Edgar Allan Poe wrote that the death of a beautiful woman "is the most poetical topic in the world." There could hardly be a less wholesome assertion in American criticism (unless it's Camille Paglia's assertion that children are sexy), but it's true that the profound lyrical appeal of Sylvia Plath's suicide at 30-the final drafts of her blistering new poems typed and on her desk-goes a long way toward explaining why she and not another of the brilliant women writers and betrayed wives of the postwar period became an icon of modern female wrath. Death was Plath's own great theme, both personally and artistically: a correspondence too rich not to lift her pitiable, vengeful exit to the level of poetry, so that her life-especially in its last months, during the breakup of her marriage-forms a unity with her art.

Plath critics, biographers and readers have seized on this final period with, well, a death grip. And now that the fallen giant, Ted Hughes, has joined Plath in the poets' graveyard, both of them are fair game for fiction. This season's contender is Robert Anderson's debut novel, Little Fugue, which begins on Plath's last day and carries the story forward from the well-documented marital strife and separation into an afterlife Plath might have wickedly anticipated: the living hell that she willed on her chief survivor, her unfaithful spouse Ted Hughes.

This is a novel of fading echoes, a book of memory in which the recalled event is the suicide of Plath. It's divided into two story lines-one originating in the Primrose Hill flat where Plath took her life in February 1963, and the other in New York, where a stripling writer (named Robert Anderson, by postmodern coincidence) nurses a lifelong obsession with Sylvia Plath. Both stories are inventive and stylistically dazzling. For most of the book, they are like two sides of a zipper that only intermittently match up. The Plath portion is further divided into three: Plath's by-now familiar tale; part of the Hughes sequel (the seven years after Plath's death); and the story of Hughes' lover Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he left his wife.

Like other novelists of Plath, Mr. Anderson seems steeped in her rich literary remains. But where he has most evidence, he's least convincing. His Plath-who signs off by page 100-has an internal voice so densely poetic that it's a wonder she could order a pork chop. Her every action is fraught with meaning, or with the appearance of meaning. On the morning of her suicide, she writes a line or two, then drops her underpants, climbs up on a table and grinds her vagina against the cold stone of a sculpted head. "Bad-self Sylvia, as she has termed her twin, is orbiting the room, powerless, or more accurately too bemused to intervene. There is something distinctly feline in the elasticity of Sylvia's spine. One might expect her to leap to the higher perch of the rosewood bookshelf at any instant. Instead she grinds down with the withering rhythm of a weary metronome." This act of statuary rape, followed soon after by her fateful meeting with the gas stove, is seen as both a farewell to her father, whose early death made him a god to her, and a reunion with him.

In the way of some more recent Plath scholarship, Mr. Anderson's treatment of Hughes is sympathetic. His Hughes is initially intrigued by Plath's inscrutability, and his interest is sustained by her verse; he doesn't cheat out of boredom alone, but out of "a submerged terror that he might have married a phantom, and that, by extension, all women might be phantoms." I don't know how closely Little Fugue follows the actual events of Hughes' life in those years, but nothing jars in Mr. Anderson's depiction of him. He's a suffering mortal like the rest of us.

The strongest character in the novel is the historically shadowy Assia Wevill, a Holocaust witness who abandoned her third husband (the poet David Wevill) for a chance at achieving some sense of reality with Hughes. This is an almost unbearably intimate portrayal of a woman whose notoriety rests on having stolen Plath's husband and then having killed herself and the daughter she'd had with Hughes-by putting her head, like Plath, in a gas stove.

When Mr. Anderson eventually draws connections between each of these stories and the New York–based narrative of "Robert Anderson," the results are hugely satisfying despite their complete implausibility. After the gravity and lyricism that precedes them, these coincidences -magical encounters between "Anderson" and Plath's survivors-may feel like eating whipped cream from the can. Happily, Anderson has earned his fanciful flourishes, and those who praised his collection of short stories, Ice Age-which won the Flannery O'Connor Prize in 2000-will feel they've earned them as well.

Regina Marler is the author of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press).

On the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, in the alleyway behind 23 Fitzroy Road in snowbound London, Myra Norris, a Health Services nurse who was scheduled to arrive for work at 9 a.m. but couldn't get anyone to answer, looked up at the flat where she was supposed to be and saw them-two small children framed by a window, crying. Rushing around to the main street, the nurse persuaded a construction worker to break down the brownstone's front door. In the kitchen of the upstairs flat, they discovered the body of a woman sprawled on the floor, her head in the oven, the gas still on. One floor up, they found her children sealed in their bedroom. In another room, on the desk where she worked, lay an unpublished manuscript entitled Ariel and Other Poems.

The dead woman was Sylvia Plath. Only 30 when she died, she'd lived a full life: She'd earned degrees from Smith College and Cambridge University; published one poetry collection under her own name (The Colossus) and one novel under a pseudonym (The Bell Jar); survived three suicide attempts (one of them serious); given birth to two children; and endured a seven-year marriage to the young British poet Ted Hughes. In July of 1962, that marriage had begun to unravel when Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair with their friend, Assia Guttman, who was married to the poet David Wevill. Had it not been for the affair, Plath's marriage would certainly have continued-at least as far as Plath was concerned.

But as the summer and fall unfolded, Hughes unleashed a flurry of emotional abuse on Plath, who more than once wrote her mother that Hughes was trying to "kill" her with his actions. That's one reason why many people sympathetic to Plath were unhappy when Hughes inherited her entire literary estate, including unpublished work like Ariel. It seemed bitterly ironic that the man responsible for Plath's final deadly breakdown (there had been other breakdowns, to be sure, which Hughes knew about when he met her) would now own the copyright to all of her work.

In 1965, Hughes decided to publish Ariel in the United Kingdom, but when he did, he drastically altered the 40-poem manuscript Plath had completed and carefully arranged as of mid-November 1962. (The book, Plath noted, began with the word "Love" and ended with the word "Spring.") Hughes omitted 13 poems, among them "The Rabbit Catcher" (a poem about a strained romance in which the woman feels she is being killed by the relationship), "Barren Women" and "Lesbos" (unhappy poems directed toward Hughes' sister, Olwyn), "A Secret" (a vicious poem spoken by a woman who wants the man in her life "dead or away"), "The Other" (a poem in which the narrator's rival is another woman) and "Stopped Dead" (an unflattering poem about Hughes' uncle, Walter).

Generally speaking, Hughes removed poems that were personally aggressive toward him or his family. He replaced them with poems that were either emotionally neutral (like "Balloons" or "Years") or potentially cast Plath in a bad light (like "Kindness" or "Edge"). Some but not all of the poems Hughes added came from poems Plath had written in the final weeks of her life. When Ariel appeared in America in 1966, Hughes-rather inexplicably-added "Lesbos," "Mary's Song" and "The Swarm."

