I'm indebted to Frederick Buechner for many things: for his helping to sort out my faith when I was ready to walk away from it in my twenties, for his demonstration of the rippling effects of suicide on a family which has kept me from committing a sin by which I've been sorely beset, for his calling up the inherent musical possibility of prose sentences—their Janus-faced, Chestertonian grace—that made me want to be an essayist as well as a poet, and especially for his sorting out what is now my theory of evangelism: that it doesn't start with sharing The Story, as one might tell it out on a string of beads beginning with green for Eden, then black for sin, etc.; rather, it begins with sharing The Author as He has written, and has been writing, my story, or as Buechner memorably-as-ever, phrased it,
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness.[1]
I've been trying to pick out that lead of Love ever since reading his biographies decades ago, and by Heaven's grace, sometimes even successfully. But in addition to all that, recently, I've been grateful to the good Reverend for helping me make sense of Shakespeare's strangest stage direction.
It's famous; you've probably heard it. In the middle of The Winter's Tale, when the lost child Perdita is set among the rocks, exposed to whatever death or happenstantial rescue might find her, poor Antigonus—the servant in charge of setting the supposed-bastard out as a foundling that the kingdom might not be defiled by the act that King Leontes wrongly imagines begat her —is chased off-stage with a curt ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ (iii.3.65). It's a fun bit of artistic assignment as generations of directors are given a practical problem to solve. In Jamesian England, maybe they used a live bear from the bear-baiting shows that often preceded a night at the theater. Do we make a bear costume and have an actor stage the chase? Should it be funny? Animated? What if we used a stuffed teddy and Antigonus just acts terrified? Some critics, theater-goers, and directors enjoy this scene simply because it seems so random: here we are in a very serious play about jealousy and power imbalance, rage and injustice, gift-economy and indebtedness and now this crazy bit of text suggesting, what exactly? I think I know now and I know I wouldn't have noticed were it not for Buechner's relation of his experience of teaching King Lear at Phillips Exeter in Telling the Truth (1977).
Buechner refers to the ‘tragic vision’ of King Lear, ‘in which the good and the bad alike go down to dusty and, it would seem, equally meaningless death with no God to intervene on their behalf’,[2] but he also calls the same play ‘a homily’ on 1 Corinthians 1:27-28 because,
[It] points to the apparent emptiness of the world where God belongs and to how the emptiness starts to echo like an empty shell after a while until you can hear in it the still, small voice of the sea, hear strength in weakness, victory in defeat, presence in absence.[3]
But if Lear is a gloss on the silence/absence of God in which He is still active, as above, Winter's Tale is all presence. True, villainy thrives, evil denounces good, jealousy destroys ancient friendships, and families are torn asunder. And yes, children—the least of these—suffer, but for all that, the universe in the play is fundamentally just. In fact, justice seems to be the central feature of the cosmos therein, one more profoundly woven into the fabric of existence than, for example, the laws of physics or biology.
While the unlucky Antigonus argues that he’s just the means for the injustice he’s about to commit—I was just following orders—some part of him senses a divine retributive justice at work, of the sort Buechner identifies in Lear, saying ‘I will be squared by this’ (iii.3.45). Here too, as in Lear, the world and weather seem to agree. While the day is fine over at the oracle of Delphi, which detail is meant to convince a Christian audience that we can trust what it says, the sky over Perdita and Antigonus ‘looks grimly/ and threaten[s] present blusters’ (iii.3.4-5). Everything is lining up to perform justice, despite humans’ best efforts to deny it. And, of course, this culminates in ‘how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone…how the poor souls roared and the sea mocked them; and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him’ (iii.3.99-107). God is not mocked. Why a bear and not, for example, a wolf? Because we later find out that Hermione is descended from Russian nobility: the spirit of her homeland, like the sea and sky itself, has conspired to ‘show the heavens more just’ (Lear, iii.4.41).
