William Blake's "Jerusalem" Explained
The William Blake Press: Cambridge
612 pages
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There are three books on this site: namely
1. Shakespeare's Heir
2. The Four Zoas
3. William Blake's Jerusalem Explained;
This is a short book. It can be thought of as William Blake made easy.
Shakespeare’s Heir: William Blake and The Four Zoas Explained.
The analysis that comprises most of this book is unchanged:
namely, a virtually line-by-line study of The Four Zoas, its stages of
growth and its additions, deletions and emendations. It is the first such full-scale study and is
found in Volume II. This separate volume
offers a fresh context to my study.
There are three sets of ideas below that will re-fresh the clarity of
our understandings of the narrative causality of The Four Zoas. My
conclusions allow us to read Blake’s epic in dramatic form and clearly follow
its cause and effect narrative linearity.
This volume will reveal the hidden dramatic conventions used by Blake in
his story of The Four Zoas.
First, I summarise some current research on The Four Zoas and highlight major unresolved issues such as the alleged impenetrable and plotless chaos of his myth. An issue this study resolves. This means that, after reading this book the reader can expect to understand The Four Zoas as a coherent epic, with a clear crafted causal narrative of plot that links its parts to an aesthetic whole. As detailed in Volume II, this means also the resolution of the textual unity of Night VII(a) and Night VII(b).
Second, I examine the similar conventions used by
Shakespeare and Blake respectively to manage entries, exits, and poetry of
transition. This means detailing ‘how’ time, the locale in an imaginative space
and the poetry of transition shapes together shape the myth enacted in our
visual and aural perceptions as an audience.
That this be very practical I construct an analogy between
the hidden conventions of Shakespeare’s stagecraft as it was performed in his
contemporary theatrical architecture, by a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s The Second
Blackfriars Theatre and therefore an accurate reconstruction of the plays
staged there. Third, following my reconstruction of this theatre, I reconstruct
the hidden conventions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean staging. The hidden conventions gave a prescient
causality to the audience’s imagination of time, space, nature, and human
events in ways that were lost or atrophied in the closing of the theatres,
1642-1660. The open stages were dismantled and its generation passed away. The indoor mask tradition of the courts, with
its
It is important to, know how Shakespeare’s influence on Blake’s narrative causality is immediate and practical, and this has been incompletely studied. Too often Blake is presented as dislocated, when in fact his tone, diction, cadence and rhythms are in harmony with the dramatic poetry of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights and the King James Bible..
In conclusion, Volume 1 shows how Shakespeare’s hidden conventions once revealed, apply directly to Blake’s dramatic causality and logic of place, time, character and transition in his narrative of The Four Zoas. My study offers a fresh methodology; namely a study of hidden dramatic conventions that reveal how Blake crafts a clear narrative causality. I decided to work from first principles to help establish a factual basis on which to reconstruct Blake’s use of tradition in his dramatic causality, narrative conventions, and his poetry of transition.
Thus I begin with a study of theatrical architecture and the consequent and unresolved practical issues of stage management on Shakespeare’s contemporary stages. I decided to choose this course of action because the revealed dramatic continuums of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans playwrights reveal the dramatic continuum of Blake.
Once the architecture is determined, it is possible to reason soundly to a reconstruction and a re-appraisal of the hidden conventions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. I show these to be a highly evolved, indigenous set of imbedded conventions by which narrative causality is imagined in the audience. Time and space are fluidly prescient in the visual ‘dance ‘ of Shakespeare’s embedded staging, and Blake’s similar use of time and space and systems of poetic transition is likewise embedded in The Four Zoas. Thus, the arguments in this Volume 1 move from the reconstruction of the architecture of Shakespeare’s theatres; to a reconstruction of plays performed on them; to revealing his hidden conventions; and, thereby, to offer an analysis of Blake’s dramatic myth in The Four Zoas in terms of these hidden conventions.
For reason made clear below, the first step is to re-construct the indoor theatre owned by Shakespeare’s players: The Second Blackfriars. The architecture for such buildings was profoundly symbolic even reified (and followed the ‘Divine’ or golden section measurements and proportions found by squaring the circle with chords within and without in their theatres).
This architecture of golden sections
controlled the contemporary stage management.1 Of vital
significance, and referred to several times, is the fact that these indigenous
stage management conventions were mostly lost or atrophied when the theatres
were closed 1642-1660. We are left with
mysterious signs and hints of how place is transferred from event to event,
from entry to exit, with seeming impossible problems of transition and visual
purpose. Thus the practical causality of
Shakespeare’s staging is hidden.
The second step is to reconstruct the staging of ‘problem’
scenes in different plays (for example, there are 15 scene changes in Act IV of
Anthony and Cleopatra) such that Shakespeare’s hidden conventions are
revealed.
The third step is to bring these ‘hidden’ conventions back to Blake’s works and reveal his dramatic causality. I suggest that if we see Blake’s zoas and emanations as players in a dramatic narrative story, then the dramatic causality of their entries and exits and Blake’s poetry of transition, interlaced as it is with dialogues, soliloquies, and morphologies of matter and mind, can clearly be understood. It means also that Blake’s dramatic causality is consciously created and perfectly reasonable, in mythic terms, even logical. By that I mean the causal process of its drama can retrospectively be seen to lead backward to revealed causes and presciently forward to future effects.
As the architecture of the golden proportions served as a
spiritual vessel shaping Shakespeare’s dramatic causality, so too does the
spiritual architecture of Blake’s great theatres of human drama: namely, Los’
Golgonooza, built of sentience, and Urizen’s Temple, built out of matter
geometry, shape Blake’s narrative causality.
It is sufficient to note here that the dramatic transformations of
Golgonooza are in Night the Seventh (a), and those of the Temple in Night the
Seventh (b): Golgonooza is prophetic three-fold and sublime, leads to four-fold
vision; and the Temple is two-fold and leads to one-fold death; which is why
there are two nights. Thereby, we see
Blake’s hidden conventions of entry; exit and transition all rest on his
spiritual architecture of four-fold, three-fold, two-fold and one-fold vision.
Once we, as audience, can understand how Shakespeare’s
hidden conventions work then we can understand how like conventions work in
Blake’s narrative dramas. We need first to re-discover the lost or atrophied,
indigenous English conventions of narrative drama, reconstruct our modern
methodology, and build new meanings in the current critical ‘wasteland’ of
“chaos” thought to be Blake’s The Four Zoas.
To summarise my methodology here, if my reconstruction of
The Second Blackfriars (1972) is accurate, then (given the reconstruction of
the staging follows the prompt copy) it is also accurate. Further, by
extension, the conventions thereby reconstructed apply fully to the stagecraft
used in The Globe, The Fortune, The Hope and The Swan (1973).
To demonstrate The Second Blackfriars as shown below is
identical in its golden proportions to The Globe (and The Fortune and The Hope)
it is necessary for me to argue my reconstruction from the architecture, for,
it would then seem The Second Blackfriars here might be the most advanced
reconstruction of this theatre yet suggested; and, therefore, the most
convincing and valuable ‘lens’ to envision Blake’s dramatic causality. I show that it is easier to understand
Blake’s hidden dramatic and narrative logic if an audience understands the
hidden dramatic and narrative conventions of causality used by Shakespeare and
his contemporaries. Amongst other contributions, such a ‘lens’ locates Blake as
Shakespeare’s heir.
Scholarship requires redaction, below is some 30 pages that
focus upon The Second Blackfriars’ precise architecture, the text of The
First Folio, and, the precise reconstructions of Middleton at The Swan and
Shakespeare at both The Globe and The Second Blackfriars. After this detailed
redaction we are in a position to examine Blake’s like hidden conventions in The
Four Zoas. To my mind, without this
architectural proof, the staging conventions cannot be shown either as certain
or, in context, universally known to contemporary playwrights, players and
audience and played in all contemporary theatres, nor intuitively known by
Blake.
Without certainty of staging conventions the drama is mystified;
for example we are told to listen, which is only one sense and is sound, not
sight privileged, or that the stage is unlocalised. Hence, my use of the architecture of The
Second Blackfriars, The Globe, The Fortune and The Swan, and the use of Shakespeare
and Middleton as examples of good playwrights using the staging conventions
that follow the architecture’s surround.
As shown below the combination is uniquely accurate.
Thus conclusions I reach below by yoking these sets of
research together will show for the first time that understanding ‘how’
Shakespeare’s hidden staging conventions work, helps reveal ‘how’ Blake’s
hidden dramatic conventions in The Four Zoas work. It is shown that the analysis of Blake’s
dramatic causal narrative in detail reveals both the spiritual architecture of
his poetry of space and his hidden conventions of transition. It follows that we now have a methodology
that, first, reveals the mythic plot of The Four Zoas, second, relates
the parts to the whole throughout, and thereby, third, enables it to be
imaginatively understood and grasped as aesthetic unity.
THE FOUR ZOAS
The summary above means The Four Zoas is not plotless
nor fractal, not unfinished, not impenetrable, not mythically, psychologically
or mystically incoherent nor is it intrinsically incomprehensible. Blake’s
audience should not be intimidated by such incorrect conclusions.
