Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7980

Q: I admit that Shakespeare was hot a philosophic or 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 Prosperous 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 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 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