Hughes significantly altered Plath's original vision of the volume and removed as many poems as possible that were offensive to him. Despite his actions, and because of an extraordinary core group of poems ("Lady Lazarus," "Daddy," "The Applicant," "Cut," "Elm," "Ariel," "Fever 103Þ"-poems Hughes could not remove because they had been either published or accepted for publication), Ariel would go on to become one of the seminal volumes of poetry published in the 20th century, and Plath would take her place in the canon of American literature as one of the masters-arguably the most important woman poet since Emily Dickinson.

Now, almost four decades after its publication, Ariel has been re-released, presented exactly as Plath intended. The original Ariel has been available for years in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, so it's hardly new to Plath scholars. What's new is the introduction by Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, who was not yet 3 when her mother died. Obviously, anyone familiar with Plath's life and work will have enormous sympathy for Frieda and her brother, Nicholas. The image of those two children framed by the window that February morning is haunting, the pathos nearly overwhelming.

However, in Frieda Hughes' introduction, there's information presented as fact that is, at best, open to interpretation-at worst, it's simply wrong. This is how Ms. Hughes describes the events that led to her parents' separation: "On work-connected visits to London in June 1962, my father began an affair with a woman who had incurred my mother's jealousy a month earlier. My mother, somehow learning of the affair, was enraged. In July her mother, Aurelia, came to stay at Court Green, our thatched black and white cob house in Devon, for a long visit …. By early October, with encouragement from Aurelia (whose efforts I witnessed as a small child), my mother ordered my father out of the house."

First, Hughes' decision to embark on an affair with Guttman had nothing to do with Plath's reported jealousy. (Strangely, earlier boyfriends of Plath had never complained about her being jealous.) In fact, Plath probably sensed Guttman had designs on her husband, which-quite understandably, actually-sparked Plath's concern. Second, Plath learned of the affair because Guttman kept calling Court Green and, on one particular day when Plath unexpectedly answered the phone instead of Hughes, actually disguised her voice as a man's (as if Plath would not recognize Guttman, a close friend!) and asked to speak to Hughes. Plath captured the whole disturbing incident in "Words heard, by accident, over the phone"-an episode seemingly orchestrated by Guttman to reveal her affair with Hughes to Plath. Finally, Plath's decision to end the marriage had nothing to do with her mother, whose advice, at this point in her life, she routinely ignored.

Later in her introduction, Ms. Hughes writes: "My father continued to see 'the other woman' … but she remained living primarily with her husband for two and a half years after my mother's death." What Ms. Hughes does not say is that, even though she never divorced Wevill, Guttman and Hughes continued their affair for a total of seven years and had a daughter together, Shura. Their affair finally ended when Guttman killed both herself and Shura in the same way Plath had-by turning on the gas in the kitchen stove. It's said that Guttman killed herself beside a trunk of Plath's unpublished manuscripts.

It's understandable that Frieda Hughes-about 10 at the time of Guttman's and her half-sister's deaths-might be sensitive about this material, but leaving out certain information clouds the picture of the Plath-Hughes saga. Consider this detail: "It was many years before I discovered my mother had a ferocious temper and a jealous streak … and that she had on two occasions destroyed my father's work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it." What Ms. Hughes doesn't mention is that in the second episode, when Plath built a bonfire in the backyard at Court Green and burned a lot of documents after learning of her husband's affair, she also destroyed her own work, specifically a sequel she had written to The Bell Jar in which the heroine's emotional distress is healed by her finding a supporting and loving man-now obviously a painful literary conceit for Plath since her marriage was falling apart. Nor does Ms. Hughes mention that in the years following Plath's death, Hughes allowed one large notebook containing her final journals to go "missing" and destroyed a second one because, as Hughes would later say, he did not want his children to read what Plath had written about him.

Simply put, Ms. Hughes has produced an introduction to the new Ariel that continues the disparagement of Plath and the defense of Hughes that Hughes, his family and friends have carried on now for over 40 years. Plath may have been difficult, but Hughes' roguish and flagrantly uncaring behavior in the final eight months of Plath's life was not and is not defensible. His actions helped silence prematurely one of the great geniuses of American literature.

The introduction to a restored Ariel is not the place for Plath's daughter to defend her father and attack her mother. Better to celebrate what is now more obvious than ever: Made up of poems that are so original in their style and so startlingly accomplished in their confessional voice that they helped change the direction of contemporary poetry, Ariel is a masterpiece.

Paul Alexander is the author of Rough Magic (DaCapo), a biography of Sylvia Plath, and Edge, a one-woman play about her.

In some respects, Sylvia follows last year's The Hours in its theme of suicide with a literary pedigree, and in the break-out performances of two of current cinema's leading ladies, both of whom had been taken a bit for granted before they seized on these gutsy roles. To put a point to it, Sylvia provides Gwyneth Paltrow with the opportunity to electrify the audience anew, much as The Hours enabled Nicole Kidman to soar to the Oscar heavens in the unglamorous role of Virginia Woolf. Not that Plath or Ms. Paltrow can qualify as unglamorous, but in portraying Plath's chameleon-like restlessness in dress, manner and behavior, Ms. Paltrow conveys the poet's mental and spiritual instability, which leaves her helpless to withstand the whiplash of marital betrayal without cracking up completely. Ms. Jeffs and her scenarist, Mr. Brownlow, have fashioned several scenes in which Ms. Paltrow's Plath is rude almost to the point of obnoxiousness, and yet she convinces us at the same time that her constant pain and anguish are deeply felt.

Daniel Craig's Ted Hughes is a smaller and more peripheral role than Ms. Paltrow's, but the Hughes character has more connections to the outside world than the comparatively hermit-like Plath. In a beautifully written, directed and played scene, Sylvia's mother, Aurelia (played by Ms. Paltrow's own mother, Blythe Danner), virtually warns Ted not to hurt Sylvia ever. Aurelia sees in Ted someone who has struggled to get where he is, and is therefore very dangerous in his enforced neglect of other people's feelings. And Aurelia, like Sylvia, has not failed to notice that Ted is devilishly attractive to other women, and this always spells trouble in the long run for any woman married to such a charmer. The real-life proof of this is that the real Ted Hughes had not one, but two mothers of his children who committed suicide. Assia Wevill, for whom Ted left Sylvia, not only killed herself but also their 4-year-old daughter, Shura. The affair with Assia (Amira Casar) is in the movie, but her subsequent suicide (along with her daughter's murder) is not.

In any event, it's amazing that Sylvia succeeds as well as it does in bringing Plath and Hughes to life so vividly. Writers, and especially poets, usually make unconvincing movie characters. The sheer hell of writing is difficult to convey to an audience of non-writers, and the mystery of what makes a good writer remains virtually unsolvable. As a case in point, many reviewers complained that the "happy" ending of Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945), from the Charles Jackson novel, was inadequately motivated. This was because the film's protagonist, Don Birnam (played by Ray Millard), wasn't allowed to suggest his literary counterpart's fear of his own gay tendencies as the cause of his writer's block and alcoholism. When I recently looked at the movie again, I found the ending sappy for a different reason: Birnam and Helen, his girlfriend (Jane Wyman), blithely assume that once Birnam has licked his alcohol problem, he'll be magically unblocked as a writer-and become a good one at that. In life, too many well-functioning writers have been raging drunks, and too many more have been afflicted with a profound depression.