It is a consistent vision, one not limited to Leontes' repentance and Hermione's eventual restitution. It's fundamentally an incarnation, one where God very much intervenes on behalf of the innocent. In another example from Winter’s Tale, grown Perdita is talking with a disguised Florizel about how she, apparently a mere shepherdess, could possibly bridge the huge distance in class to marry the prince. Wasn't it ridiculous for them to be talking this way? Florizel brushes the complication aside with a wave of his hand:
[…] The gods themselves,
humbling their deities to love, have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them.
He lists Jupiter, Neptune, and Apollo as examples—recall that this is intentionally a pre-Christian play—of this incarnation. Yes, he says, the distance between us is real, but a god can come down from heaven to be with those he loves.
And, of course, the play itself enacts a kind of incarnation too, breaking whatever is left of the fourth-wall at this point, when Time itself walks onstage as a character to explain why the classical unities are not being observed. We've thrown unity of place out the window, and unity of action; we've introduced brand new characters in Act 4, which every good Elizabethan playwright understands you do not do, and now to reconcile our imaginations to the passage of sixteen years on which the plot hinges, this being-outside-time just interrupts the proceedings, bending our sense of reality as (s)he does.
In this world, the very stones cry out.
It's ironic, really, that Buechner is the one who opened up for me Shakespeare's profound religious dimension, because in general, he didn't think there was much of it. In A Room Called Remember (1984), he writes, ‘There is very little religion in Shakespeare, but when he is greatest, he is most religious.’[4] As examples, Buechner cites The Tempest, ‘that masque of his old age where all comes right in the end, where like Rembrandt in his last self-portraits Shakespeare smiles up out of his wrinkles and speaks into the night a golden word too absurd to be anything perhaps but true, the laughter of things beyond the tears of things.’[5] The other example he offers is of course King Lear, ‘a fairy tale...turned on its head’, in which,
although everything comes right in the end, everything also does not come right...[as] blinded, old Gloucester sees the truth about his sons but too late to save the day. Cordelia is vindicated in her innocence only to be destroyed more grotesquely because more pointlessly than her sisters in their lustful cunning. And Lear himself emerges from his madness to become truly a king at last, but dies then babbling that his dead darling lives and fumbling with a button at his throat.[6]
But one wonders whether he really believed this about how little Shakespeare was religiously concerned. Elsewhere, Buechner notes the very tidiness he had earlier decried:
At the close of his career, after the period of the great tragedies, Shakespeare turned to something much closer to true fairy tales. He wrote Cymbeline, where innocence is vindicated and old enemies reconciled, and The Winter's Tale, where the dead queen turns out not to be dead at all, the lost child, Perdita, restored to those who love her. And he wrote The Tempest itself, where the same great storm of the world that drowned the Franciscan nuns aboard the Deutschland and lashed old Lear to madness and stung Job in his despair is stilled by Prospero's magic; and justice is done, and lovers reunited, and the kingdom restored to its rightful king so that in a way it is the beautiful dream of Caliban that turns out to be real and the storm of the world with all its cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces and solemn temples that turns out to be the insubstantial pageant that fades into thin air and leaves not a rack behind.[7]
So powerful where these miraculous transformations, especially in The Tempest, that Buechner returns to think more seriously about them at length in his novelization The Storm (1998), but the first seeds of it were there in that early memoir, Telling the Truth, which did so much to redeem fairy tales not as flights of fancy, but as—encompassing as they do both the gospel itself and the works of our greatest bard—the realest things in the redeemed cosmos.
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Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: a memoir of vocation (New York: Harper Collins, 1983), p.87.
[2] Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: the Gospel as comedy, tragedy, and fairy tale (New York: Harper Collins, 1977), p.44.
[3] Ibid., p.45.
[4] Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: uncollected pieces (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p.155.
[5] Ibid., p.155.
[6] Ibid., p.155-6.
[7] Buechner, Telling the Truth, p.87.
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