Fairy Stories and the Eucatastrophe of Shakespeare

I have spent several weeks preparing to lead a weekly after-school club on Shakespeare. In the process of doing so, I have returned to some of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets with the perspective of a teacher.

Perhaps to read Shakespeare is always, in some way, to read as a student. But I now look at the text with questions of significance that are somewhat different from the questions a student asks: I am no longer only seeking to understand what Shakespeare has to say and how he says it, but I am also seeking to understand what a student ought to take away from Shakespeare’s stories. This question is complicated by the fact that the students to whom I will be teaching Shakespeare are not, as one might think, high schoolers, but the youngest of my school’s participants, those in grades K-2.

Why try to teach a simplified Shakespeare to such young minds anyway? What could children who can hardly read profit from the complicated tales of that old master of the English language? I would propose that Shakespeare’s plays themselves—especially comedies such as A Midsummer’s Night Dream—point to an answer. Shakespeare’s plays, even in a simplified form, promise to stretch and train the imaginations of those who enjoy them. Shakespeare’s comedies prepare the young soul to delight in the true comedy of history.

My own first encounters with Shakespere involved two of his best-loved comedies: A Midsummer’s Night Dream and As You Like It. I was eleven when I read them both. I cannot recall my specific thoughts about the propositional “message” of either play, but I do remember that the forest fairylands of each play captivated me. The character Puck in A Midsummer’s Night Dream seemed to me to be a figure of Peter Pan, with real power and more mystery. Rosalind and Celia’s friendship and flight into the Forest of Arden in As You Like It seemed right out of a middle-grade fantasy novel. In these encounters, Shakespeare’s “green world” enchanted me.

The great literary critic Northrop Frye coined the term “the green world” in his study Anatomy of Criticism: the green world represents “the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from ‘reality,’ but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate.” Frye considers Shakespeare’s comedies as especially exemplary of the green world archetype, for in many of them, Shakespeare contrasts the political and intrapersonal tensions of the civilized world with the wonder and thrill of the uncontrolled natural (and supernatural) world. And in the contest of these worlds, Shakespeare shows the latter—the world of love and joy—to be superior. 

As Theseus and Hippolyta reflect in the final act of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, the strange stories of the green world—of lovers changed and then united—are not mere stories. At first, Theseus, doubtful, offers that all imaginative works are no more than “airy” nothings:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

But Hippolyta counters that the “story of the night told over, / And all their minds transfigured so together” bears witness better than “fancy’s images” that something “strange and admirable” is indeed true, that, as Theseus soon after announces, “joy and fresh days of love” may truly resolve the tensions and squabbles of ordinary life. The coupling at the end of A Midsummer’s Night Dream is proof that poets and lovers are no lunatics but follow a higher logic than the logic of plain human reason. The coupling at the end of As You Like It reveals likewise: as the god of marriage sings when joining the couples in marriage:

You and you are sure together,
As the winter to foul weather.
Whiles a wedlock-hymn we sing,
Feed yourself with questioning;
That reason wonder may diminish,
How thus we met, and these things finish.

The triumph of the green world is the triumph of wonder over reason: in the close of As You Like It, as in other Shakespearean comedies, wonder diminishes reason.

The triumph of the green world is thus a triumph rather like the triumph of the “eucatastrophe” that Tolkien writes of in his well-known lecture “On Fairy-Stories.” “Catastrophe” comes from the Greek word for a “sudden turn” or “overturning,” to which Tolkien merely adds the Greek prefix meaning “good.” A eucatastrophe is a sudden turn that is good and joyous, and, according to Tolkien, it is a feature of any good fairy story.

The Christian story holds the prime example—or the ultimate form, rather—of eucatastrophe. As Tolkien writes:

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe…The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.

Fairy stories are delightful in their catastrophes because they image the central story of human history: the divine salvation and love extended to fallen humankind in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Tolkien writes that the joy of this sudden turn in fairy stories has the “very taste of primary truth.” The same turn and the same taste emanate from Shakespeare’s green world comedies.

The triumph of the green world is the triumph of the joyous impossible, and it is accompanied always by wedding bells. Shakespearean comedy thus pictures the comedy of history: in a surprising turn of events, the unexpected coupling becomes true and is blessed forever. After all, the end of history will be a marriage feast. The final chapters of the Bible present to us this Eucatastrophe: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

This is the happiest of endings, wherein Christ will unite himself to his purified bride, the Church, with utmost radiance and splendor and mirth. In this triumph, the green world will spread to the corners of creation, for the heavens and earth will be renewed as God restores and recreates the original green world, the garden of Eden.

Will children understand the scope and the significance of the green world as its triumph as they read of Rosalind and Orlando, of Helena and Demetrius? In short: no, they will not.

But in introducing them to the comedies of Shakespeare we may train their minds and imaginations to have a category for the triumph of union over tension, impossibility over human probability, wonder over reason. We may train their hearts to one day accept by faith the eucatastrophic reality of our history and the coming of our history’s divinely comic end.

Print