Ms. Jeffs and Mr. Brownlow have not made the mistake of moralizing on the subject. And though they don't spend much time on the process of writing, they convince us that the Plath and Hughes of Ms. Paltrow and Mr. Craig are genuine poets, simply by demonstrating that Plath and Hughes are great readers and teachers of poetry as well. After all, great writers do not emerge on mountaintops accompanied by bolts of lightning or from inside a virtual vacuum. They are instead part of a long chain of predecessors who have shown them the way. In the film, W.B. Yeats and Robert Lowell are pointedly cited as prior influences on Hughes and Plath.

When Plath first swoops down on Hughes with her talons extended, she employs the same tactics of gushing flattery that, when later employed by other Hughes groupies, will help destroy the Plath-Hughes marriage. The soft-soaping of artists as a method of seduction has seldom been shown sympathetically in movies; offhand, I can only think of Woody Allen's shrewd praise of Diane Wiest's writing in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). On the other side of the coin, I felt a distinct twinge of guilt as a critic when I looked at the shattered expression on the face of Ms. Paltrow's Plath after she read an unfavorable review of her poetry.

I would be less than candid, however, if I didn't confess a certain uneasiness about the ennobling of suicide as a heroic statement on the malaise of our time. One can speculate that if Woolf and Plath had had access to the latest anti-depressants around today, they might have decided not to leave this vale of tears, Plath at 30 and Woolf near 60. Of late, I have been even more disturbed by the recent reported suicide of Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926-2003). Her son was quoted in The Times obituary saying, "She wanted to control her destiny, and she felt her life was a journey that had been concluded." Heilbrun, a former professor of English at Columbia University and a noted writer of mystery novels and nonfiction books, was reportedly not ill, which makes the words attributed to her mysterious indeed in their rejection of Hamlet's fear of entering "the undiscover'd country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns."

Consequently, I wanted to cheer Jared Harris' lucid portrayal of Al Alvarez, one of Plath's few literary champions, in the scene in which he vainly tries to convince Plath that all the mumbo-jumbo about death was so much hogwash disguising the enormity of a suicide's effect in erasing the ego, and leaving nothing but the blank blackness in it wake.

Still, Sylvia remains one of the most graceful and beautiful films of the year, which is not entirely a surprise for an admirer of Ms. Jeff's Rain (2001), with its vagrant images of aimless dancers in the surf still haunting me.

Screwball Without the Screw

Joel and Ethan Coen's Intolerable Cruelty , from a screenplay by Robert Ramsey, Matthew Stone and the Coen Brothers, has been misleadingly labeled as a screwball comedy in the "classic" tradition of Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and William Wellman's Nothing Sacred (1937). Add the six Preston Sturges comedy bonanzas in the 40's and you have at most a dozen successful screwball comedies, as opposed to the scores of mediocre to exasperating failed screwball ventures in that same period.

The point is that it's never been easy to make movies that make grown-up people really laugh. And it's much harder now, when moviemakers can get easy giggles with a fart or a four-letter word, the use of which was denied to their censor-ridden predecessors. Anyway, Intolerable Cruelty is more a typical Coen Brothers grotesquerie than the traditional romantic screwball comedy, with or without its screws loose.

For one thing, the love interest is introduced too cynically and satirically to make the inevitable final clinch credible or emotionally sustainable. George Clooney's ultra-narcissistic Miles Massey begins trying our patience with his total preoccupation with the whiteness of his teeth to provide a winning smile in a courtroom, where he practices a sleazy brand of divorce law. Unfortunately, this represents a strenuously maladroit misuse of Mr. Clooney's greatest asset: his unforced charm and charisma in a straight context. After all, Cary Grant, to whom Mr. Clooney has been compared, never fretted about his teeth, and at his peak he was never engaged in anything sleazy.

On the distaff side, Catherine Zeta-Jones' Marylin Rexroth is introduced as a grimly cool-headed gold-digger. She has little respect for the rich jerks she bags in her relentless hunt for a divorce settlement that will put her on Easy Street for the rest of her life. Hence, Marylin is more the stuff of homicidal melodrama than of romantic comedy. She looks fabulous, but sounds too refined to engage in the farcical shenanigans that made otherwise-serene beauties like Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne and Jean Arthur so memorable.

As it happens, most of the great screwball comedies were set in Hollywood's version of a dream-like magical metropolis, recognizable as Manhattan from the cardboard sets and background process shots. Intolerable Cruelty is set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two locations lacking gravitas and the element of fantasy that once was required for the screen's gods and goddesses.

So Intolerable Cruelty is not a screwball comedy. Then what is it? Most of it, it seems, is a Coen Brothers concoction of unpredictably goofball absurdism. It's usually hit or miss with these sibling auteurs; every invention is either a home run or a strikeout. Among the strikeouts are the unfunny spectacle of the hero's legal sidekick, Wrigley (Paul Adelstein), sobbing uncontrollably at weddings, and the asthmatic assassin named Wheezy Joe (Irwin Keyes) who is shoehorned into the proceedings when Miles and Marylin take turns trying to have each other killed for the most venal reasons. Ha, ha.

The one home run in the film is when Mr. Clooney renounces his marriage-slaying profession for the sake of his newfound love in a speech at a Las Vegas convention for divorce lawyers. When the initially dumbfounded audience unexpectedly cheers him, it is a classic Frank Capra moment, and Mr. Clooney handles it well enough to suggest that the seemingly effortless charm he displayed in his game of love with Jennifer Lopez, of all people, in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998), can be summoned at a moment's notice. Though there aren't enough such moments in Intolerable Cruelty , the Coen Brothers do provide enough of a diversion with bits and pieces of wacko casting, and with the deranged details of dress and makeup of their fleeting gargoyles, to make the proceedings at least moderately amusing.

Film Notes

Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is being shown at Film Forum (209 West Houston Street, 212-727-8110) from Oct. 17 through Oct. 30. The travails of a donkey's existence are transformed into a sublime testament to the sheer power and persuasiveness of a genuinely religious sensibility in the cinema.

The four women considered in the books reviewed below belong to this fiercely individualistic sisterhood, about whom it is hard to generalize except to observe that Muses tend to be beautiful, to lead dramatic lives, to have peculiar and highly theatrical love affairs with their artists, to reflect a particular cultural moment and to take a passionate interest in what their artists eat.

