The Vale of Soul-making in Keats and Shakespeare
“I am not what I am”
(Othello I:I:66)
I wake from my dreams in a sweat, tears streaming down my cheeks. It all seems so real, built off remembrances of yesterdays. Dreams of people I loved, they reach deeper, to a world that I have not yet been to. I want to believe that Keats’ negative capability can exist, but I doubt myself so often and wait. It has taken me years to realize that while I adore and perhaps obsess over Keats’s words; I will never fully understand them.
Keats and Shakespeare, two of literary history’s greatest figures, use words and images throughout their works that allow us to connect to remembrance and kenosis on a deeper level. Words thread the soul together creating a bond between the reader and the work that is unique to each individual. Shakespeare does this through his sonnets, plays, and most memorable to me, his poetry. Keats’s remembrance is most evident in his poems and letters, specifically to Fanny Brawne. These connections that are formed create a bridge from the real to the mythological. Venturing through these worlds, the real (the social world) to the mythological (a world of insight and ecstasy), helps us to better understand Keats’s idea of negative capability and how important the act of remembrance is. Shakespeare’s characters specifically, reflect an understanding of human nature and the psyche that somehow impacts each and every one of us.
From the moment that Keats receives a collection of Shakespeare’s works, he is struck by Shakespeare’s ability to portray human suffering, love, deceit, and history within his writings yet is able to leave things as they are. Keats once wrote that Shakespeare was “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Keats looked to Shakespeare and was inspired by his writings enough to conform to the idea of negative capability himself as well. Negative capability means that we are able to examine the world without desire or reconciliation of certain things.
Being given the power to explore within our imagination, we are allowed to set ourselves aside in order to understand others and the worlds we are a part of. I emphasize “worlds” because we move so often from the mythological to the real, sometimes so much that we are unable to distinguish them. I strongly believe that this is why Shakespeare is such a powerful writer because his characters help us to make this connection. Connecting on a deeper level, through what is most original in us, the soul reflects who we truly are while also making us aware of who we have become or think we have become. If anything is true it is that in fact “sometimes we are all devils to ourselves” when we fail to remember who we are.
I used to look at the “vales” in Keats’ “The Vale of Soul Making” as a representation of an unveiling of sorts. It was as if they were the next stone in the pond as we leap across. But now, as I have been studying Shakespeare and his characters within his plays and poems, I realize that those vales could actually serve as distortions. They cloud the soul, and it seems that they represent the deceptions, lies, and untrue things in life. We are able to hide behind or within these vales, deep in the soul where we are kept from who we really are. Shakespeare mentions the idea of “powerful graces” and shows how they are so easily able to be twisted (Richard III). When we allow power, love and hate, or desires to enter into our soul they can distort the real. Phillip Newell in Shakespeare and the Human Mystery emphasizes, “the journey towards wholeness involves a confronting of the shadow and a turning from the false self” (Newell 3). It also involves clearing out cobwebs and finally finding the strength and courage to accept what is really there.
What we so often fail to realize is that we are all very much the same. We all share a beginning that originated from something much deeper than we can understand. Perhaps our beginning is incomprehensible until we have reached our end. Looking at Shakespeare’s characters, we can move closer to this understanding by finding something in them that is also within ourselves. I believe that while we connect with Shakespeare’s characters, we have to be careful to not allow them to create us, but rather awaken within us what we have forgotten. Reading Shakespeare’s works, it is impossible not to notice how they rise and fall simply to rise again, or sometimes they just fall. They always reflect the process of going through tragedy and being reduced to nothing though with such beauty. The process of unveiling becomes a process of recovery and discovery for both Shakespeare’s characters and us.
What do we remember most as we enter this process? It seems we always remember what we wish we could forget. The pain of betrayal, and that, which inspires, hurts and makes us. The act of remembrance is sometimes clouded though by what we think we remember, which in fact is not at all what we remember. In regards to Shakespeare, King Lear and Miranda present themselves most clearly in my mind. King Lear looks to Cordelia to remember who he was and realizes that he does not even know himself. Lear becomes almost desperate in his attempt to remember asking, “who is it that can tell me who I am?” (I:IV). I think we can all think of a time when we have asked ourselves this. We forget so easily who we are because we are caught up in the social world where chaos and vocation take over us. King Lear does not realize that he has no idea who he really is though until he loses everything, which is then when he is able to see everything.
Miranda traces back through the mythological in order to reach her beginning. She is so childlike and innocent in the way that her beginning is told to her, recounted through storytelling. For many of us, this is how we come to understand where we came from. In the social world, the idea of beginnings seems to be irrelevant to us, but as we venture through the mythological we begin to understand more. Mythology brings us to the core of remembrance and origin into that "dark and backward abysm of time" (The Tempest I:II).
I have become lost in Shakespeare’s works in a way that only I could understand and even I do not fully understand. I am attracted to his tragedies, as are all of us as humans. Connecting through the loss of love that lives solely through my remembrances. I am constantly held down by who I want to be and who I am. Remembrances sometimes carry a weight with them, but it is impossible to rid ourselves of them. I am realizing as I am writing this paper that we should remember and be honored that we do. If we can remember, then we can know that we have lived, loved, and maybe lost but most importantly we experienced. We live. Immortality is achieved through our words and remembrances. They thread not only our soul, but our world.
The worst has not yet come. I am not laughing. I am not crying. So the worst is not upon me. I know this because I still remember, love and breathe new life each day. Even death will not make me forget, but I fear that forgetting may be my death. My final vale.
