The India of my Dreams
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
Monday, 5 May 2014
450 years of Shakespeare, the secular Bard of the World
Sukumaran C. V.
Shakespeare approximates the remote and familiarizes
the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but, if it were
possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be
said that he has not only shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but
as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed. This therefore is
the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life.—Samuel
Johnson (in his Preface to Shakespeare).
April 23, 2014 marked the 450th birthday
of William Shakespeare, the greatest and marvelous creative genius the world
has ever seen. We can even form a library with the books written on
Shakespeare. There are many writers who are remembered forever only for their
writings on the Bard. The most famous examples are A. C. Bradley, the author of
Shakespearean Tragedy and Wilson
Knight, the author of The Wheel of Fire.
And almost all well-known English writers have written on Shakespeare. Samuel
Johnson, William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats…the list is never ending. What makes Shakespeare the subject of
so many books and why he is read more than any author in the world was or is
read?
The reason is, as Samuel Johnson says in his Preface to Shakespeare, “…the
composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches,
and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and
sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful
pomp and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display
cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and
polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and
diamonds in inexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by
impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.”
I was attracted to Shakespeare by Julius Caesar. Mark Antony’s brilliant
speech by which he wins the sympathy of a hostile people and turns them against
the conspirators enthralled me and thereafter, I spent months and years on
Shakespeare and found that the most remarkable fact about Shakespeare is that
his plays are astonishingly secular. Let me borrow a passage from Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy:
“…although this or that dramatis persona may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of
Satan, of heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from
another world, these ideas do not materially influence his representation of
life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery of its tragedy….while
Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of
non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents it substantially
in one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian or
Christian. He looked at this secular world most intently and seriously; and he
painted it with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his
own, and, in essentials, without regard to anyone’s hopes, fears, or beliefs.
His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary
power.”
Read any of Shakespeare’s plays, you don’t feel that
you are reading something written by another human being. Each play takes us
into different aspects of human life. Again, in the words of Bradley: “We
cannot arrive at Shakespeare’s whole dramatic way of looking at the world from
his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton’s way of regarding things, or
at Wordsworth’s or at Shelley’s, by examining almost any one of their important
works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at their best always
look at things in one light; but Hamlet and
Henry IV and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct positions, and
Shakespeare’s whole dramatic view is not to be identified with any one of these
reflections.”
When we read a literary work, we can garner the views of the writer, it may be religious or fanatic or progressive; but when we read
Shakespeare we can only see Life and its evergreen emotions. There is no
religious or theoretical dogma; there is no intolerance or fanaticism or racism
that smothers life and its emotions. The powerful creative genius of
Shakespeare celebrates secular life and its ecstasy and that is why even after
450 years, Shakespeare is still living and is loved.
Only an extraordinary creative genius can produce
the following dialogue (of Shylock in The
Merchant of Venice) four hundred years ago when the prejudice against the
Jews was predominant in Europe:
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew
hands, organs, dimensions, sense, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and
cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we
not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we
will resemble you in that.”
In the present day India, where caste and religion
wreak havoc on the innocent, we have to learn the truth that the Dalits, the
Adivasis, the OBCs, the caste Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians and everybody
are ‘fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
diseases and healed by the same means’. If we learn this precious truth, it
will blur our caste and religious identities and we all will be humans.
And who can forget the dilemma of human beings, of any age or of any locale, beautifully expressed through Hamlet, the character who ‘has been the subject of more discussion than any other in the whole literature of the world’, in the world-famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy of the first scene in the Act III of the play Hamlet?
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The headache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to! ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there is the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardles bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The headache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to! ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there is the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardles bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
The English actor John Philip Kemble as Hamlet in 1802, in the grave-yard scene.
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