Perhaps a more important writer than Ted Hughes, the poet she inspired, Sylvia Plath has become the Muse of a small but lucrative and clamorous cottage industry of posthumous literary gossip. Like all the great Serial Muses (Lou Andreas-Salome, Alma Mahler, Misia Sert), Lady Caroline Blackwood fascinated one genius after another. And who can possibly estimate the creativity unleashed in the millions of young fans first elevated toward the heights of art by the transcendent vision of Natalie Wood lip-synching "I Feel Pretty"? Among the strangest and mostly unlikely of Muses was Typhoid Mary, a vector of contagion who continues to demonstrate the mysterious operations of the goddess, her paranormal powers of seduction and persuasion. Decades after her death, Typhoid Mary has moved Anthony Bourdain, one of our most gifted and visible chefs, to bury his kitchen knife in the earth at her grave–to pay her the highest homage a smitten cook can offer his departed Muse of cuisine and reputation.

–Francine Prose

Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of "Birthday Letters," by Erica Wagner. W.W. Norton, 312 pages, $25.95.

Sylvia and Ted , by Emma Tennant. Henry Holt, 192 pages, $22.

Madness, genius, violence, betrayal–all in the first five minutes. Anyone looking for a defining moment in the tempestuous union of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes could do no better than their first, now-legendary meeting in 1956 at a noisy Cambridge party, when Plath, a 23-year-old Fulbright scholar and aspiring writer, shouted lines of Hughes' own poetry to him while he chased her around a kitchen, tore off her tantalizing red headband, made off with her silver earrings and crushed her to him in an embrace that had everything to do with her vivacious American blondness and nothing to do with his girlfriend Shirley. "And when he kissed my neck," Plath recorded in her diary, "I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face …. Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists."

Seven years later, Sylvia Plath was dead. Her finest work, the Ariel poems that she had known would make her name, lay on her desk in typescript. A handful of these were published in a London newspaper just six days after she died, and over the next several months poems that had been rejected by publications like The New Yorker began to be accepted. The details of her suicide (the folded towel on the oven door, the milk and bread left by the bedsides of her sleeping children) were soon disclosed; they became, like those white-hot final poems, established elements of the Sylvia Plath mystique, as did the bare facts of her separation from Hughes: He had fallen in love with another woman, Assia Wevill, and Plath's most powerful poems emerged from this betrayal. In even its sparest version, it's a compelling story, and any writer can be forgiven for wanting to revisit the rooms where Sylvia Plath and her big-boned, charismatic husband read Blake to each other and hunched over the planchette of an Ouija board.

In Sylvia and Ted , her lyrical evocation of the love triangle that broke up the Hughes' marriage, Emma Tennant recounts events that she learned about not only from the usual sources but also from Hughes himself, during his brief romance with Ms. Tennant in the late 1970's. In particular, the author's note at the beginning of the novel promises the revelation of "previously concealed or unknown" facts about Plath's mysterious rival, Assia Wevill. One difficulty with Ms. Tennant's project, though, is the absurd richness of the story she is attempting to retell. Each character has its double, for example. While Sylvia Plath was alive, both she and Hughes himself identified Ted with Professor Otto Plath, Sylvia's father, who died when she was 8. Hughes blamed Plath's recurrent depression on her father fixation, and in a late interview with an Israeli journalist expressed his belief that all of Plath's creative work "tells just one story: her Oedipal love for her father, her complex relationship with her mother, the [early] attempt at suicide, the shock therapy." For her part, Assia Wevill was fascinated by Sylvia Plath, and in Tennant's novel sends an unfinished tapestry of a rose to her rival, expressing the hope that Plath would fill in the greenery around the dark red needlepoint bloom in the center. Wevill would later kill herself, a Plath copycat.

Sylvia's double, in a harder, freer, masculine version, was Ted himself. To Sylvia, he seemed God-like in his talent and physique, indifferent to the social pressures that she recounted in her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar , and that fed her contradictory ambitions–to achieve artistic greatness while earning the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. She would be a poet, yes, but also a smiling wife, a doting mother, happy to take second place to her celebrated husband.

As a prose poem, Sylvia and Ted is lovely and resonant. As a novel, however, the book falls short. The characterization is too thin and the plot too airily sketched for the book to stand on its own, without the knowledge of Plath's life a reader might bring to it. Paradoxically, however, if the reader is too well-versed in Plath, he or she ends up simply trolling the pages for those promised scraps of new biographical detail. Perhaps this is why Assia Wevill emerges as the surprise heroine of the novel. She has barely appeared in the historical record; no one is an expert in Wevill. Now she gets the best line in the book: "And then the winter came, with Assia glowing in the heart of it like a red-shaded bedroom lamp you just can't turn off."

When, horribly, Wevill gassed herself in 1969, choosing also to kill her young daughter by Hughes, the bitter symmetries of Ted Hughes' life fell into place. For the next 30 years, he made almost no public statement about his relationship with either woman, arguing that he would never be believed in any case, but also that the story of his separation from Plath, and its appalling aftermath, was "permanent dynamite" for his children. As her literary executor, he denied permission to quote from Plath's work in any biography that he was not allowed to vet. He suppressed (and destroyed) parts of her journals. His refusal to explain or apologize or to oil the Plath machine did not endear him to critics, especially those who regarded Plath as a martyr to the brutish male ego.

Hence the surprise of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters , first published in 1998, nine months before his death from cancer. Birthday Letters is a spectacular series of 88 poems about his life with Plath; Hughes described them as an attempt to make "direct, private, inner contact" with his dead wife. In a letter to a friend, Hughes explained that he had always thought the poems, begun in the late 1970's, "too unpublishably raw and unguarded, simply too vulnerable." Yet he felt that the story they released was the one that all his work since Plath's death had been evading. "How strange that we have to make these public declarations of our secrets," he concluded. "But we do."

In Ariel's Gift , Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times of London, gives the story of Birthday Letters and of the Plath-Hughes marriage. She regards Hughes' final book as "the artistic flowering of more than thirty years of pent-up emotion" and concurs with Seamus Heaney that, in the end, Hughes found the only way for his version of his life with Plath to become more than "simply that, another version, with no special authority over the versions of those who had not lived it. The only way for him to enter this discussion was through the complex structure of his art."

A thoughtful critic, at ease with both Hughes' and Plath's poetry, Ms. Wagner reads the poems in Birthday Letters as a dialogue with Plath's poems. They sometimes share titles, and cover much of the same ground–not only from Hughes' point of view, in the sense of "he said, she said," but from his vantage in time, as a careworn man looking back on his youth. With hindsight, he can see Fate working against him. So profound is Hughes' belief in this malevolent guiding force that it almost constitutes a third party in the marriage. Recalling his first night with Plath in "18 Rugby Street," he describes his growing infatuation with her and how he had caught sight of the facial scar from her first suicide attempt: "And I heard / Without ceasing for a moment to kiss you / As if a sober star had whispered it / Above the revolving, rumbling city: stay clear." He watches helplessly as his youthful self ignores the warning and is drawn into Plath's troubled life: "the male lead in your drama," as he describes himself in an earlier poem in the sequence.

