ALANS’s notes

Book Review: Sylvia Eckersley. Number & Geometry in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Sylvia Eckersley, ed. Alan Thewless. Number and Geometry in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: the Flower and the Serpent. 7 appendices. Numbered First-Folio text of Macbeth. 8 plates. 43 figs. 346 pp. Floris Books. Edinburgh 2007. ISBN 978-086315-592-5. R.r.p. £20.

The post-boxes in Greece are labelled with words looking like “esoteric” and “exoteric”—our “inland” and “abroad”. On this distinction, “the authorship question”, in seeking for hidden clues, is “esoteric”; literary detection pursues an “inland” question. But what of the painstaking efforts of studying the texts and marshalling all the evidence to trace the creative processes of the Bard? By seeking to establish facts this research is scientific; in seeking to interpret the evidence it is also artistic and critical. Is, then, this activity esoteric, exoteric, or perhaps both together?
Readers of “Shakespeare Matters”, already used to the search for hidden clues, will welcome a new revelation of the structure of Bard’s plays. Sylvia Eckersley explores Macbeth with the new-old concept of symmetry, known as chiasm (from the Greek letter chi, X). Developed from parallelism, it was found in the Psalms (Thomas Boys) and even throughout the Bible (E.W. Bullinger. The Companion Bible).
Sylvia Eckersley—related to Thomas Huxley and daughter of an eminent scientist noted for his radar research—claims to have discovered symmetrical forms for the plays. Simply put, there is a mid-point around which the lines of text—including the prose and the stage directions—relate like gigantic menorahs: first and last lines, second and penultimate, and so on. In addition, there are also relationships around mid-act and mid-scene points, and significant number rhythms. The lineation is that of the First Folio (1623). This emerges as an esoteric text, challenging its accepted reputation as a botched job. The lines at the exact centre of Macbeth are:
Macb. See they encounter thee with their harts thanks
Both sides are even: here Ile sit I’ th’ mid’st
The results of a lifetime’s work are encapsulated in circular, geometrical figures, each accompanying an entire play. With their act-“wings”, they look at first like astrolabes. What is the use of all this? These templates, we are shown, provide an objective method to discover the Bard’s deeper meaning. In the worked example, Macbeth, even darker revelations of the main characters’ motivation challenge the play’s conventional interpretation. An exact reading of the text, including the layout and punctuation, reveals ambiguities and an alternative plot.
What exactly is Lady Macbeth’s relationship with King Duncan? What, too, are the circumstances of her death? Why does Shakespeare give Lady Macbeth two references to nursing? She goes on to suggest a violent, murderous deed. If she did have a child by Duncan, is this what became of him? What is this “darling” doing hidden in an act-centre as the Porter’s “Le-cherie”? and Macbeth’s final words in Act II, 2, “Making the Greene one, Red”?
We get an even more disturbing play than the one we thought we knew, one in which we can also sympathise more with the main characters. The evidence for all the insights is the only original, the First-Folio, text. Why hidden? An ephemeral sex-and-violence drama was clearly not the Bard’s intention.
Eckersley, a scrupulously disciplined author, avoids speculation. But just how significant, in context, is her discovery? Nature herself is symmetrical, certainly geometrically ordered, right up to the human skeleton. Interestingly, nature’s abundance is not usually termed “uniformity”. The editor suggests the analogy of architecture. Studies show that every inch was planned of, for example, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid and Chartres Cathedral. These monuments are models of the universe. We can think, too, of the latest research (Hertha Kluge-Kahn; Helga Thoene) on Bach’s instrumental cycles revealing a Christian cabbalist using traditional techniques of—for our intellects—seemingly super-human mathematical-musical complexity. All this is employed for the composer’s own expressive purposes. Without words, Bach praises his Creator by attempting to create after His pattern through a hidden plan based on a unifying concept. Informed ideas on “inspiration” are becoming ever more concrete, and could interest readers. Yet we still meet the attitude, “Who cares who penned the plays—a backwoodsman or an English nobleman—we have the plays!”

Well, do we? Eckersley carefully presents a new method which could take Shakespearean interpretation on to a new, comprehensive level of objectivity. The template and number-rhythms she identifies challenge our complacencies. Her discoveries come at a time when advances in appreciating megalithic science, to more recent architectural and musical masterpieces, all proclaim that we live in a universe of meaning. Great artists, researching “what is”, consistently show that the “irrational” and creative mind can be researched—usually termed “self-knowledge”. The grand illusion and fear of our “subjective” and “irrational” selves, facing the apparently “objective” world seemingly “out there”, become united in a world of correspondences in which we live. The Bard, Bach, and the builders of Chartres Cathedral were hardly backwoodsmen. For them the world is one with the undivided human being.
The binary-system mind-set has to be superseded, “and betimes; For ’tis most dangerous”. Western Baconian science is a chapter overlaying our indigenous holistic science, on which the Bard draws. It is not true, as Richard Dawkins evangelises, sentimentally confusing applied science with scientific method, that we need to choose between the rational and irrational. Today, grateful for Hume’s skepticism and the Enlightenment, we still await an accepted, inclusive scientific method to account for all the phenomena. Binary “right-or-wrong”, “either-or” mentality would eliminate all ambiguity, all metaphor, all poetry. The threatened control of globalisation, moreover, caricatures an achievable unity proclaimed by the poetic imagination. In his detailed analysis of tragedy and its overcoming, Shakespeare is streaks ahead, ever addressing the real issue of keeping whole. If “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on”, then conceivably we shall one day wake up.
In this perspective, I doubt whether the play-figures discovered by Eckersley were cast in bronze and hidden in Wilton House (argued in chapter 11). Along with Bach, a comparable mathematical genius, the Bard employs his advanced consciousness in creating—after all, neither do chess players use pocket calculators.
The author, who knew Macbeth and other plays by heart—literally forwards and backwards—died in 2001. On the day of her death, charitable status was awarded to the Sylvia Eckersley Foundation which holds her literary estate. To G. Wilson Knight’s “interpretations”, the insights of John Vyvyan, Ted Hughes and others, students are now offered a further powerful research tool.
Both exoteric/ esoteric, and scientific/ artistic categories, as such, become increasingly superseded as more is revealed of the astonishingly comprehensive and prophetic mind of the Bard himself. Eckersley succeeds less in advocating a new theory, more in revealing afresh the text itself. From inside knowledge, too, the First-Folio editors John Heminge and Henrie Condell almost 400 years ago, already advised:
Reade him, therefore, and againe, and againe:

Alan Stott, August 2007

Shakespeare

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Reviews

Reviews on my translations of and commentaries on Steiner’s two basic texts for eurythmists.

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The Philosophy of Freedom

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One for one

A look at what this journalistic slogan—accusing eurythmy of being an illustrative art—can teach us.

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Kolben & answer

Robert Kolben is intolerant of my interpretations. But, I think, he chooses to misunderstand. Don’t miss his exemplary analysis of Chopin’s Preludes, included here.

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Chopin

Chopin’s Preludes, which celebrate the musical system (circle of fifths) as a spiritual path.

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Readers Letter – Angle-gestures revisited

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The Angle-Gestures

Further discussion from the Section Newsletter.

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Wedemeir & answer

The ensuing discussion in the “Section Newsletter”, stimulated by the article “No more tone-angles?”, with my answering article.

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