The research below reveals Blake’s hidden conventions of
dramatic narrative or myth by analogy with Shakespeare’s hidden staging. For example, it shows ‘how’ Blake presented
the drama of a fall as absolutely not in medias res (see below P. 27-31). The cosmology revealed thereby presents for
the first time Blake’s clear mythic logic as both rational and causally
sequenced. It is time this critical proof be presented as a book for use by
other Blake scholars, graduate students and above all by admirers of Blake in
the general sense of an audience. Its
purpose is to help demystify clarify and democratise Blake’s epic so that it
can be read easily and fluently from first line to last.
That the claim above be convincing, this research also argues
closely from the text that Night VIIa and Night VIIb are clearly interconnected
as two side of the one coin, and, that this remarkable structural principle is
not unlike stereo music in which two separate sounds in the two speakers form a
third inside in the listener. Thus, the
auditory perception of the two written compositions creates a third
non-scripted creation. Without a
reconciliation of both Nights VIIa and Night VIIb in narrative unity there can
be no finished poem we today agree to call The Four Zoas.
Though some would want the name Vala to be added, I think the
final version exceeds the energies of Vala.
The implications of this stereo structure for the literary
philosopher and for the semiologist are significant and some are explored briefly
below. To my mind, for Blake, the
extraordinary structural parallel of these two parallel Nights (very briefly,
in one is built Golgonooza, in the other Urizen’s
Further, the methodology also reveals for the first time the
hidden structures in the texts Blake emended to interconnect Night VI with both
Night VIIa and Night VIIb. As must be
shown to claim reasonable compositional completion, Night VIIa and Night VIIb
are integrated with Night VIII and Night IX.
For this, and only this, allows critical certainty in the revelation of
the hidden dramatic structures of all nine Nights as a highly crafted, causally
sequenced and reasonable finished aesthetic whole. It is shown for the first time (1984), that
Blake wrote The Four Zoas in two initial major stages, with a third
linking them (as noted above in the unity of the two Nights VII) and, a final
series of pencilled additions to deftly connect the three earlier stages more clearly. The exact textual evidence is given in Volume
2, as it should be, in situ.
Once Blake’s conventions are grasped, The Four Zoas
reads as an intricately crafted, magnificently integrated and consistent story
that follows fluently and easily from beginning to end as an aesthetic
whole. However, I suggest Blake realised
his two Nights VII were so unusual a structural principle for a contemporary
story that he did not etch it into an illuminated book.
Now, after the last century of post-dadaist,
structural/post-structural and modern/post modern sense of myth and plot, we
can quite happily accept a stereo plot structure in a book. Ide’s structuralist studies (beginning 1987)
of linguistic concentrations into of word/themes in her Fourier analysis,
closely correspond to the thematic patterns of the plot described here, for
example, Ide’s structuralist study shows Night IX to contain all the thematic
patterns of the previous Nights I to VIII 3
To my mind, because Blake’s myth and plot is not understood,
neither is his art nor his dramatic narrative.
This study for the first time traces and connects the really difficult
problems of transition from line to line throughout, or its logia. The plot significantly enhances the meaning
of Blake’s art and calligraphy on the palimpsest and myth as explained
below. Some of Blake’s art is not
directly related to the text of the plate or page, some to other pages or
plates, sometimes the art shows events that are not directly in the writing at
all and the epics are never art privileged cartoons. Blake’s art is coiled up
inside his writing and his writing is coiled up in his dramatic narrative; his
writing and drama are not coiled up inside his art ( 4)
Clearly, Blake’s stagecraft in his early play King Edward
the Third and his two prologues King Edward the Fourth and King
John are less sophisticated than Shakespeare’s hints; let alone his hidden
conventions. But, like everyone who
enjoys Shakespeare’s play soon finds out, without an intuitive grasp of hidden
unity therein they simply do not make sense.
Thus, I seek to represent his hidden conventions Once revealed, Blake’s
intuitive grasp of the inherent unity of flow, use of exeunt to signal major
shifts in place, entries and exits during speeches and use of asides show Blake
imitates Shakespeare, not Aristotle or Greek tragedy. I suggest Blake shared an intuitive grasp of
Shakespeare’s indigenous dramatic staging techniques in the same way
intelligent audiences after 1660, likewise, intuitively grasp Shakespeare’s
hidden staging myth.
Stage managers have experimented with such venues as
open-air staging, ‘in the round’ or even as in the productions at the modern
Globe. But, they are informed only intuitively; thus, Freeman (5) lists
the many unresolved problems of transition.
Following Freeman, without resolution of these problems there can be no
accurate reproduction of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. To my mind, it is important to reveal ‘how’
these hidden structures are manifested, to play Shakespeare in any venue.
Further, as I show below, it helps to see Blake’s art in his
epics in a drama with visual, imaginative staging. We need to ‘see’ his drama
as we ‘hear’ Shakespeare’s plays. As I show Blake’s three-fold spiritual
architecture is detailed in his Golgonooza and contrasted with the two-fold
architecture of Urizen’s
In short, Blake’s cosmos as is not as O’Neill thought; it is not “Unexplained”.
Minute Particulars: thoughts of modern theories of text and Blake’s The Four Zoas
The Derrida lectures at Yale and developments by De Man et
al (as studied by Thomas, 2006) contributed to a dramatic modernisation of the
For my purpose here, namely, the study of text, plot and
myth, I have targeted three essential premises of the modern/post modern,
structural/post structural, deconstructuralists/demythologists
methodologies. These are important
fields and terms, but for my study there are really two field-dominant
contextual periods: namely Frye to Ault (1947-1986) and Ault till now.
The concepts are:
1. The end of fealty to the text or the dictatorship of the author; for there is no definitive thing as ‘the text’ nor authorial presence
2. There is no definitive statement of ‘the meaning’ of a work, for there can be no definitive thing as ‘the plot’ or ‘the performance’ or ‘the interpretation’.
3. There is no such definitive thing as a ‘the myth’.
To help illuminate these ideas, and for reasons presented
below, I will use Shakespeare’s The First Folio, Elizabethan and
Jacobean staging, and Middleton’s prompt Quarto of A Chaste Maid at
Cheapside. This will examine the context of
the text, the myth and the staging reconstruction, and provide clear answers to
current unanswered problems.
On the one hand, Ault claims Frye’s methodology rests on
four principles he thinks fallacious: namely
1. That there is a unified text or system.
2. That characters are transposable (as, for examples, in allegory or psychology).
3. That there are extractable statements with the status of truth.
4. That decoding text references (for examples Damon, or
Erdman) is a key to unlocking Blake’s
meaning.
On the other hand, four decades prior to Ault’s work, Frye
opened his Fearful Symmetry with an argument from The Tempest
(II.i), that in terms of Ault’s methodology of ‘minute particulars’ speaks for
Frye.
Gon. How lush and lusty the grass looks!
how green!
Seb. With an eye of green in ‘t.
Seb. No; he doth but mistake the truth.
An example of closed possibilities in Ault’s methodology is
Blake’s irony. With no plot there is no
narrative linear progression and no stable points. Thus, no Socratic or Shakespearian forms of
irony are possible for there can be no grasp of the work as a whole, a grasp
upon which traditional irony rests. There are other forms of irony of course
but coincidence necessarily implies an order or coherence of things that can be
surprised by a coincidence of opposites.
Ianesco is a playwright whose irony orders improvisation into the
visually unsurprising as in The Chairs.
Given the succession of major prophecy specialist critics
after Ault who find, with him, that the myths of The Four Zoas or
Clearly, there is a need for a study that explains Blake’s
story in The Four Zoas that like Jerusalem Explained, gives a
reader a methodology that reveals Blake’s magnificently crafted text, myth and
excellent story. This study meets a need
for critical balance. Admirers of Blake’s work should not be intimidated by his
major prophesies or taught that Blake’s major epics are impenetrable, or
intrinsically incomprehensible, and that looking for a plot is a futile
exercise. As shown in The Four Zoas
Explained here and in Jerusalem Explained it is not a futile
exercise at all. It is the starting point to a soundly judged, balanced and
accurate understanding of Blake’s major prophecies and his art.
There is no such definitive thing as The Text:
Shakespeare’s The First
Folio
We turn to the idea of the text to explore this comparison;
again, of course there is no such thing as ‘the text’ as a definitive
object. I turn to The First Folio.
No textual scholar, skilled in the text of The First Folio would say
anything other than there can be no The First Folio definitive
text. The concept is a fundamental
premise of palaeography or textual criticism. To demonstrate that there is
never a definitive text we look briefly at the common knowledge shared by
skilled textual scholars of The First Folio. 8
Like Shakespeare, Blake is not an
Aristotelian classicist. Johnson, who Blake also almost certainly read, wrote
in his preface (1765): “having read that Sophocles was the great model of
tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its rules…his masterpieces
were neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience to Aristotle”.
Blake almost certainly read Pope’s preface (1773-75): “to
judge therefore…Shakespear by Aristotle, is like trying a man by the laws of
one country, who acted under those of another…the body of men of which he was a
member [the Players]…have ever had a standard to themselves upon other
principles than those of Aristotle”.
