There is no third

In pursuit of a conversation between Dante and Shakespeare as in the estimation of T. S. Eliot admitting no third, first in this book comes an account of what Dante himself speaks of as this ‘blessed existence’, an account proceeding by way of a theology of salvation culminating in a sense of grace as, in all its givenness, an inwardly operative power to properly human being, to – again as Dante himself puts it – the kind of moral and ontological ‘sufficiency’ of those ‘adult in the flame of love’. Following this comes an account of Shakespeare’s sense of what man as man actually is as a creature of moral and ontological accountability, an account designed to confirm by way of the histories, of the comedies, of the tragedies and of the final ‘romance’ moment of his own meditation hereabouts what for him too it means to come home on the plane of properly human being. At no point is there any underestimating the differences – be they historical, cultural or personal – between Dante and Shakespeare as representative respectively of a high scholastic and of a Renaissance humanist phase of European civilization, but the book seeks to point up even so what one Italian scholar speaks of as the ‘serietà terribile’ or ‘terrifying seriousness’ of what upon reflection actually matters about man’s actually being there as man. In the final analysis therefore - and this by way both of its brevity and and of its analytical precision – homage to these two sovereign spirits.