Biography, of course, cannot explain art, as Ms. Wagner is quick to point out in her introduction. Poems "may be linked to events, but they are not those events; they are themselves." For this reason, and because Ms. Wagner uses only brief quotes to illustrate her narrative, Ariel's Gift is best read alongside copies of both Birthday Letters and Plath's Collected Poems .

In Birthday Letters , Hughes gives vent to much of his pain, along with regret, sorrow, anger, love–and, above all, his continuing bewilderment. Although Plath's friend Wendy Christie has said that Plath chose Hughes because "her vividness demanded largeness, intensity, an extreme," Birthday Letters suggests a brilliant but emotionally rough-hewn man: dazzled, even 40 years later, by an American girl in a red headband, and desperately wishing that he and she could still be happy.

–Regina Marler

Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood , by Suzanne Finstad. Harmony Books, 454 pages, $25.

In her new biography of Natalie Wood, Suzanne Finstad writes: "The tragic, anomalous events of Natalie's sad, last, lost weekend off Catalina Island, leading to her greatest fear realized–drowning in deep, dark water–have been speculated about and exploited throughout the twenty years since she died, threatening to eclipse the memory of her poignant performances." Which is presumably why Ms. Finstad keeps the mentions of that death down to a bare minimum: just the first page of her author's note, and then in the first paragraph of her first chapter, and then on the page after that, and thereafter at regular intervals whenever Wood comes within an inch of any water. She can barely take a bath without Ms. Finstad going into a conniption fit of fateful intimations of that "tragic climax, the details of which may remain as murky as the dark seawater she had a premonition would take her life." But hey, apart from that, this life of Natalie Wood is hardly turned on by her death.

Ms. Finstad's big angle is Wood's Russian heritage, which gives all these premonitions a slighter tonier feel: for in Russia, as we all know, the dark roiling clouds of fate come as a side order with your borscht. Hence the book's title, not Natalie but Natasha –her Russian nickname, although the air of Chekhovian tragedy evaporates slightly when you find out that one of her brothers was called Semen. The Wood family–the Zakharenkos–were possibly of Gypsy extraction, and also quite possibly related to the Romanovs, although one thing is absolutely clear: In 1917, "Bolshevik workers seized the Winter Palace by October, naming Communist Vladimir Lenin as their leader."

Grateful though I was for this important news, I couldn't help getting a little fidgety for my first sighting of little Natalie, her "flashing dark eyes … deep, dark pools of sensitivity" that seemed, to her proud father, "to go way back to Russia or beyond." But then, looking at a family photograph, Ms. Finstad notes that "everyone has captivating eyes," which makes you wonder if her standards don't need tightening up.

Natalie started acting at age 6, at the behest of her mother, Maria or "Mud"–and for once, the nickname fits: In this book, her name really is mud. A stage mother of a particularly sharp-fanged variety–a "snake coiled round her neck," in one of Ms. Finstad's better phrases–Mud would hire private detectives to keep track of Natalie on dates, but send her hurtling out of the house in her best dress when the date turned out to be Frank Sinatra. (Lexicologists specializing in Rat Pack slang will be delighted to learn that Sinatra picked up his pet name for the penis–"Clyde"–from Wood.) She finally loosed herself from her mother's clutches in time for Rebel Without a Cause , although it took a real car crash, with Dennis Hopper at the wheel, to convince director Nicholas Ray that she was right for the role. "Nick, they called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent!" she told him excitedly from her hospital bed, and there is something touchingly sad in that excitement–the raving ingenue with a touch of convent-girl rebellion.

Wood's friendship with Mr. Hopper and James Dean marked the beginning of her Zelda Fitzgerald years: smoking and drinking, strolling barefoot, mimicking strangers, talking pseudo-nihilist talk long into the night. "We used to talk about how unhappy we were. Whoever was the unhappiest, whoever came closest to suicide the night before, he was the winner." There is a nicely satirical slant to that observation which hints at high spirits out of kilter with the times. This was the 50's, the era of hot, roiling Tennessee Williams adaptations, jagged with sexual hysteria. Actors scouted hungrily for big breakdown scenes, and Wood got hers in Splendor in the Grass , emerging naked from a bathtub to rage at her mother, wet with water and tears–a sort of Ophelia in reverse, or maybe just Venus on a really, really bad day.

This sort of thing goes down big with those who measure acting like rainfall–in inches of tears–but in truth, Sturm und Drang were never Wood's card. Her real gift, infinitely rarer and more valuable, was for a particular brand of unforced gaiety. What you remember best about her in Rebel are not her attempts to snarl sexily while leaning against the hood of Dean's car, but her fleetness of foot as she runs around the abandoned mansion in the film brief's pre-climactic idyll. I'd happily exchange the waterworks in Splendor in the Grass for the gaze of molten adoration that she directs at Warren Beatty: She manages to look more interested in Warren Beatty than Warren Beatty is, a singular achievement. According to Ms. Finstad, Wood arrived on the set each day to find Mr. Beatty separating each eyelash with a pin to give them added luster.

Wood tried for the opposite trajectory: She took her built-in luster and attempted to run it through the mangler. It was a battle she was bound to lose–the perfectionism she learnt as a child star proved hard to shake–and if her performances are touching today, it is in part because they present us with the sight of an actress locked tight within her loveliness, trying to break free of the curse of eternal poise. She was desperate to play Blanche Dubois, but her tiny teeth–milk teeth, really–were never those of a sexual carnivore. She was flat-chested in an era of busts you could wrap your fenders around. Now that the shock of her death–in 1981, when she was 43–has subsided, the more lasting shock for most people is that she ever got as far as 43: She's frozen in our memories as the teenage poppet of West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause .

"Her life is more compelling than any of her movie roles," concludes Ms. Finstad, a sad and rather shameful admission from someone who calls herself a movie fan–but then, I'm not sure she is one. Anybody who can write that Robert Wagner dropped a pair of diamond earrings into a glass of champagne "the way Cary Grant, his role model, might have done on screen" has simply never seen a Cary Grant movie. As for Wood herself, well: "Natasha, the real Natalie, was submerged inside the star persona of 'Natalie Wood' …. She existed in a twilight zone between fantasy and reality, movie life and real life …. [T]he movie star façade that was 'Natalie Wood' concealed the person inside, gasping for breath …. The person inside the illusion of Natalie Wood was lost for years, even to hers2fg38sy6721djh5jsa*61#@#$!^@*Y@

Oops. Fell asleep for a second there. Head hit the keyboard. Dreadfully sorry. It's just that this sort of turbo-charged therapy-speak depersonalizes–it processes the self into an anonymous assembly line of traumas, crises, breakdowns and flare-ups. Only occasionally do you glimpse a real person in this book: for instance, when Laurence Olivier catches Wood checking out her reflection with a knife at dinner. "There was a kind of breathless vulnerability," said Sydney Pollack of her. "You wanted to say, 'It's going to be okay.'" "[S]he had this tinkly laugh, it was just so adorable," said Gil Cates. "I can hear it, it was just light and merry–just this merry, merry laugh." The real tragedy is that she came into her own at just the time when movies were abandoning their high spirits for a prolonged bout of forehead-pounding. Someone should have set her loose in Shakespearean comedy; then we'd have seen her run.