Ault’s modernist rejection of late 20th Century
neo-Aristotelian criticism has some analogies with Blake’s contemporary
reaction against classical models. Blake
identified with Shakespeare’s apparent indifference to Greek models (and so
Aristotle). Interestingly Pope and Johnson both spell Shakespeare’s name
without a final ‘e’; for it is true there is no definitive spelling of
Shakespeare’s name, let alone his texts. Also of interest is that Shakespeare
did not know of Greek tragedy but modelled his plays on Seneca, without knowing
Seneca wrote closet dramas read by reclining people at feasts. Hence Shakespeare’s soliloquies are drawn
from misunderstood dramatic conventions, and, Blake, Pope and Johnson et al did
not know that Shakespeare, in turn, did not know of the Greek tragedies.
Chapman’s translation of part of Homer’s Iliad was not published until
1598 (Achille’s Shield and Seven Books of the Iliades, Prince of
Poets: namely I, II, VII, VIII, IX, X, XII and XVIII).
This research reveals Blake’s hidden conventions of dramatic
narrative or myth by analogy with Shakespeare’s hidden staging. For example, it shows below ‘how’ Blake
presented the drama of a fall as absolutely not in medias res. The cosmology revealed thereby presents for
the first time Blake’s clear mythic logic as both rational and consciously
crafted and causally sequenced.
There cannot be such a textual certainty and never has been
in Shakespearian textual criticism over centuries. To illustrate very briefly
some issues faced by the skilled textual analyst, I consider some conclusions,
now common knowledge, in the texts Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, A
Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, The Tempest, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Macbeth, King
Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra and relate reconstructions resolving famous
‘problem scenes’, to Blake’s dramatic modes of expression and narrative
causality. I note here that the use of
the trapdoor is examined because for it to be usable, it needs to be about 5
foot high. The textual issues follow
Freeman The First Folio and help detail the methodology by which sound
texts are composed. 9
The architecture of time and place: The Second
Blackfriars
Every play in The First Folio (18 are sole copies,
the other 18 from several publishers, only 12 are legal, but these corrupt
Quartos often have valuable stage directions) is fraught with editorial
challenge and conjecture. Are we therefore to conclude there is little point in
seeking a good text for the plays noted above (each selected because of unique
textual problems and unanswered staging problems); or are we to dismiss all
previous performances as empty? My
rhetorical questions are answered: a good text is a skilled enterprise. Blake’s
The Four Zoas is a reasonably clean text, though with particular
difficulties in its opening lines, and several editors have produced very good
editions; Bentley, Keynes, Erdman and Bindman are examples.
In this vein, the textual problems of The Four Zoas
are largely transcription. Its internal
problems of plot, narrative causality and transitions are the hermeneutical
challenges. A not unreasonably clean handwritten text is completed that as
noted, Blake wrote in two major phases, with a third stage that united these
two early stages and a final drift in pencilled emendations for textual
fusions. That there is a completed Blake text that can be typed out/copied
quite accurately is self-evident; though it cannot be ‘final’. Thus, to claim
it is not finished is inaccurate; to claim it is not etched is accurate. 10.
Briefly, the Blackfriars Hall was bought in 1586 for £600
and ownership held by the three Burbage brothers, and the actors, in seven
equal shares. Both The Second Blackfriars and The Globe were refurbished and
re-built in 1598. There is no ‘first’ or ‘second’ Globe here. There is an
indoor Globe and an outdoor Globe. The Second Blackfriars is NOT the second
Globe. The second Globe is the rebuilt Globe after the fire of 1613.
Middleton’s hidden staging in A Chaste Maid at
Cheapside
The Swan opened in 1594, the sketch 1595. It lost its
licence in 1597 because of the play Isle of Dogs; it was kept closed
because of the plague and was not a regular theatre after 1597. Middleton’s
play A Chaste Maid at Cheapside is the only Elizabethan and Jacobean
play we can know was performed at The Swan between 1594 and 1597, by following
the stage directions as they are in the Quarto.
This means the reconstruction is reliable. The core of the reconstruction was published Theatre Notebook 1973
The concept of a hidden morphology of space and time behind
the visible stage is not used in the same way at all in our modern conventions
that use sets on the stage. Sets are usually changed behind a curtain fall, at
which time a new place is set up to be revealed as a surprise when the curtain
rises. It is into this visually pre-determined locale that the players enter.
The events are thereby pre-structured visually and aurally if there is music.
The place and time are changed after a curtain fall and are changed unseen. The
curtain falls also between intermittent cycles of action and tension in the
Acts and in the Interval when the fall signals a complete change of audience
response, and its rise after the Interval gives the new change in time and
place.
By contrast, Middleton’s play begins when the two doors
open. There is no curtain rise. The
opening direction in A Chaste Maid at Cheapside reads: “shop thrust
out”. This needs only be a simple table with a set of scales. For the audience
this was a shop door. Behind it was the goldsmith’s shop. All who came out or entered by this door
either left or entered Yellowhammer’s shop; which though unseen was an imaginatively
real ‘inside’ of the shop. To turn to my
reconstruction of The Second Blackfriars, the 4-foot passage behind the tiring
wall is essential for such stage sets as the shop/table. It would be stored behind in the 4-foot
passage. It is a bulky object and its
meaning to the audience was as flexible as ‘the whatever’ the object put on it
signified. I suggest it was 2-foot wide.
A general point can be made here, for along with such
symbols as a set of scales were others like the ‘banket’ or tray with food/jug
on it that often accompanies the scenes with eating and drinking. In the De Witt sketch there is a table and
bench at the centre of the stage. By contrast, in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid
at Cheapside, the table is ‘thrust out’ in front of the door stage right
and on it was a set of goldsmith’s scales.
Behind the other door are the streets of London. Likewise, entering or exiting meant coming from or going into the streets of London, or an imaginatively real world of London. When Sir Walter enters from the street door he tells the audience ‘where’ the players are. His words enshape a definite, unseen, imaginatively real place. He tells the audience we are at the ‘heart of the city’.
An apparently complex sequence takes place when
Yellowhammer’s daughter elopes, runs with her lover to the river where a boat
awaits while Yellowhammer raises a hue and cry and chases after them. His wife stops, thinks afresh, and runs to
head them off at the river. The lovers
run to the river and are met by the mother who drags her daughter to the
shop. There are multiple places on the
stage. Modern conventions with a single proscenium arch and with curtain rises
and falls is impossible to clearly present this flow. How did it work?
Consider the following: the lover enters from the streets, crosses to the shop, enters, comes out with the daughter, and the two run out by the street door. All this is visually perfectly clear to the audience familiar with stage convention. Yellowhammer runs out from the shop door with his wife. He raises a hue and cry and runs out the street door after the eloping couple. The wife, thinking ahead runs down the trap door to the river, to Barne-Elms to trap the lovers. Again the use of the trapdoor and exit is perfectly clear. The stage is empty briefly. Out of the street door run the lovers, a boatman raises his head from the trapdoor, and calls to them to come down. Down they go. However the mother is waiting below as is perfectly well known to the audience, and comes out of the trapdoor dragging her daughter into the shop. Indeed the whole sequence could be done without a word being spoken and the action is perfectly clear to the audience. Hence it is a structure. It also requires a stage approximately 5-foot high.
Acting in the Globe indoors or, The Second Blackfriars, is
more flexible, especially in winter (it was a brilliant real estate choice for
theatre was an uncertain business). However, indoor or outdoor the need for
care of costuming, safe use of weaponry, and the dignity of an exit or entrance
needs a carefully thought out trapdoor, its place on the stage with the timing
of usage as a priority, and its size and locking beneath. A very practical problem is the last second
bobbing of the head as the player ducks under the stage. Once closed the
trapdoor must be able carry the weight of several people who do not want to
trip over heavy hinges and the like. On the one hand it cannot close downward
and not hit the steps; on the other hand nor could it be raised without it
being visibly clumsy.
I suggest the trapdoor had two doors 3-foot wide each. They
did not open or close, they slid sideward. Two people, unseen by the audience,
could easily lift the trapdoor two or three inches and together slide it
sideward. The two trapdoors could be closed easily too. Sometimes only one side
need be open, such as when the boatman lifts his head out of the trapdoor in A
Chaste Maid at Cheapside. The author and director prepare all changes in
the ideas of place in the audience’s imagination. The famous rhyming couplet followed by an
exeunt gives the management directions, for after the couplet the stage is cleared.
A cleared stage always signals an impending major change in time and space,
sometimes without a couplet, but the couplet always signals a change of time
and place. The new imaginative locales are introduced, in logical succession,
in the entries that follow. The new entry can come from any of the five locales
in Shakespeare though there are only four in Middleton’s play A Chaste Maid
at Cheapside, or in any other play performed at The Swan.
Further, as with all drama time, place and action are necessarily in unity though the unity is hidden. Even the no time, no narrative cause and effect, no dramatic character continuity and no stable points of contextual reference of Artaud’s theatre of terror, plague or total theatre is in duration and is a totalised unity.
The indigenous genius of these evolved conventions lay in their precision and simplicity. Honed through the centuries from the medieval theatre of the Castle of Perseverance, the earliest extant theatre design known, is a huge circle, ditch and mound, with five acting points, at the centre and the four compass points. The audience sat in wedges between the five towers, and the action was staged on three vertical levels of heaven, earth and hell, acted between and on the five towers.
