Shakespeare, being “myriad-minded”, means many things to many people. So does he to me. To the same person he means different things at different ages. So is the case with me. In my boyhood I was charmed by him when he was introduced to me by Charles and Mary Lamb. While at college he repelled when he was thrust on me as prescribed reading. Later on in life when I sought him out of my free choice, I felt as Swinburne said of Michaelangelo :
He was most awful of the sons of God
And at his feet as natural servants lay
Twilight and dawn and night and laboring day.
I am not believer in God or in his chosen sons, but it there is a God I would be terribly uncomfortable in his presence. