The stage for William Shakespeare’s 400th death anniversary on April 23, 2016 was set when the Globe theatre was reconstructed in 1996 on the South Bank of River Thames by Sam Wanamaker, an Americam actor, producer and director, retaining the theatrical ambience of Elizabethan times. As another coincidence, an old Shakespearean Folio first published in 1623 was discovered recently from Mount Stuart Mansion on a Scottish Island, making it one of the most valuable books in the world. Further, a smart phone app was launched to help those adoring Shakespeare to type two words of a Shakespearean quote for the app to do the rest.
In the words of his contemporary, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare knew “small Latine and lesse Greeke”. But he was tutored by nature and he learned the universal language of human passions, emotions, anxieties, its little joys and sorrows. In sonnet XXX, he sums up the checkered history of his early life:
“When to the sessions of sweet Silent thought
I summon up remembrances of things past
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought
And with old woes, new wail my dear times’ waste.”
Just as Abraham Lincoln rose from a loghouse to the White House, Shakespeare rose from being a callboy in a theatre to the zenith of glory as a world-acclaimed dramatist.
In the Greek and Roman classics of Homer and Sophocles, mythological characters played important roles. But human life was the raw material of Shakespeare to expound his cosmic vision of life with its conflicts and myriad emotions. We can trace the growth of his mind through his writings. His early plays were his experiments in the literary genre. Comedies and historical plays delight us with wit and laughter. After 1600, Shakespeare seems to have passed into a mood of solemn questioning of life and death. His plays became sombre in tone and deeply philosophic.
Hamlet and Macbeth require several readings to probe deep into their meanings. Macbeth is relevant to contemporary times with intrigues, military coup, and struggle for political power. Hamlet is the tragedy of an intellectual caught in the dilemma of irresolution and scepticism. King Lear, the tragic victim of filial ingratitude, calls on elements of air and sky as a fit setting for the disappointment of the old mad king.
In Othello the passion of jealousy inspires a tragedy strong in form and masterly dialogue and description. The peculiar glory of Antony and Cleopatra is its poetry, poetry of range and poignancy hard to match elsewhere in Shakespeare. Terrible as these plays are in theme and plot, they are so permeated by the playwright’s deep understanding of human nature that they stand supreme among his works. Shakespeare transcended the geographical limits of nations in his appeal to aesthetes. One should not be surprised to know that Macbeth was staged as a ‘Koodiyattom’, a theatrical genre, in Vijnanakalavedi, a Kerala village in Aranmula by Leuba Schild, a French national who set up the centre for the promotion of Indian Arts. Local people, including this writer and foreign tourists who came to Anandavadi Ashram, were among the audience to cement the bond of friendship between East and West.
All his tragedies deal with fatal flaws in human character. But the basic message of all of them for humanity is the same. Tragedy occurs when vital human bonds are snapped. Besides, the mellifluous cadence of his verse endeared him to generations of readers. The careful conduct of plot and surprising solution of the intrigue in Merchant of Venice, which revolves round a Jew and a Christian merchant, anticipates a new genre of Tragicomedy. Portia’s speech on the quality of mercy is a favourite recitation passage for school children.
Midsummer Night’s Dream is a signal triumph in the field of romantic comedy with a happy blend of romance and realism. His characters are not types or allegorical abstractions, but living men and women with their qualities, often the inconsistencies of life itself. Shakespeare was no fatalist. Again and again, he says man’s powers and virtues were given him not to waste in idleness , but to shine like torches giving light to others.
Some history and drama enthusiasts have argued there are too unanswered questions in the Bard’s works for them to have been written by a provincial writer. But Shakespeare specialist Dr William Poole from Cambridge dismissed the views of such skeptics, “It takes only basic historical spade work to conclude that such standard objections fall flat on reasoning. Shakespeare was made immortal through his immortal writings.”
m_kthomas@yahoo.co.in