–Tom Shone

Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood ,byNancySchoenberger.NanA. Talese-Doubleday, 377 pages, $27.50.

Once upon a time, artistic genius was predominantly male and inspiration predominantly female. Genius invoked the goddess for inspiration: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course"–Homer's old song.

The great modern muses tend to be charismatic society ladies who collect artistic husbands and lovers. Alma Mahler is perhaps the most notorious; she "collected" Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel. (A fictionalized Alma Mahler narrates Max Phillips' recent novel, The Artist's Wife .)

And then there's Caroline Blackwood, another lover of great men, the subject of Nancy Schoenberger's new biography, Dangerous Muse . Beautiful, drunken, depressed, a landed Irish aristocrat and an heir to the Guinness ale fortune, Lady Caroline Blackwood collected, among others, painter Lucian Freud, musician Israel Citkowitz and the poet Robert Lowell. But Blackwood wrought more destruction than inspiration over the course of her tragic life. Despite Ms. Schoenberger's title, she's not a "dangerous" muse, just a very bad one.

Sullen, unkempt and often drunk, Blackwood's allure was nonetheless enduring. An obituary in The Independent of London described Caroline as "one of the most beautiful women of her generation …. Even in the last years, when life and illness ravaged her, you could not look at anyone else when she was in the room." Too shy to be an actress, too smart to be a model, Lady Blackwood disparaged her attributes with the exclusive panache of a great beauty: "I think beauty is fraudulent," she said. "Nothing to do with you."

Being a muse was the least of Blackwood's ambitions. She was a renegade-style aristocrat and a distinguished writer. An industrious journalist, she started writing books of fiction and nonfiction in her late 30's, and in 1977 her autobiographical novel Great Granny Webster was short-listed for the Booker Prize. She didn't make anyone's career or channel inspiration. She was simply attracted to smart, gifted, handsome men.

The destinies of the men she teamed up with were already established by the time she got to them. The staggeringly gorgeous Lucian Freud was already a London celebrity when he met the 18-year-old Caroline, and under the devoted tutelage of Francis Bacon would soon become an art-world celebrity. Israel Citkowitz had great promise but was already washed up by the time Blackwood darkened his threshold, and he cowered in her shadow until his death many years later. The New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers was well launched when he had his affair with her (rumor names him as the father of Blackwood's third daughter, Ivana). Screenwriter Ivan Moffat worked in Hollywood and didn't need a muse for that. Robert Lowell, her third, "main" husband, wrote The Dolphin for her, and it won a Pulitzer Prize. But Lowell was already great before he met Blackwood. She didn't even inspire his self-destruction: Lowell was clinically bipolar, and Blackwood proved too high-maintenance herself to handle his manic episodes. "In Caroline, Cal [Lowell] had met his match 'for unreality and carelessness'"–take that with a grain of salt; it was written by Elizabeth Hardwick right after Lowell abandoned her.

It's typical of this gossipy biography that the descriptions of Blackwood come from those who were on the margins of her intimate world and possibly hostile. Blackwood died right after making overtures to Ms. Schoenberger about collaborating on a biography; her death left the would-be biographer with significantly diminished resources. Those resources got poorer still when Blackwood's family recused themselves from the project. The resulting anecdotal–but not intimate–portrait of Blackwood exacerbates the impression that she was an extremely difficult person to know. "Caroline refused to examine herself, in life and in literature, afraid she'd be ostracized if she revealed too much," explained her onetime lover, the poet Andrew Harvey. He speaks warmly of their relationship but still nurses wounds (she ridiculed his burgeoning interest in spirituality).

Blackwood was expert at alienating people. She "suffered silences" and could only talk or socialize when she was liquored up–a pattern that began during the heady days of her marriage to Lucian Freud. Composer Ned Rorem met her in Paris during that time and reports that she "was heart-stoppingly beautiful, but vague. There she sat … on the edge of a sofa, legs crossed, one knee supporting an elbow extending into a smoking hand, which flicked ash abstractedly onto the blue Persian rug. Caroline, very blond, with eyes the hue of the Persian rug and large as eagle eggs, uttered nary a word, neither approved nor disapproved, just smoked."

It's said that muses only need to possess two qualities: beauty and mystery. Blackwood had both in spades. Her daughter Ivana described life with her as "a lot of unspoken things and a lot of closed doors." Caroline Blackwood carried the unspoken things and what was behind those closed doors to her grave, and so remains the glamorous enigma at the center of her own life story.

–Minna Proctor

Typhoid Mary , by Anthony Bourdain, Bloomsbury, 148 pages, $19.95.

Typhoid Mary, the Irish-American cook whose merest effluvium could bring on diarrhea and death (as if one of those things wasn't bad enough), unwittingly spread the disease that became her first name to the wealthy New Yorkers she worked for in 1907. Anthony Bourdain, a cook and writer, the author of Kitchen Confidential and a couple of novels, tells her story in this slim, exuberant new biography.

In a sense, it's two stories: the history of Mary Mallon herself and then Mr. Bourdain's peculiar take on her, which resembles a love letter from one cook to another. The second story is more moving, and seems somehow more interesting to the author. Mr. Bourdain weaves between the two, sometimes doling out the minimal facts we know about Mary Mallon, sometimes speculating about how a proud cook must have felt when she learned she had served up biological poison to her employers and their families.

It's a good plot to excavate. Though completely healthy herself, Mallon was a lethal carrier, and left a trail of victims wherever she worked. A tireless sanitary engineer, George Soper, tracked her through the city until he finally confronted her one day by barging into her place of employment and asking for a stool sample. Understandably, he was rebuffed. It's worth telling the story in his words: "I was as diplomatic as possible, but I had to say I suspected her of making people sick and that I wanted specimens of her urine, feces and blood. It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving knife and advanced in my direction."

There wasn't much humor after that. After a ferocious struggle, Mallon was brought in for examination and tested positive for a high level of typhoid. She was sent into sullen exile on North Brother Island off the Bronx. After a few years, her case excited attention from civil libertarians, who pointed out that she had committed no crime. She promised never to cook again and was released in 1910. Then, tragically, she fell into all her old habits and got a job as a cook–at a hospital, of all places (her coworkers had jokingly called her "Typhoid Mary," never suspecting the truth). When typhoid hit the hospital, she was discovered and sent back to the island forever. After three decades of urban exile, she died in November 1938, a fortnight after Orson Welles terrified New York all over again with his War of the Worlds broadcast.