In this ancient stage design in a ‘theatre’ requiring huge
earthworks and construction efforts, we can clearly see the foundations of what
became the Elizabethan and Jacobean indigenous use of time, place and
action. In particular, the use of a
‘spaces’ into which, and out of which, came and went the players. The conventions of going into and coming out
of Heaven, Earth and Hell evolved into the systems of entry and exit, to which
was added music, song and dance and processions and entertainments that became
increasingly secular when the protestant theatre ‘took off’, and Interludes
became popular.
Wickham notes there were mechanical cranes to raise and
lower thrones and Henslowe mentions such a device, but they were not very
common; though multiple players to work Hell’s Mouth were common. After the Castle of Perseverance came the
Guild cycles, like the Chester cycle with moving Guild wagons. These developed
alongside Miracle, Mystery and Morality Plays, Mummings, Disguisings, Masks and
Interludes that were played in/on fixed places like churches, or in private
halls, or Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, or used portable, raised stages as
drawn in woodcuts. Londoners were quite accustomed to pageants, royal welcomes,
and lavish water shows. Pageants and shows like the Lord Mayor’s Annual Show
were ornate. For examples, the extraordinary water show with an island and
boats for Elizabeth 1 in 1591, or the Fishmongers Show of 1616 (which included
a pageant-car, like a ship, that carried 16 people, was 14-foot long, 5 ½ foot wide and 7-foot high). 14Wickham
also notes that 4 ½ to 5-foot high stages were common across Europe, citing a
painting on copper, 1600, by Breugel the elder. Hence my choice here for the
English stage height is 5-foot. The 5-foot raised stage was the usual height
for the ‘stage’ of public executions too, as in the engraving “Tragicum
Theatrum”. The anonymous picture
published by Jodocum Jansonium, 1649, as with “a trestle stage” about 5-foot
high, but the stage was “not that from a play” but from the execution of
Charles I”. A 5-foot raised stage was
the ‘stage’ for public executions too.15.
In time the secular, often bawdy, Interludes in particular
became welcome in the great Halls (with two doors, a musician’s gallery, an
acting space between the feasters, and a variety of plays ready to be performed
for the host’). Finally the public theatres were built. 16. The commodification of secular drama settled
upon the individual’s entrance fee, and the patronage of the aristocracy was
supplemented by middle class money. The
‘heaven, earth and hell’ triple space of place gave the conventions the use of
the left door as the door to hell, with right door as heaven, and the middle as
earth: hence the irony of ‘exit stage left’.
After the theatres re-opened, the indigenous English staging
conventions were replaced the Italian Vitruvian tradition, with a curtain that
rose and was lowered from a roller, a proscenium arch, and the use of
perspective screens narrowing to a vanishing point (often with a special
effect, like a moving ship or the like).
The ‘change of stage objects’ indicate change in place, but, unlike the
indigenous conventions, they were changed between curtain falls, and out of
sight of the audience. The curtain ‘rise
and fall’ and the unseen set changes visually defines place. This latter
convention still prevails.
Thus, in conventional modern realist theatre, say from
Dryden to Dada, the curtain rises to reveal a living room/tennis court/mountain
side or whatever set is deemed to work visually. The nature of place, therefore, is defined
visually by the set before the action begins.
Dryden’s All For Love allows a direct comparison between the
indigenous English tradition of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and
neo-classical theatre. It is this
neo-classical theatre with its sculptural forms and stilled groupings that
Blake rejects; Blake turns to Shakespeare and the hidden conventions Blake
intuitively grasped.
Blake’s epics take on a dramatic form when the speeches are seen to be connected by poetry of transition, morphology and descriptions of place and this is seen only through Blake’s four levels of vision, one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and four-fold, seen here as analogous to the four quantum Levels or fields of information. Visual ‘definites’ or ‘absolutes’, constructed unseen behind a dropped curtain and then revealed as the curtain rises, is not possible in the apron stage as shown by my re-construction and stage management of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and, is not the model by which to understand Blake’s dramatic genius.
(pages here are available in the forthcoming book "Shakespeare's Heir: William Blake and the Four Zoas Explaines)
Blake’s dramatic narrative: The Four Zoas
In The Four Zoas, let us hypothesise with Blake that
the universal Human Form Divine, called Albion, who is the Angel of the
Presence and who turns from God, as a narrative drama in the form of a
triptych. Let us accept Blake’s
hypothesis that, for the audience, the action begins ‘behind’ in an infinite
time and space that Blake calls four-fold. Albion must fall within into
two-fold reality for, separate from God, there is nowhere else to go but within,
and so into finitude, division, self-predation and death.
It is also true that Blake’s myth evolved over years of creative reflection and expression. The three major and final minor stages of the manuscript’s growth capture some of the evolution of Blake’s mythic development. Thus there is no ‘single’ system of mythic metaphysics. Milton and Jerusalem are quite different in mythic metaphysic from each other and from The Four Zoas. It is emphatically not the case that Blake’s epics are analogous to the kind of ‘picaresque’ unity of the Homeric mythic universe that, for example, is gathered in Homer or Hesiod. Blake’s Jerusalem does not follow ‘in mythic logic’ from The Four Zoas as Homer’s two epics flow into each other. My detailed analysis demonstrating this is in William Blake's The Four Zoas Explained and William Blake's Jerusalem Explained
Here, briefly, Blake uses four unique sets of visionary
convention to present his drama: namely, four-fold, three-fold, two-fold and
one-fold vision or fields of information. I suggest that we, as the audience,
envision Blake’s players enter and exit as from the infinite into the finite,
and envision the drama that unfolds. Blake uses three-fold coordinates to show
us this. We are not in four-fold life, we are finite and need the prophetic
plane of three-fold seeing to read, see and hear revelation. The prophet
reveals what the ordinary person cannot see: and Blake’s prophetic stance is
given by three-fold vision, which thereby is finite but prophetic.
The Four Zoas begins its two-fold finite adventure as
the audience watch Tharmas and Enion enter and contract from four-fold into a
two-fold ruin, that we see as a finite set of movement from west to east.
Evidence of the contraction in Blake is usually symbolised by a web of some
kind. It is spun out behind, spreading inwards from all directions, as Enion’s
woof in Night I, or Urizen’s web in Night VI. or Vala’s “Polypus” in Night
VII(b).
I suggest if we imagine Blake’s imaginative ‘stage’ of Albion
as a globe. The globe is Albion, its shell his ‘skin’, called by Blake the
mundane shell. Outside the globe/mundane shell is four-fold infinity. Inside
the globe/mundane shell is two-fold life, or the eight zoas and emanations,
contracting to one-fold death. As audience, we see both infinity outside and
finitude inside in by means of Blake’s crafted three-fold vision. This means we
know Beulah and Eden in infinity can see within the mundane shell but the zoas
and emanations cannot see out. Thus, the globe is Albion, and his ‘skin’ is the mundane shell. We see, inside
Albion, the two-fold life of his self-predating energies and see these
components in contraction, divisions and conflict until they consume each other.
All this dramatic causality is reasonable because Albion,
divided from God, has no source of energy other than himself. As a ‘chicken in
an egg’ consumes the albumen, so too does Albion self-predate. The chicken and
egg analogy ends here, for Albion cannot break through the shell; thus he dies,
self-consumed in one-fold vision. He would be eternally dead save that Divine
energy enters from the centre within Albion as Jesus, and the revelation of
apocalyptic four-fold Divine energy in two-fold life expands outward back to
the circumference/shell thereby cleansing the two-fold and restoring the dead
Albion. Wholly cleansed from the two Limits of Satan and Adam, Albion can
‘know’ unity with God.
For Blake, death always means one-fold compaction into an
eternal sleep. in Blake. Compass point coordinates always mean two-fold life
within Albion. Circumference, centre, zenith, nadir coordinates always mean
three-fold prophetic vision in Blake. The infinite life of the within and
without in unity with God always means four-fold being in Blake.
Thus, infinite life is symbolised in four-fold freedom. In the opening statement, the audience is introduced in an analogy to a Shakespearian prologue to a state of unity: “Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity” (I: 9). The infinite is a four-fold state that Blake contrasts with the finite. In typical Prologue format, the theme of the drama is announced to the audience. Blake sets the scene for Albion’s mythic tale of “fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity:/ His Fall into the Generation and decay of death, & his/ Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead”. (I: 21-3).
The audience envisions this great three-part drama from the
prescient perspective of three-fold vision. Thereby, we are enabled to clearly
follow the actions of two-fold vision within Albion.
Hence, Tharmas enters with Enion and they spin matter out
into a woof of sentient particles. This shows we shift from four-fold infinite
vision to finite two-fold life for Tharmas and Enion begins the first of three
major cycles in Blake’s narrative drama. Within Albion and bound to two-fold
life, Tharmas cries “Lost! Lost! Lost! Are my emanations”, then enters Enion.
To her he says: ”We are become a victim to the Living We hide in secret”.
The transition that follows gives finite generation to the
fabric of sentience and Tharmas morphologises into its finite life. He ‘exits’
when he “Turned round the Circle of Destiny” (Albion’s time bound circle of
finitude) and “sunk down into the sea of atomic sentience, and the encircled
“Space” is named “Ulro”. Tharmas ‘re-enters’ as the Spectre of Tharmas. “insane
& most deformed”, woven by Enion into generation. The first act of
generation or finite self-reproduction is primal incest: the Spectre’s rape of
Enion that engenders Los and Enitharmon.
