On Himself

Interpretation of a Passage in Shakespeare

Q: On that famous passage of Shakespeare's—

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.—

would it be legitimate to comment as follows?—"The meaning, on the surface, is that for each of us life will pass away as if it were a dream and what will remain is the sleep of death, an undetailed everlasting rest. But there is a deeper implication: just as the actor-spirits have not been destroyed and only their visible play has vanished while they themselves, seeming to melt into 'thin air have returned to their unknown realm of consciousness, so too the sleep of death is but an annihilation in appearance—it is really an unknown state which is our original mode of existence. Nor is this all: from the fourth line

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onward the language and the rhythm serve to evoke by a certain large and deep suggestiveness an intuition of some transcendental God-self—a being, rapt and remote, who experiences through each individual life a dream-interlude between a divine peace and peace, an 'insubstantial pageant' conjured up for a while by its creative imagination between two states of self-absorbed superconsciousness. We are reminded of the Upanishad's description of the mystic trance in which the whole world fades like an illusion and the individual soul enters the supreme Spirit's unfeatured ecstasy of repose. Shakespeare's intuition is not pure Upanishad, the supreme Spirit is not clearly felt and whatever profundity is there is vague and unintentional; still, a looming mystic light does appear, stay a little, find a suggestive contour before receding and falling away to a music sublimely defunctive."

A: I don't think Shakespeare had any such idea in his mind. What he is dwelling on is the insubstantiality of the world and of human existence. "We are such stuff" does not point to any God-self. "Dream" and "sleep" would properly imply Somebody who dreams and sleeps, but the two words are merely metaphors. Shakespeare is not an intellectual or philosophic thinker nor a mystic one. All that you can say is that there comes out here an impression or intimation of the illusion of Maya, the dream-character of life, but without any vision or intimation of what is behind the dream and the illusion. There is nothing in the passage that even hints vaguely the sense of something abiding—all is insubstantial, "into air, into thin air", "baseless fabric," "insubstantial pageant", "we are such stuff as dreams are made on". "Stuff" points to some inert material rather than a spirit dreamer or sleep. Of course one can always read things into it for one's own pleasure, but...

8-3-1935

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Q: I admit that Shakespeare was not a philosophic or

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mystic thinker; also that he had no wish to mysticise in this passage. But is great poetry always a matter of one's conscious intention?—do not unconscious or accidental effects occur which have implications beyond the poet's personal aim or at least unrealised in full by him? A genuinely mystic accident of a high order is the quotation I sent you some days back—

        the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

If we take this in connection with Prospero's lines we may have not only an intuition of the illusion of Maya but also that of an abiding something behind the illusory appearance: the word "dream" common to the two passages is extremely suggestive. But as Shakespeare was not a systematic thinker it might not be right to construct like this a philosophy of any sort. And in my essay I do not wish to do so. What, however, surprises me is your saying that there is not the vaguest hint of something abiding. In the magic performance which Prospero gave to Ferdinand and Miranda it was spirits that produced a simulacrum of material reality—a very convincing simulacrum and the young lovers must have been quite taken in, until Prospero reminded them of what he had said before—namely, that "these our actors...were all spirits." They melt into thin air but do not disappear from existence, from conscious being of some character however unearthly: they just become invisible and what disappears is the visible pageant produced by them, a seemingly material construction which yet was a mere phantom. From this seeming, Prospero catches the suggestion that all that looks material is like a phantom, a dream, which must vanish, leaving no trace. But as the actor-spirits are not destroyed with the fabric of their visionary pageant, the terms "baseless" and "insubstantial" assume a meaning not quite what you give them. They mean that the pageant