Mr. Bourdain gleaned most of his biographical information from a recent academic study, Judith Walzer Leavitt's Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health (1996), which will not be displaced as a source for serious researchers. But the cook's perspective is exclusively his own, and he makes the most of it, particularly in the book's final scene, when he finds Mary's untended grave in the Bronx, slips one of his favorite knives into the ground and covers it up "the way it had looked before–this sharp-edged gift is presumably an act of devotion, though it suggests that some counseling might be in order.

Mr. Bourdain convincingly recreates the overwhelming odds that faced a single immigrant woman at the mercy of a phalanx of health inspectors and angry yellow journalists (she was also labeled "the Human Typhoid Germ"). Her situation was not made easier by her unrelentingly snotty attitude toward her pursuers and the lack of remorse she showed throughout her life. Mr. Bourdain admires her toughness, and gleefully describes the scenes in which she attacks her pursuers with volleys of profanity and great physical strength (it took five policemen to haul her in for analysis). It's a provocative stance, but it's hard not to feel creeping sympathy for the poor scientists who were chasing Mary on the assumption–correct, as it turned out–that her gall bladder was a boarding house for deadly bacilli. Would Mr. Bourdain still feel admiration if she prepared her specialty–peaches and ice cream–just for him?

–Ted Widmer

It is a landmark production of the most hackneyed great play in history precisely because it compels us to see it with utterly fresh eyes. The fine Polish critic Jan Kott–an influence on Brook's early work–wrote memorably about Hamlet that he's become like Leonardo's Mona Lisa. "We know she is smiling even before we have seen the picture," Kott wrote. "Mona Lisa's smile has been separated from the picture, as it were."

So Hamlet through the ages has been produced a thousand different ways, and analyzed and quoted a million more, until the mythologized Hamlet has been separated from the play. We know what to expect in advance, like Mona Lisa's smile.

Peter Brook's aim is to see behind the smile. It has always been the goal of all his work. He looks for the inner truth of a piece–the myth beneath the surface, an illuminating essence of things. His 90-minute version of Carmen (entitled The Tragedy of Carmen ) was a distillation of a fat popular opera. His two-and-a-half-hour version of Hamlet (entitled The Tragedy of Hamlet ) is a distillation of a vast, unruly great drama–an eternal enigma.

Yet his experimental intention has been surprisingly misunderstood and has even caused offense–as if by cutting Hamlet , Mr. Brook were sacrilegiously defacing an ancient monument. God save the theater from purists. They would bore us to death with their pedantry.

All modern productions of Hamlet –including those with "full" texts–have been cut. Historically, Shakespeare's plays weren't sacred. They've always been messed with! (The Restoration "improved" them; Garrick, who invented Bard worship for tourists in Stratford, cheerfully gutted the texts in the 18th century.) The truth is that a full version of Hamlet would run for six hours on a good day (and evening). To cut or not to cut isn't the question.

Then why the fuss? With Shakespeare movies, practically anything goes–and we seem to be open to it. Has there ever been a more thrilling Lear than Kurosawa's Ran ? Is there a more contemporary Hamlet than Ethan Hawke's hip son of the murdered C.E.O. of Denmark Corporation in Michael Almereyda's movie version?

Yet theater is still treated as a temple, and Hamlet its deity. "It is only when we forget Shakespeare that we can begin to find him," Mr. Brook wrote in an irreverent essay entitled "Forget Shakespeare." The familiar Shakespeare baggage is heavy; the experience too dutiful. It's a waste of time going to see the new adaptation in Brooklyn unless we're open to the possibility of making a fresh start. If we expect to see the princely Hamlet of broody, poetic melancholy–"the Gloomy Dane"–we're sunk.

What does Shakespeare have in common with Mel Brooks?

Both love broad knockabout comedy. The Brook adaptation is actually the first Hamlet I've seen that made me laugh. A handsome young kid, who's charming and bright and blessed, pretends to be nuts. There's method in it, but in the hands of an actor as greatly gifted as Adrian Lester, Hamlet's tragedy can actually balance on the dangerous edge of comedy, broad or dark.

At the performance I attended, a child, perhaps 9 or 10 years old, happily got the giggles during the gravedigger's scene. Accessibility is the name of Brook's game–without the usual vulgarities and dumbing down. The Shakespeare production that appeals to both child and adult is the ideal.

I invariably dread the gravedigger's scene. Desperate clowning is never a pretty sight. But here we have a refined hint of Riverdance introducing us to the inspired looniness of an Irish gravedigger dancing on graves–and the audience is convulsed with laughter. Three upright cushions represent the grave; a bamboo pole is a shovel. With two bamboo sticks for swords and two skulls as gleaming white as a toothpaste ad, they're all the props that are needed in a theater that ignites our imagination. But the gravedigger's scene cuts much deeper than comedy, of course. Hamlet buries Yorick's skull, now stuck on the top of the bamboo pole like a jester's death head. In a moment of awesome simplicity and feeling, a skeleton seems to be dying before our eyes.

This isn't Mr. Brook's first Hamlet . He directed his first for his parents when he was 7 or 8 years old on a toy theater with puppets. He called it " Hamlet by P. Brook and W. Shakespeare." I know what you're thinking. Why puppets? He has almost never used them since. At the start of his career, he directed a traditional Hamlet with Paul Scofield in 1953. His first experimental version came with his "Theatre of Cruelty" season for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960's. If memory isn't playing tricks on me, I recall a large lady struggling mightily to give birth to someone called Hamlet.

In 1995, he returned to the play at his base in Paris to explore how it might have been done by such contrasting theater theorists as Stanislavski, Brecht, Artaud, Meyerhold and Gordon Craig. (It was called Who Is There ?) Then came the current, elemental production with eight actors, one musician, a blood-orange carpet, a low table or two and several cushions.

The carpet is the "empty space," or bare stage. When Peter Brook left England in the early 1970's, having directed the now-mythical A Midsummer Night's Dream in Stratford, he began his center of theater research in the old carpet district of Paris. On the troupe's journey through the Sahara and Central West Africa, which I joined, the little shows that were improvised in an invented language along the way were known as "Carpet Shows." They rolled out a carpet in a village square and tried to make it a magic one. Hamlet is a sophisticated version of the Carpet Show.

When the Player King recites to Polonius "The Murder of Gonzago" in an intensely emotional language that no one knows, the speech itself comes from Mr. Brook's earliest experiment in language and sound, invented by the poet Ted Hughes. " Eleleu! Eleleu! Ausfakeloskai! Xoodedom! " Ah, yes, I remember it well. Hughes' invented language, which is meant to touch the deepest emotional chord, as music can, was created from Latin and ancient Greek as well as a 2,000-year-old dead forgotten language called Avesta. They learnt how to speak it from diagrams.