Thus the hidden structure reveals that Albion turned from
God into two-fold life and one-fold death, self-reproduction and
self-violation. He is morally insane, divided and inverted within. The first
act of his component energies as self-reproduction, and so primal incest
necessarily follows in the sexual inversion of Albion’s fall.
Tharmas must be first to enter two-fold finitude for he is
the atomic fabric itself (or in modern terms Tharmas is like the particle
universe of Level 1 quantum thought). Therefore Blake writes without ambiguity
that we “Begin with Tharmas Parent power darkning in the West” (or the
circumference) and thus the raw material for all of finitude that is built from
circumference inwards to the centre. The
“Parent power” is in agonising chaos after the fall within into
division. He calls his emanation, Enion, who is the formative energy, to enter.
She weaves the chaos into the woof that binds all forms of generation into the
centre of finite being. Thus, in Blake’s narrative drama, Tharmas and Enion
enter to begin two-fold life for they are the necessary beginnings for sentient
‘parenting’ and the finite life of generation within Albion.
The precise mythic logic of Blake’s cosmology is clearly
revealed, for born to Enion are the twins: “Behold two little infants wept upon
the desolate wind” (I: 190-3). Los and Enitharmon’s entry thus follows in
logical mythic causality for in Blake’s hidden dramatic structures they are the
energies that give serial time and a specific finite space to the woof of
connectivities in Ulro. Thereby, duration is serialised, and the matter
geometry of two-fold Ulro ‘space’ is given the fourth dimension of serial time
(thus conforming reasonably to the Level 2 quantum field of energy).
The audience envisions two-fold life in the drama through a
three-fold angle of vision (that conforms to Level 3 quantum field). Blake’s
unities of time and space are very sophisticated and are dealt with else where;
here Blake’s states of vision and the four quantum fields of information
(Wheeler et al 1998) are equated thusly: one-fold is stasis or death or
particles; two-fold is matter geometry of length, height and breadth, with the
fourth dimension of serial time and the energy therein; three-fold is sentience
and information; and four-fold is like Polkinghorne’s ‘God’s eye’ or block
universe or Wheeler’s Level 4.
Here, Los and Enitharmon enter into the spiritual
architecture of Ulro, mutual transitions and morphologies are given in dramatic
dialogue and action, and locale is given by descriptive poetry of transition.
Fallen from infinite time and space into two-fold life, serial time and a
continuum of organised space, they are necessarily erratic in the discordant
struggle of opposites as seen in their violence and mutual abuse.
Generative or sexual passion is lacking without Luvah and
Vala. Thus, next ‘enter’ Luvah and Vala, who are the zoa and emanation of male
and female sexuality. In Blake’s mythic logic, the two characters give sexual
power to life. They drive the cycle of generation after generation of
copulation birth, life and death; and so are the two-fold seeding impulse and
womb of nature. Male and female sexuality thus fall from infinite regeneration
in unity with the love of God to enter two-fold finitude. Their transitions,
given in dialogue and descriptive passages, shape finite life into passion for
reproduction and the evolution of variant species through self-predation, slaughter
and sacrifice, for self-separated from Divine energy, Albion can only consume
himself.
Thus Los and Enitharmon see a vision of a degraded Luvah and
Vala, who are the next to ‘enter’ in an “orb of blood” though at first “descend
they could not” into Ulro (I: 360-365). The audience, looking in from the
three-fold vision can read, see and hear the two-fold ‘staging’ of the
component zoas and emanations; for the component energies are only recently
born into two-fold life and are ignorant of their futures.
Finally ‘enters’ Urizen who “descended” into Ulro, claiming
Divinity: “Now I am God from Eternity to Eternity” (or the time cycle of Ulro).
In three-fold vision, Urizen emerges in Albion’s interiority. Hubris is
necessary concomitant with turning from God, thus Urizen seek to rules the
others. In three-fold vision the audience sees there is a parody of celebration
in a two-fold feast at which the zoas and emanations celebrate their ‘communion
feast’ of ‘unity’ at which is served a parody of the Eucharist: “the wine of
anguish” and the “fleshly bread and nervous wine”. Significantly in Blake’s
hidden structures, Ahania has yet to enter. And her entrance completes the
entrance of the major players. The illusion of order collapses and the
component energies contract further toward the centre.
These eight zoas and emanations are Albion’s component,
divided energies and their entries into finitude completed, the audience can
follow clearly the major locale shift as Blake returns us to envision Albion in
the infinite and its four-fold life. In this scene Albion lies in the arms of
Jesus. Albion, whom we know has turned from the infinite life that we know
sustains him, is now contracted and divided into “an image of Eternal Death”.
As the audience
knows, Albion is morally and perceptually blind. It is perfectly clear why, he
“sank down” for the arms of “the Eternal Saviour who dispos’d/ The pale limbs
of his Eternal Individuality/ Upon The Rock of Ages, Watching over him with
Love & Care” (I: 461-468). The audience knows that although he is
self-blinded and turned wholly within, in four-fold vision Albion is always in
Divine love.
We are shifted reasonably then to “Great Eternity” where in
four-fold vision “the Council of God” meet “as One Man all the Universal
family” in unity with God. Blake clearly tells us that in infinite being, life
is not limited to the finite activities of the eight components we have just
seen enter finitude, self-predation, and death. The Universal family” in
four-fold life can contract “their Exalted Senses” to the smallest minute
particular and “behold Multitude”, or the totality of all minute particulars in
unity with God. Should they wish, they expand their senses “to behold as one/
As One Man” and “ they in him & he in them/ Live in Perfect harmony” in
unity with “Jesus the Christ”. (I: 469-475).
The narrative drama in four-fold life continues with the
entry of the “messengers from Beulah” who tell the story of the
self-annihilation of Albion’s component energies. The “Seven/ Eyes Of God &
the Seven Lamps of the Almighty…one within the other” will descend into
finitude to serve as an axis of unity to Albion’s chaos. Thereby, both male
energies and female energies in four-fold life is brought into unity by Blake’s
crafting. (I: 560-574).
Thus, Blake’s narrative logic shows us Albion on his couch
of death, Beulah and the Council and the messengers from the finite within
Albion. We see in three-fold vision that Albion is the finite. He is Ulro.. He
turns to look around within finitude, and so, having passed through a
singularity point of the infinite and finite he now looks “outward to” his
finite “self” and necessarily loses “the Divine Vision”. Looking around and
about within himself/Ulro he sees only his component energies and calls to
Urizen to give order. Thus the audience knows Blake has shifted into finitude.
Albion turns his “Eyes outward to Self” and we know clearly
we are watching him within the mundane shell of the inner circumference of
Ulro, the globe of Albion’s interiority in finite place and finite time (II:
I-6). Everywhere and everything he perceives, as he looks “outward” is merely
himself, reflected back inwards. In Blake’s story, the audience sees Albion’s
eight component energies as his self-enclosed two-fold selfhood: namely,
sentient matter and generation (Tharmas and Enion), time and space (Los and
Enitharmon), passion and love (Luvah and Vala) and reason and truth (Urizen and
Ahania), (II: 1-6)
Urizen’s entry is perfectly reasonable and logically
consequent. Urizen will attempt to order the chaos of all components, while
remaining one of them; and, that is manifestly impossible for a part cannot
rule over the whole. Urizen’s zoas nature means he must seek understanding and
power over all events and the other zoas and emanations and he enters to ‘rule’
in each cycle of the three ‘Acts’ that structure The Four Zoas.
Before Ahania enters in Night the Third, Urizen has built
his palace by enslaving and sacrificing the energies of Luvah, the main source
of psychophysical sexual power within the self-separated Albion. For the
audience, Luvah’s enslavement is causally reasonable because Albion
self-severed from God and can no longer be empowered by Divine energy. This
means, necessarily, that only Luvah’s limited energies can be called on to
energise Urizen’s attempted transformation of nature. Hence, Luvah is
sacrificed in the furnaces and nature is shaped. The morphologies and
transitions are in the poetry of the dramatic commentary and dialogues.
The audience knows in three-fold vision, first, that the
eight divide and self-predate in two-fold vision, closed ‘inside’ Albion’s
‘skin’ so to speak., and, second, that when in unity with God, the eight zoas
and emanations are Blake’s Human Form Divine.
The opening of The Four Zoas, then, reveals Blake’s
hidden movements of entrance, transition, morphology and quiescence or ‘exit’.
Being and generation (Tharmas and Enion), time and space (Los and Enitharmon),
and male and female sexuality (Luvah and Vala) are given a primitive, savage,
opportunistic government by Urizen who enforces a pseudo-Divine rationality. A
fallen, blind energy, Urizen’s order enslaves and kills to survive. When he has
completed the parody of infinite life, Ahania enters. I see her as the feminine
energy that reveals truth to Urizen, who, it follows, collapses into ruin. Thus
the dramatic narrative is quite clear. Blake hidden entries and exits craft a
first universe of Hellenic or classical form, Gnostic spirituality and an order
that fails and collapses into chaos.
