FOCUS LITERATURE Sudha Devi Nayak
Shakespeare has been the driving force of my life, a friend in need I turn to in times of elation, depression and protest
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“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages,” was how the bard of all bards looked at life. No writer could ever rival William Shakespeare in his philosophical outpourings or the way he understood life.
Shakespeare has been the driving force of my life, a friend in need I turn to in times of elation, depression and protest. In the words of the American writer Frank McCourt, ”Shakespeare is like mashed potatoes. One can never have enough of him.”
While I read him for sheer joy initially, with the ecstasy of first love, I also read him with academic rigour when I majored in English. The result is, he is steeped in my psyche and I specially remember him with gratitude the day he was born — April 23—and thereabouts, that occasions this piece. I can echo Germaine Greer, “I went on reading the family Shakespeare for years until the cadence of Shakespeare’s lines had worn its way into my synapses and I spoke in iambic pentameter”
Shakespeare’s plays with their larger-than-life heroes, their transcendental qualities and no less their tragic flaws that prove their undoing have fascinated the reading world. Everyone finds himself in Shakespeare even in the most trying circumstances. When Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner in Robben Island, a smuggled copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare was made available to him. Mandela signed next to the lines, “Cowards die many times before their death/the valiant taste of death but once”.
Walter Sislu, another South African leader, signed against the passage in Merchant of Venice which contained the lines, “Still have I borne it with a patient shrug/for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.” The volume served as a guest book bearing the signatures of 34 of Robben Island prisoners. The Robben Island Shakespeare, a tattered 1970 edition, was on display at the British Museum as a part of an exhibition ”Shakespeare staging the world” and bears testament to an era.
Apart from his plays, Shakespeare’s sonnets hold a special place in English poetry. They deal with the passage of time, the themes of love, beauty and mortality. About the sonnets, here’s what Wordsworth said, “With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart.” The first sonnets are known as procreation sonnets and addressed to a young man exhorting him to marry and have children in order to pass on his beauty to the next generation. “From fairest creatures we desire increase.”
The other sonnets express a consuming love for a young man and a brooding on love, loneliness and transience: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme” … and ”So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”
Later, Shakespeare wrote with divine despair about the seductive Dark Lady of his sonnets, who inspired some of his most famous and explicit sonnets: “In the old age, black was not counted fair, or if it were it bore not beauty’s name/But now is black beauty’s successive heir.”
Shakespeare defends the unfashionable taste of the lady and the way she shunned any cosmetic aids for her looks. The Dark Lady remains an unidentified, elusive figure and makes for the enduring appeal of the sonnets.
Shakespeare, for all his genius and universality, has his critics, the severest being his contemporary, Ben Jonson. When actors praised Shakespeare, ”In his writings, (whatever he penned) he never blotted out a line”, Ben Jonson said, ”My answer hath been ”would he had blotted a thousand.” Again, however, it was Jonson who makes a volte face about the bard and bestows fulsome praise, when he wrote, ”Thou art a monument without a tomb/And art alive still while thy book doth live/ And we have wits to read and praise to give…”
For the legendary Shakespearean actor, Laurence Olivier, Shakespeare was “the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God.” And for Dame Ellen Terry, another Shakespearean actor, ”Wonderful women! Have you ever thought how much we all and women especially, owe to Shakespeare for his vindication of women in these fearless, high-spirited, resolute and intelligent heroines?”
Shakespeare is as timely as ever, “not of an age, but of all time”, and enjoys today the status of a rock star — with his Hamlet being staged in 200 countries to packed audiences in village squares, beaches and palaces as part of his 450th birth anniversary celebrations last year. Best-selling Chinese author Zhang Yiyi shelled out a staggering amount of 1,51,000 pounds in a series of plastic surgeries to become a lookalike Shakespeare but was still unable to emulate Shakespeare’s bald pate.
On World Theatre Day, the other day, culture enthusiasts in Bhubaneswar were treated to Ratan Thiyam’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Chorus Rrepertory Theatre, Imphal, in Manipuri. The play was treated not just as the tale of an individual but “a disease of greed and unlimited desire of a human being.”
Shakespeare outdid his peers and he is still the scale by which all great writing is judged. ”He is the best record we have of everything that continues to make us human,“ as a literary critic put it.