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has no basis in materiality, in substantiality as opposed to spirit-nature; and by "we are such stuff as dreams are made on" the outer human earthly personalities are regarded as dreamlike, as having no permanent basis of material reality. I may be going beyond the premises in speaking of a God-self, but, all things considered, what strikes me as analogically implicit in the passage is that "we" and earth-existence are projected as a visionary pageant by some immaterial being or beings. I can't exactly say whether spirits akin to Ariel and his crew are implied or some superconscious God-self; but a general implication of occult if not mystic reality responsible for the pageant of human life and earth-existence seems to me inescapable. If pressed to choose on the side either of occult or of mystic implication, I would incline towards the latter: the intuition of Maya is so strong that the implicit significance may very well be some vague shadow of its Upanishadic complement, and the word "sleep" may be a far hint of some rapt, remote, self-absorbed superconsciousness. The whole thing is vague and far-looming because in Shakespeare's case a mystic inspiration would be mostly accidental and his was not a mind that would transmit it easily. The difficulty would be increased since this inspiration was mystic rather in the Indian than the Christian way. Only in that line and a half about the prophetic soul did an ultra-Christian mystic intuition come out more or less explicit—a miracle not to be expected always.

I may be quite at fault in all this complex impression and if you tell me again after considering the points I have broached that it is absolutely off the mark I shall at once scrap it.

A: One can read anything into anything. But Shakespeare says nothing about the material world or there being a base somewhere else or of our being projected into a dream. He says, "We are such stuff." The spirits vanish into air, into thin air, as Shakespeare emphasises by repetition, which means to any plain

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interpretation that they too are unreal, only dream-stuff; he does not say that they disappear from view but are there behind all the time. The whole stress is on the unreality and insubstantiality of existence, whether of a pageant or of the spirits or of ourselves—there is no stress anywhere, no mention or hint of an eternal spiritual existence. Shakespeare's idea here as everywhere is the expression of a mood of the vital mind, it is not a reasoned philosophical conclusion. However, if you like to argue that, logically, this or that is the true philosophical consequence of what Shakespeare says and that therefore the Daemon who inspired him must have meant that, I have no objection. I am simply interpreting the passage as Shakespeare's transcribing mind has put it.

9-3-1934

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Q: Just a word more about that passage. If it is taken in vacuo, there is no internal justification for my idea which turns on the survival of the spirits after the pageant has faded. But almost immediately after the stage indication: "...to a strange, hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish", occurs this aside on the part of Prospero: (To the Spirits) "Well done; avoid; no more." The quoted passage follows a little later. Then again Prospero says after Ferdinand and Miranda are gone: "Come with a thought:—I thank you:—Ariel, come." Thereupon Ariel enters.

Ariel: Thy thoughts I cleave to. What's thy pleasure? Spirit,
Prospero: We must prepare to meet with Caliban.

What do you make of all this? And when Ariel reports how he has lured Prospero's enemies into a "foul lake", Prospero commends him:

        This was well done, my bird.
Thy shape invisible retain thou still.

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Still later, comes another stage-direction: "A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of hounds...; Prospero and Ariel setting them on." Even if this is taken to refer to Spirits other than those who produce that masque, the previous quotations are sufficient to prove that only the visible shapes and formations vanished—the entities themselves remained behind all the time.

To echo X: "Qu'en dites vous?"

A: I don't see what all that has to do with the meaning of the passage in question which plainly insists that nothing endures. Obviously Ariel had an invisible shape—invisible to human eyes, but the point of the passage is that all shapes and substances and beings disappear into nothingness. We are concerned with Prospero's meaning, not with what actually happened to the spirits or for that matter to the pageant in total which we might conceive also of having an invisible source or material. He uses the disappearance of the pageant and the spirits as a base for the idea that all existence is an illusion—it is the idea of the illusion that he enforces. If he had wanted to say, "We disappear, all disappears to view but the reality of us and of all things persists in a greater immaterial reality", he would surely have said so or at least not left it to be inferred or reasoned out by you in the twentieth century. I repeat, however, that this is my view of Shakespeare's meaning and does not affect any possibility of reading into it something that Shakespeare's outer mind did not receive or else did not express.

10-3-1935