The second cycle of events: the finger of God and the two
Limits to the Resurrection
Hence the second phase in the narrative drama is the awesome
re-entrance of Tharmas into Ulro as the ‘parent power’ to begin a second
universe. He “reard up his hands…the dead reard up his voice…Crying: ‘fury in
my limbs! Destruction in my bones & marrow! /My skull riven into filaments,
my eyes into sea jellies….” Enion re-enters her energies drained, for severed
from Divine energy she is exhausted and emptied to become merely a “voice
eternal wailing in the Elements” (of finite being and generation).
As in the first cycle, Los and Enitharmon then re-enter as
logically anticipated in the three-fold seeing of the audience. Blake’s poetry
of transition clearly that, as in the first cycle, Luvah energies fuel the
two-fold life/death cycle of finite life: he therefore re-enters, morphologised
(‘disguised’) as the compacted energies of Orc to become the energy of the
furnace and so of nature, and, again, as in the first cycle Urizen ‘re-enters’.
He ‘re-enters’ now as concussed and unconscious, his
hubristic energies are compacted into one-fold rock in a “stoned stupor” of
one-fold ‘death’: as in quantum thought, mind affects matter; matter effects
mind. Blake’s the poetry of transition visually creates the effects of Urizen’s
hubris upon matter in the building of his Temple; and his energies collapsed
into a traumatised coma.
Appropriately, the scene changes as Divine energy enters,
for only Divine energy can save Albion, and, so and four-fold vision enters the
two-fold finite. The audience sees Los re-build Urizen, binding him by the
chains of time and sorrow as God intervenes. Albion moral limit is fixed into
the State of Satan, and Albion’s perceptual self-annihilation is fixed into the
State of Adam.
The Council of God and daughters of Beulah “saw the Divine
Vision”, for “Eternal Death is in Beulah”. Thus, the audience accepts Blake’s
four-fold life in which the “Saviour mild & gentle bent over the corse of
Death/ Saying, “If ye Believe your Brother shall rise again.”/ And first he
found the Limit of Opacity, & nam’d it Satan, / In Albion’s bosom, for in
every human being these limits stand, / And next he found the Limit of
Contraction, & nam’d it Adam” (V: 269-274). All four-fold life witnesses
Jesus intervene and Divinely establish limits.
The “Finger of God” touched “the Seventh furnace” (V: 277)
as God sets creation as the limit of the fall in an act of mercy. Thereby, we
see limits set to Albion’s ruined moral and physical being in two-fold life and
one-fold death. This ends one cycle and another cycle of mythic causality
begins. The second cycle begins with Jesus intervening and ends in a second
intervention, the incarnation, crucifixion and the resurrection.
As shown, hidden in the text thus far is a clear, logically
integrated cycle of entrances and exits from the four-fold infinite and unity,
to the two-fold finite. Then, the second cycle begins as the audience’s sees
the locale change and envisions Divine intervention and a second cycle or
universe begins. This is Night VI.
In three-fold vision the audience can envision Albion as a
closed globe of finitude that pulses from circumference and back again. Urizen
begins at the circumference or west (where his daughters must be after the ruin
of the first universe) and journeys to the centre of Albion’s ruined
interiority. Therefore, the audience sees into the globe, inside of which
Urizen journeys, and knows Urizen is limited to two-fold vision and blind to
three-fold and four-fold vision.
Thus he believes he travels from the west, where he meets
Tharmas as a “dreary waste of solid waters” (VI: 51), to the north where “Los
brooded on the darkness” (VI: 83), to the south, his realm where “his Children
ruin’d in his ruin’d world” (VI: 130), to the east “the empty world of Luvah”
(VI: 156), through the four ‘corners’ of the compass. He tries to organise the
component energies within the ‘globe’ of Albion from the centre outwards. Thus
“bending” his “head downward into the deep,/
‘Tis upward all which way soever” his “course begin (VI: 20204): “waking then ‘tis downward all which way/
Soever” his “spirits turn” His vision is two-fold and he cannot understand how
to see in three-fold vision. The audience can, and so can clearly visualise
Urizen’s journey in his two-fold world with the other zoas also in two-fold
vision.
Ulro, we know, is “a Moment of Time” drawn out by Eno in
Beulah “to [twenty years del] seven thousand years with much care & affliction/
And many tears” in “every year” she “made windows into Eden. To finite time,
opening out into infinite time, she gave a space, opening into infinite space:
she made “an atom & open’d its
centre/ Into Infinitude” (I: 222-231).
Thus, the audience’s
three-fold vision clearly understands why Urizen’s journey is in two-fold
serial time and space, and why it exists and he within it, and why he
encounters whom he encounters, and does what he does. When he states: “Here I
will fix my foot & here rebuild” (VI: 227) he wrongly believes he is right.
He is at the centre and usurps Luvah’s realm, builds his vortices outward till
he returns to the “Cave of Urizen” in the west (VI: 265). The audience is
reminded by Blake’s poetry of transition that: “in Eternal times The Seat of
Urizen is in the South, Urthona in the North, Luvah in East, Tharmas in West”
(VI: 279-80). The collapse is so profound the zoas appear to be divided from
their emanations, which is why Urizen and his daughters cannot recognise each
other.
Los’ Golgonooza structures the spiritual architecture of
this second universe in Night VII(a); and, opposing it is Urizen’s Temple of
two-fold reason in Night VIIb. Golgonooza and the Temple. The two structures of
spiritual architecture are built in the respective two Nights VII; which is why
there are two of them. Blake’s poetry of transition clearly shows Golgonooza is
three-fold sublime and built out of sentience while, in opposition, Urizen’s
Temple is built out of matter/particle geometry. This second dramatic cycle
indicated above, thus begins with Divine intervention and in balanced mythic
logic ends in Divine intervention.
The audience in three-fold vision now faces the parallel,
‘stereo-textual’ Night VII(a) and Night VII(b).
Obviously, Blake developed his myth as he wrote his epic. He
could not have foreseen the emergence of the two Nights VII, the details of
textual analysis that demonstrate this beyond reasonable doubt are in situ in
the analysis itself below. Here, in Night
VII(a) Los builds Golgonooza and the Night ends with Los who “planting
his right foot firm/ Upon the Iron crag of Urizen, thence springing up aloft/
Into the heavens of Enitharmon in a mighty circle” drawing a “line upon walls
of shining heaven” and “Enitharmon tinctur’d it with beams of blushing love./
It remain’d permanent, a lovely form, inspir’d, divinely human”; and sublime
forgiveness enlightens Los, whose “whole soul lov’d” his enemy Urizen ”
[VII(a); 464-469]. It should be noted that this is the only time Los and Enitharmon
make art in The Four Zoas. Art is two-fold.
To the audience, Blake exits and shifts to a new locale at
the end of Night VII(a), to four-fold
life, as he envisions it, from line 1 of Night VIII and the locale shift by the
entry of infinite life as “the Council of God”. In terms of Blake’s hidden
conventions this is reasonable as the sublime work of Los and Enitharmon call
our perception to the entry of four-fold infinite time and space.
However we have to deal with Night VII(b). We have to suspend
our demand for linear continuity for Blake’s myth evolved into a form that
could not be transferred to linear etched completion and that is why, I
suggest, Blake left the work in hand-written form with unfinished sketches.
However, a modern audience is able to envision such a stereo-textual identity.
In Night VII(b) Urizen builds his Temple. The Night ends
with a shift, as in VII(a), to Beulah “waiting with patience for the fulfilment
of the Promise Divine” given when the Limits were set. The promise is eternal
life. Thus the “dead burst thro’ the bottoms of their tombs Beyond the Limit of
Translucence on the Lake of Udan Adan/ These they nam’d Satan and in the
Aggregate they nam’d them Satan” [VII(b): 295-301]. Death is hardened into a
finite form that is the State of Satan and will be put off for infinite life.
At the end of Night VII(b) the audience is placed clearly in the infinite, thus
logically connected to the opening lines of Night VIII, the continued entry of
infinite life in four-fold life vision, and the resurrection.
Therefore, both Nights VII begin in the same time and space
of two-fold life and end in four-fold life. In VII(a) is built Golgonooza: the
“dead that descend in the Temple sighed out into Golgonooza” and the “Divine
Countenance shone in Golgonooza”, as “a Human form”. Los and Enitharmon “knew
he was the Saviour” (VIII: 42-4).
In Night VII(b) is built the Temple: Urizen calls the
“Synagogue of Satan”, for Satan has formed in Night VII(b), “to judge the Lamb
of God to Death”, the “Lamb of God” is “condem’d to Death” and crucified.
(VIII: 273-4) Both Nights are drawn
together and the last lines interlaced to form a dramatic unity in the first
lines of Night VIII. The details of Blake’s additions deletions and amendments
that show this are given in situ below.
Now, in Night VIII, Blake’s drama shows Jesus enter to
descend into the Temple (the Synagogue of Satan) to assume the ‘mantle’ or
finite form of finite human life and finite human death: “The Lamb of God
descended thro’ the twelve portions of Luvah, / Bearing his sorrows &
recieving all his cruel wounds” (K.VIII: 323-4).
