A FULLER RENDERING
In the same year John O’Meara put out On Nature and the Goddess, the greater part of his work on Shakespeare, exclusive of Otherworldly Hamlet and Othello’s Sacrifice, was also collected under the title Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity. Parts of Myth, Depravity, Impasse were incorporated into this volume also, as well as an edited version of a short essay on Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Plays that had also appeared in 2007 under the title The New School of the Imagination: Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Plays in Literary Tradition. The issue of the modern “impasse” is again raised in this essay—Steiner’s Plays, as a fulfilment of Romantic tradition, offering a form of panacea for the imaginative limitations and deficiencies of our era. In this essay, as well as in Prospero’s Powers, O’Meara brings forward the Anthroposophical approach to the Goddess, who transforms here into the Sophia. He is able on this basis to critique the views of Graves and Hughes, whom he otherwise admires for their courage and commitment, from a still deeper perspective than in Myth, Depravity, Impasse. S.T. Coleridge’s own association with the Goddess is also critiqued from this deeper point of view.
[From the author: “The Second Trilogy could thus have taken quite another form, with reference in this case to its teleological end-point: The Modern Debacle—Myth, Depravity, Impasse—The New School of the Imagination. Contrasting with this, in the Trilogy as it stands, Wordsworth, who comes in for another appearance in School, is given an expansive treatment that keeps the Trilogy well within the area of the theme of historical impasse.
Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity was conceived as a companion-piece to my other big collection, On Nature and the Goddess. A measure of the close symbiosis between these two works is that the latter collection could itself have borne the title "Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity," and perhaps better, though it is more about the Goddess and Modernity than it is about Shakespeare, while the present collection explains Shakespeare more in relation to the themes of the Goddess and Modernity. Otherwise Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity presents Shakespeare very much as his own subject. As for the additional theme of the evolution of the Goddess into the Sophia first broached in my work in Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity, and first developed in The New School, see my later work for further elaborations, especially The Riddle of the Sophia”: the website page for which the reader may find below.]