All is never as simple, then, as it seems. I was raised on Hamlet at the worst possible place, school. ("What ails Hamlet? Discuss in no more than 300 words. Use pencil only.") Yet the achievement of the Brook production resides in its apparent, naked simplicity. The international troupe itself isn't virtuoso or starry, though Mr. Lester's quicksilver Hamlet naturally takes the eye. No one is at all declamatory, least of all "poetic." The language comes naturally and freshly off the tongue. They are consummate actors, dignified and complete, going about their business like the itinerant actors in Hamlet .

But the production isn't a compilation, a kind of edited highlights or best moments, as its critics would somehow have us believe. To the contrary, it liberates the play from even its own clichés–"Neither a borrower nor a lender be"–and at the same time it respects the language. It avoids a narrowly political interpretation, as well as the boring, the Oedipal and the merely neurotic.

This is a Hamlet about a young man who must learn to kill. Imagine that! It defies the imagination. It's a great story, of course. But suppose you learned that your beloved father had been killed by your uncle. Suppose your mother married the uncle soon afterward. And suppose that your father's ghost told you of the murder and swore you to take vengeance. What would you do? How would you do it?

Could you?

In the space I have left, I must tell you that when Hamlet stands with his sword over the King, who's knelt in his prayer of penance, I actually thought, "Do it!"

I lost sight of the original story. I wanted Hamlet to kill Claudius before his time, Christian conscience or no.

Peter Brook's new production makes clear how much, and how terribly, Hamlet's life is stolen from him. Perhaps it is his preordained destiny or fate, a ritual played for us. The tragedy of this pleasant, educated young man with a glorious future begins when he kills in his loathing of a wormy, unjust world.

At the close, in a beautiful scene of rebirth and mystery, the dead rise with the dawn. Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes and now Hamlet–all killed, the dead newly risen.

"Who's there?" go the haunting last words, echoing the same urgent words to the ghost of the father that open the play. "Who's there?"

God? Some meaning, some state of grace in the chaos.

Who are we?

Peter Brook's The Tragedy of Hamlet runs through Sunday, May 6, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Over the years, Mr. Hughes has kept quiet about his relationship with Sylvia Plath. Now, 35 years after her death, he has finally broken that silence with Birthday Letters , a volume of 88 poems, all but two of which are addressed to her. Rarely has a book of poetry received such hype, meriting front-page articles in both The New York Times and The Times of London. Indeed, the press coverage has been so intense that Birthday Letters has landed on several best seller lists, one of the few times in recent memory a volume of poetry has done so.

After such a long silence, many readers have been looking anxiously to Birthday Letters for Mr. Hughes' commentary on Plath. They will be disappointed, however, for the book provides little new information. Readers will learn that the couple met at Cambridge University, dated briefly, married, honeymooned in Paris, vacationed in Spain, traveled across America and ended up in England to live. But all of this has been covered in much more detail in the biographies of Plath that have appeared through the years. (Full disclosure: I come to this conclusion having written one of those biographies myself.)

In fact, what many readers-not to mention the literary community-have been waiting for for 35 years now is some admission from Mr. Hughes about the role he played in Sylvia Plath's suicide or, failing that, some insight into why she did what she did. After all, of all the figures in Plath's life, the one who should know what was happening to her in those early weeks of 1963 is Mr. Hughes. Instead of providing an explanation of the events that lead up to her suicide, however, Mr. Hughes offers only one reason as to why their marriage broke up, the singular event that precipitated Plath's final emotional decline.

According to Mr. Hughes, Plath was disturbed because of painful memories of her father. Anything could trigger these memories. When Mr. Hughes made her a desk, the wood reminded Plath of her "daddy." "With a plane/ I revealed a perfect landing pad/ For your inspiration," he writes in "The Table." "I did not/ Know I had made and fitted a door/ Opening downwards into your Daddy's grave." As these memories took over, Plath apparently projected her disturbed emotions onto Mr. Hughes. "You were the jailer of your murderer-/ Which imprisoned you," he writes in "The Blackbird." "And since I was your nurse and protector/ Your sentence was mine too." To help her cope with her feelings, Mr. Hughes, his wife's "protector," hypnotized her ("Each night/ I hypnotized calm into you"). Ultimately, it did no good. Mr. Hughes could not control her, Plath could not control her emotions, and he moved on. Or at least that's the version of events he offers in Birthday Letters .

So that's it? Readers have waited three and a half decades to hear Ted Hughes make the earth-shaking revelation that he left Sylvia Plath because she was disturbed by upsetting memories of her dead father? What an anticlimax! Then again, Mr. Hughes has lived much of his life in denial, which is evident in Birthday Letters . Except for one veiled reference that is so convoluted most readers will not understand it, Mr. Hughes never discusses the reality: that he did not leave Plath to be alone, to get away from her craziness, as he would have readers believe, but to be with Assia Gutmann. Much of this is made evident in the correspondence Plath carried on with her mother in the last months of her life. (These letters are part of Plath's literary papers housed at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.)

"I found Ted has been building a secret London life all this summer-a flat, a separate bank account, this woman, who I am sure will now leave her … husband & marry Ted," Plath wrote to her mother, Aurelia Plath, on Oct. 9, 1962, referring to Mr. Hughes' affair with Assia. "He gave me no time, no inkling, to make any plans of my own."

In Birthday Letters , Mr. Hughes never mentions Plath's fear of him. "He is not only infantile," Plath wrote to her mother on Sept. 24, 1962, "but dangerously destructive, and I feel both the children & I need protection from him, for now & forever." At no point in Birthday Letters does Mr. Hughes discuss the contempt he and Assia quickly developed for Plath. That abhorrence apparently became so strong that they taunted Plath, a woman known to them to have a history of suicide attempts, to kill herself. "Ted and his woman … have already wistfully started wondering why I didn't commit suicide, since I did before!" Plath wrote to her mother on Oct. 16, 1962. "Ted has said how convenient it would be if I were dead, then he could sell the house & take the children whom He likes. It is me he does not like." (Not surprisingly, the quotes from Plath's letters included here were edited out of Letters Home , a collection of Plath's letters to her mother; Mr. Hughes had final editorial control over that book.)

This disdain did not end with Plath's suicide. Several weeks after her death, Assia Gutmann sent the final gas bill for Plath's flat to one of Plath's best friends with a note that read, "You were her friend. You pay the bill."

None of these extreme emotions is even alluded to in Birthday Letters . Instead, readers get homogenized fragments of Mr. Hughes' memories of his life with Plath-a car trip here, a daffodil-picking expedition there-in poems that are advertised as having been written over a 25-year period but are so similar in tone, and so comparable in construction, they feel as if they were written in one sustained burst of energy. Ironically, the poems themselves exhibit no energy at all, which ultimately underscores the tragedy of Plath's death and the travesty of Mr. Hughes' failure to explain his connection to it. With Birthday Letters , Mr. Hughes proves once and for all that Plath was the greater poet; only with Crow did he approach writing pieces of literature that will last. Finally, this current spree of media hype cannot obscure the fact that, even after publishing a book about her, Mr. Hughes has said nothing relevant about his former wife, her death or the loss to literature her death represents.