It is appropriate to review the role played by Luvah and
Vala thus far in The Four Zoas. In the first universe: “They melt the
bones of Vala & the bones of Luvah into wedges;/ The innumerable sons &
daughters of Luvah, clos’d in furnaces, melt into furrows”. Luvah and Vala and
all their ‘children’ are sacrificed to fertilize generative nature, which in
turn is Albion’s desire to self-reproduce. He is unable to infinitely
regenerate himself. He is able only to self-predate in primal incest in finite
generation until he is self-consumed. Thus in the second universe Luvah
‘enters’ as compressed, chained and concentrated into fury, Blake names this
extreme state of compaction Orc. In VII(a): 41, he burns in “foaming fires”
[VII(a): 41]. In VII(b) he burst his “wrists of fire” and rapes Vala, the
“nameless shadow” [VII(b): 146].
Vala is the nature goddess of Albion’s inner collapse into
generation and so birth, life and death. She is a “howling melancholy./ For far
& wide she stretch’d thro’ all the worlds of Urizen’s journey,/ And was
ajoin’d to Beulah as the Polypus to the Rock.” [VII(b): 88-9]
Albion needs to self-predate; his hunger, concomitant with
turning from Divine energy, is insatiable. In Blake’s three-fold vision, the
audience reads and sees that without Divine energy Albion dies for he is
contingent. He thought he was God; but the audience understands clearly that
infinite regeneration is infinitely beyond his finite life. The tortured body
of Luvah that Blake shows us in Night VIII is clearly Albion’s self-predation:
the ecstatic insanity of Vala, the “nameless shadow”, is seen as inevitable. In
two-fold life it is necessary murder in order to maximise sacrificial
suffering, and then ‘drain out’ the energies of agony to ‘water’ Vala’s
fertilized generation. In Blake’s soteriology, human sacrifice is the image of
Albion’s hubristic blasphemy; hence the Limit of Satan and the Limit of Adam
cannot be forgiven for they are negation and eternally dead and must be put
off.
Jesus descends into two-fold life to take on the “cruel
wounds”. Thus “death Eternal is put off
Eternally” (K VIII: 240). As Satan forms (he is not born) into “a Vast
Hermaphroditic form…dishumaniz’d, monstrous” (VIII 246-259) so Jesus “the Lamb
of God descended thro’ Jerusalem’s gates/ To put off Mystery time after time;
& as a Man/ Is born on Earth so was he born” (VIII: 259-262). The audience sees in Blake’s
three-fold vision that Jesus’ birth reveals four-fold life in contracted
two-fold life, and his resurrection reveals infinite life in an otherwise
eternal, one-fold death. Albion’s finitude, like a tension stretched surround,
is ‘sliced’ away and ‘rolls up’, burning itself up till it is self-consumed
entirely. Reasonably, the end of death means the revelation of infinite life.
Hence, the Apocalypse quite reasonably follows the resurrection in Blake’s
mythic logic and dramatic causality. It is not inexplicable.
Blake’s three-fold vision shows us the cruelties of the
harvest and vintage of Night IX cleanse Albion of the appalling brutality of
his morally insane self-predation, that is the two-fold world of birth, life
and death in a fallen universe. The Limit of Satan and the Limit of Adam will
be cleansed from Albion in the apocalypse. The celebration of cleansing is the
Eucharistic feast of the vintage and harvest. Thus the Luvah and Vala cycle as
shown to an audience becomes a major thematic vehicle for Blake’s dramatic
causality and mythic logic.
The third cycle of events: the Resurrection to the
Apocalypse; harvest, vintage and unity with God.
The resurrection of Night VIII then, ends the second major
cycle in The Four Zoas. In other terms, Blake’s crafted hidden
conventions and three-fold vision allows the audience to envision the drama of
Divine, four-fold infinite life enter Ulro and save two-fold life from one-fold
death. Time, locales, the player’s roles and Blake’s poetry of transition allow
imaginative clarity to an audience that can understand the hidden conventions
and sequences of entry and exit and poetry of transition according to the
dramatic conventions of the four levels of vision Blake uses.
After the resurrection in Night VIII, there begins a third
cycle of evolution. The eight zoas and emanations are reconciled in logical
order, and a third sequence of entries and exits follow. During this third
sequence the two chains of time and sorrow that bound Urizen are shattered; and
the cycle of cleansing that culminates in the Apocalypse begins. This third
cycle of entries cleanses Albion’s inner energies of the State of Satan and
State of Adam respectively by the bread and wine of the Apocalyptic Eucharist.
The events are clearly seen, though like Shakespeare’s staging, they are hidden
and need to be revealed to the imagination of Blake’s audience.
To summarise Blake’s narrative drama thus far, as seen by
the four-fold entries and exits of the Council of God and the daughters of
Beulah, there is a three-fold state of vision through which the audience can
watch Blake’s four-fold vision enter the two-fold spiritual life and restore
one-fold death into life, all enacted imaginatively in logical mythic and
dramatic causality.
As noted, the third major cycle of entries and exits for the
eight zoas and emanations begins as Los and Enitharmon enter. They build
Blake’s sublime city, seen in three-fold vision as the realised spiritual
crucible of vision in finitude, or, the New Jerusalem of the resurrection. The
prophetic purpose of the sublime in Golgonooza is fulfilled in a ‘New’
Jerusalem.
Thus as expected, the opening scene of Night IX opens with
Los and Enitharmon in the “Sepulcher & over the Crucified body/ Which to
their Phantom Eye” of finitude “appear’d still in the Sepulcher; /But Jesus
stood beside them in the spirit, separating/ Their spirit from their body” (IX
1-5). The causality is clear, for, since infinite life is revealed in finite
life, it follow in mythic logic that finite energy be consumed by infinite energy;
and, it follows, the apocalypse begins. This is the second Divine intervention
and it ends the second cycle.
Blake reasonably shifts to the scene in infinity of the
“rock” upon which “lay the faded head of the Eternal Man/ Enwapped round with
weeds of death”. The audience knows Albion lies on the rock of ages in the
infinite. We return to this rock. The apocalyptic revelation of infinite life
awakes Albion and he “lifts the blue lamps of his Eyes & cries with
heavenly voice” (IX::95-6). As in the earlier cycles, Albion can only see
within to component life. Thus Urizen is called out from Albion’s interior
life: “Prince of Light where art thou?” Urizen enters: “he wept in the dark
deep” (IX: 162). Called into the energies of revelation, the “bursting Universe
explodes” as “All things revers’d flew
from their centers” (IX: 230-1). Jesus was born, crucified and resurrected at
the centre, the east, .in Jerusalem. Thus, Jerusalem is renewed from the centre
out to the circumference in all directions outward.
Into the new life enter Luvah and Vala “beneath the apple
tree”. All eight component energies, or players in Blake’s myth, are renewed in
turn. Thus, Tharmas and Enion enter re-born in the love of Luvah and Vala in
her garden. The audience sees these two-fold events in three-fold vision and
follows the causality, for it is rational. It is reasonable that the entrance
of each zoa and emanation in turn reconciles all Albion’s component energies.
It follows that Albion as a whole needs to be purged of the Limit of Satan and
the Limit of Adam else Albion must remain finite.
The climax of Albion’s unity with God is reached in
beautifully crafted poetry of transition. The zoas and emanations now sit at a
“golden feast” of the harvest and vintage respectively purging Albion’s
interior energies of the Limit of Adam and the Limit of Satan. This third major
cycle ends in restoration into unity with God and so the Blake’s last lines of The
Four Zoas give us a scene of reconciled life. Cleansed, Albion opens his
sense to infinite perception: “The Expanding Eyes of Man” see a beautiful
universe like a “New born Man” in “songs & joy” with its first lines “The
war of swords departed now,/ The dark religions are departed & sweet
Science reigns” and we have reached the “End of the Dream”.
Epilogue
The infinity of the zoas and emanations lay hidden within
the finite. Blake’s reveals this throughout the poem sharing in three-fold
vision his prophetic purpose; namely to speak out and reveal what ordinary
people do not see. While the purpose of life for Blake is unity with God, to
give some balance for a secularist, Blake’s metaphors signify an ontology and
epistemology of a descent into madness and a return in wholeness through
creative expression (Youngquist 1994).
The Four Zoas could be presented in a dramatic
medium. Using modern technology, animation might succeed in presenting Blake’s
narrative ‘stagecraft’. The plot of the myth is the sequences of entrances and
transitions. Each entrance is into the audience’s individual imagination. In
analogy to the stagecraft of Shakespeare, Blake’s calligraphy and art pulse
with hidden alternative tensions about a controlled dramatic flow. Blake’s art
is a visual surround of controlled change. Jerusalem has been recently
performed (Sklar 2007) as has Milton (see The Blake Journal 2008).
In Anthony and Cleopatra, as shown, there are three
clear stagecraft movements in which the armies separately cross to the middle
door, behind which is the noise of battle, and out of which enter players who
gives the audience the answers of victory or defeat in the battle ‘behind’.
Even Blake’s dream is echoed by Anthony’s dying dream. Anthony, dying, enters a
boundary state of consciousness where being itself becomes a dissolving dream:
“Here I am Anthony,/ Yet cannot hold this visible shape”. Likewise, in The Tempest we have a
shipwreck and behind the middle door is the noise of the ‘battle’ against the
elements. It is this middle door out of which enter players who give the answer
of ‘defeat’ as the elements wreck the ship.
