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Shakespeare . . . and the eye of God
Syed badrul Ahsan
(Four and a half centuries ago, on 23 April 1564, it is said that William Shakespeare opened his eyes to life. He was baptized three days later. In the fifty two years that spanned his life, he left English literature transformed and the world's imagination soaring into aesthetic space never before imagined. He died on 23 April 1616).
HERE are reasons why you cannot ignore William Shakespeare. In a larger dimension, you cannot stay away from literature, the pursuit of it. For literature speaks of life, more pertinently of what life ought to be or could be. In Shakespeare, you come by all these images, perspectives if you will, which speak of existence. He delves into the soul in all its manifestations. Think here of arrogance, that common human frailty.
Danger knows full well that Caesar is more dangerous than he / We are two lions litter'd in one day / And I the elder and more terrible.
There is that timeless, unmistakable hint of politics here. The malady Caesar suffers from is an affliction which has regularly destroyed the lives of authoritarian, self-obsessed men. Recall more from Julius Caesar. The most powerful man in Rome reminds the one who had earlier warned him of the Ides of March. The Ides of March are come, says Caesar, with a grin. Ay, Caesar, says the other, but not gone. Minutes later, Caesar is a bloodied corpse.
Shakespeare's universality springs from this deep-rooted ability in him to present individuals in all their corporeal and intellectual manifestations. That good, thinking men are often incapable of decisive action or eventually act when the effort is doomed to failure comes through in the Prince of Denmark. In Hamlet lurks a philosopher, a fastidious lover. Forty thousand brothers, he screams at Laertes, cannot equal his love for Ophelia. And yet that morbidity of a thought — To be, or not to be . ..' — pushes him toward an ugly end. And when he goes down, he carries a whole body of people with him. In Hamlet, therefore, you come by the image of the perennial scholar rendered immobile through inordinately long moments of rumination. He fears the consequences of his probable acts and stays his hand. Those consequences happen anyway.
There is something of the impartial about Shakespeare, the dispassionate in him if you will. He tells us what men have long known, before and after him. The evil that men do lives after them/the good is oft interred with their bones . . . That is Antony. In Shakespeare's deft use of language, this mundane truth takes on the form of a philosophical statement. And you stumble into similar philosophical peregrinations even in Shylock, much though you may dislike the nerves in the man who badly needs his pound of flesh:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions ... 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?. . .The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.
The evil in the man peeps through that well-formulated statement. Shylock is the symbol of a man under siege, at least in his view. And besieged men are prone to explosive behaviour, even incendiary acts. That said, how do you assess the plain villainy in Lady Macbeth, in whom not a drop of the milk of human kindness can be spotted? Macbeth succeeds Duncan on the throne; and yet somewhere concealed behind the crown he wears is the disturbing figure of a henpecked husband. Power, then, becomes a matter of opinion. If Lady Macbeth rides her husband, in that all-encompassing sense of the meaning, the fiery-and-gradually-submissive Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is in the end a considerably shrunken woman. Petruchio will have none of the nonsense she hurls at him. Note:
Petruchio: Come, come, you wasp: I faith, you are too angry-
Katherine: If I be waspish, best beware my sting. Petruchio: My remedy is then, to pluck it out. Unhappy, ambitious individuals people the world of Shakespeare. And men initially happy at the rise of their siblings to the summit are soon made grumpy by an excess of hate and a plenitude of expectations. You find some of that in Richard the Third. Richard, not yet king, seemingly celebrates the emergence of his brother as monarch thus:
Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York / And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house/In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
The hunchbacked Richard will soon emerge, in all his depth of vanity and villainy, to wreak havoc on the world around him. Consider, through the prism of history, the march of such hunchbacks, figuratively speaking, to the heights of glory at the expense of the good and the pious. They destroyed a world.
Shakespeare is all about life, about the nature of men and women. He makes us laugh, even in the midst of deepening gloom. Think here of Puck, of Nick Bottom, of Caliban. The folly into which Lear lands himself once he surrenders the pomp of royalty to Goneril and Regan swiftly pushes him down a spiral staircase of gathering insignificance. And yet the proud king, not in the best of moods, dismisses his Fool as a plain, silly being. The Fool comes back with a vengeance:
. ..now thou art an O without a figure: I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing.
Yes, you laugh at the wit in the Fool. And yet there is pathos which comes with that laughter, for Lear has fallen to the depths. Remember his tears, the howl that appears to rend the heavens asunder as he cradles a dead Cordelia in his arms?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life/And thou no breath at all?
Lear's tears become yours. Somewhere in you a father, a foolish one to be precise, rises. And you understand those bootless cries flung at the heavens.
Shakespeare, then, is part of you — beyond frontiers, beyond cultures, beyond circumscribed time. Ben Jonson puts it aptly: 'He was not of an age, but for all time.' And Laurence Olivier was not far behind: 'Shakespeare — the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God.'
SYED BADRUL AHSAN IS WITH THE DAILY STAR