing my ideas about the plays with Swedish actors." As he notes in the "Foreword" to SGCB, "it [occurred] to me that if I anatomized what I had identified as Shakespeare's myth, as it revealed itself in each work, and followed through what are to me its fascinating evolutions, and set it all out in letters to Donya Feuer, bit by bit, as simply as possible, who knows, maybe something would emerge. Those letters became this book" (xiii). In the letters to Feuer, Hughes has already divided his project into five broad sections. Thereafter he begins to divide up these sections into smaller "chapters," as many as 80 of them, eventually arranged into six sections (instead of the initial five – see 24 July 1991 letter to his copy editor, Gillian Bate), and then further arranged into three very broad "Parts." In a letter of 30 July 1991, Bate recommended that he remove the small numbered chapters and instead refer to the six sections as chapters, still under three broad Parts. This is the general final structure of the published version. There are seven complete typescript drafts of SGCB in the collection. For purposes of differentiation, they are numbered TS 1 – 7 according to their apparent order of composition.

Arrangement Note

Arranged by date of publication.