Shakespeare’s myth of staging means the audience views the
stage from an ‘outside’. It knows the dance of exits and entrances and place
and time that binds the staging. Think of this as like Blake’s three-fold
vision. On the stage the players play out their roles bound by the staging.
Think of this as like two-fold vision.
To an audience’s imagination it is possible to imagine
Shakespeare’s players as analogous to Blake’s dramatic players; for example,
both sets of players are bound in that time and space of the staging or the
epic, while the audience is not. The audience is prescient. It envisions the
future space and time of the next entry or exit by means of the conventions of
transition. Thus while in the staging or epic surprise is acted, as Romeo and
Juliet can surprise each other, or Urizen and his daughters, the audience is
not at all surprised by their encounter. Other times one player can plan to
surprise the other, or bring a gift or good or bad news, again that which is
the surprise is no surprise to the audience, such as the death of Caesar or the
opening of the furnace in Jerusalem. Sometimes the meeting is planned by
both, as in the elopement scene in Middleton A Chaste Maid at Cheapside.
However, both writers live creatively in the uniquely
evolved indigenous traditions of English theatre and dramatic narrative; and
both are best understood in terms of its hidden conventions. In The Winters
Tale Act V Shakespeare directly constructs time-in-motion in the audience’s
imagination. The directions read: “Enter Time, The Chorus” who gives us 16
years of fluid prescience: “Now take me up in the name of Time/ To use my
wings: impute it nor a crime to me, or my swift passage, that I slide ore
sixteen years” (V: I; 2-3). Time brings: “witness to/ The times that brought
them in, so shall I do/ To the freshest things now reining, and make stale” (V:
I; 27-28).
Once recognised, we can see these indigenous conventions in
narrative drama throughout English ‘epic’ writers. Chaucer, Spencer (and Dante)
are predecessors of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights well known to
fascinate Blake. Modern writers like Eliot in The Wasteland and Auden in
“The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest like
wise rest on hidden Shakespearian dramatic conventions.
Thus, the Blake’s prophetic lens, gaze and speech shows
‘how’ the audience looks within, in three-fold vision, at how two-fold
generation and one-fold death are saved by four-fold life. Such is his
prophetic mission, and it allows us to see and hear Blake’s art and poetry. The
savage and murderous sexuality, opportunism and enslavement of labour in
Blake’s two-fold world is chanted and imaginatively ‘danced’ before the
audience by his crafting of mythic entry and exit, dialogue and soliloquy,
poetry of morphology and transition between fields of perception and his causal
narrative logic.
Thus, the hidden structures of the eight’s entries and exits
and Jesus’ entrance and resurrection craft Blake’s myth in The Four Zoas; and;
these entries and exits are structured in three main cycles: namely, the fall
to the two Limits; the two Limits to the incarnation, crucifixion and
resurrection; the resurrection to the apocalypse. Thus accomplishing Blake’s
prophetic triptych form as the ‘prologue’ announced in the opening lines of
Night I: “His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity:/ His Fall
into the Generation and decay of death, & his/ Regeneration by the
Resurrection from the dead”.
END OF THE DREAM
1 Recent studies of The Globe
by Orrell and Blatherwick 1992 and Cuyler Ph.D. Birmingham. 1985 show the
significance of the golden section in the building The Globe. The archaeology has helped re-construct the
modern Globe. However these studies did
not resolve the problems of stage management as recently outlined by Freeman.
2001
2Though this study of The Four Zoas per se was
granted a Doctorate in 1984; it remains largely unread by scholars in the
field, though noted in Blake An Illustrated Quarterly 1986.
In response to many requests, I put the study on the Internet and interest is
such the site receives some hundreds of thousands of hits a year and registers
approximately 100-120 visits daily, since 2003. Aside from the interest in
Blake globally it is hard to know what these sorts of figures mean. One clear
meaning was requests for a book, so I decided to publish, 2009. In scholarly
context then the study here is fresh to the field, and is noted in Justin Van
Kleeck’s invaluable bibliography of The Four Zoas 2006 and in Blake:
An Illustrated Quarterly. 2008.
Thus, I seek in this Chapter
to review some representative present scholarship on The Four Zoas. A reasonable beginning is Johnson and Wilkie’s
first book length study of the epic as a dream in 1976. Second came this study
in 1984. It is the first full-scale study that completes a virtually
line-by-line analysis and a like study, in situ, of the additions, deletions
and amendments and Blake’s stages of development. Two years later Ault published
his study 1986, obviously without knowledge of my entirely different
methodologies and conclusions. Following these very different studies, there
have been very few others. Lincoln, for example, published his book in 1994.
Ide published a Fourier analysis 1993. Like Ault my research seemed unread by
them or by Otto, who also completed a study of The Four Zoas (2000).
Otto points out it is not unusual for it to take ten years to write on Blake’s
major prophecies. The Four Zoas is formidable and any full-length study
of is significant as its level of difficulty is such there are few full-scale
studies completed and all are astonishingly insightful. My research findings as described by my
supervisor Frederick Cogswell and my Doctorate readers is the study “challenges
the views of “some greats in the field”
and “a major breakthrough”. I start with this peer review, simply because my
findings showed beyond reasonable doubt that The Four Zoas is a
beautifully crafted epic, with a clear serial cause and effect dramatic
narrative and ordered plot, in which the parts are so crafted as to create an
aesthetic whole.
3 See also Ault, Pierce, Lincoln, Rothenberg, Dortort,
Van Lieshout et al) and those who for quite different reasons also find no
crafted, serial cause and effect narrative continuum (for examples, Bindman,
Bloom, Doskow, Erdman, Frye, Kiralis, Otto, Paley, Percival, Raines, Spector,
Stevenson, Webster and others.
4
Significantly, her Fourier analysis of The Four Zoas study was without
knowledge of this research below detailing the narrative causality and plot and
so her independent study, when placed beside this, allows both to mutually
provide support for both methodologies.
The valuable possibilities of linguistic methodologies and the computer
are seen here in the structural correspondences that can be read. Both studies help confirm the quality of
Blake’s crafting and, further, though written much earlier, no other textual
analysis provides such close support to the grammar she details. The methodologies generate quite different
and complementary fields of information (Potter 1993).
The
opening to Night I, in particular, will always be subject to editorial
decisions and discussions. The Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly
offers a valuable edition in 1978 in which practical details of the first few
pages of the palimpsest’s layered text are examined.
6 A significant
place to begin is Café Voltaire and the fountainhead of modern aesthetics, The
Dadaist Manifesto. The post-Dadaist
aesthetics of Tzara and Breton’s two surrealist manifestos are now mainstream
aesthetics, art, literature, drama and literary philosophy. It is as a mainstream French philosopher that
Derrida enters US literary thought rather than a radical innovator. Tzara,
Picasso Artaud, Barthes, Becket, Brecht, Breton, Camus Celine, De Beauvoir,
Eliot, Foucault, Freud, Genet Ianesco, Kokoschka, Lacan, Leotard,
Merleau-Ponty, Patchen, Picasso, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Saussure, Tzara, Wahol
and many others are familiar names in introductions to Blake’s writing drawing
and engravings in terms of a modern aesthetic. This is not the place for a reading list or detailed discussion because
there is so much involved, but broadly speaking American aesthetics embraced
the French aesthetic.
7 I was fortunate to be
trained by David Galloway at graduate school, during four post-graduate years
of exhilarating and exacting course work, in which we examined every syllable
and spaces between in the facsimile of The First Folio. Freeman’s
edition of The First Folio in modern type (2001) is an outstanding
contribution and the details quoted below are found in the preface to his work
(passim).
As is common knowledge,
Shakespeare was popular with Blake’s contemporaries and Blake was well read and
hugely influenced by Shakespeare. Available were four Folios, in 1623, 1632
(dated 1622) and full of errors, 1663-4, and 1685. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe
published an edition suggesting Act and Scene divisions throughout that are
mostly conjectural. Johnson’s edition was published in 1765, with a famous
preface. Pope’s edition was published in 1773-5, again with a famous preface,
and Morgan published in 1777 with a famous passage on Falstaff. Then, between
1709 and 1799 there were 60 complete editions including reprints. Coleridge’s
lectures were also famous especially his rheory of Iago’s ‘motiveless
malignity’. Hazlitt in 1817 wrote a reply on Iago’s motive, and De Quincey
wrote, in turn, of the Porter scene and his knocking on the gate in Macbeth.
Bentley describes Blake’s acquaintance with Wordsworth and Coleridge with a
telling anecdote of Wordsworth ‘nicking’ a copy of Blake’s Songs.
8 A Midsummers Nights Dream was entered into the Stationer’s Register October 8
1600. and published as Quarto 1. Quarto 2 was published 1619 with the date 1600
on it. The Folio was based on a revised Quarto 2. The Tempest was
recorded in the Revels Accounts as played before King James on Hallowmas Night
(November 1) in 1611. It was played also at court in 1613 as part of the
celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine. It was first
published in The First Folio and its stage directions are reliable.
The Famous History of the
Life of Henry VIII was acted at The
Globe on June 6th, 1613. It was first printed in The First Folio
1623. It is a clean text with complex and reliable stage directions. Scholars
have shown Shakespeare relied closely on Holinshed and Foxe for some passages.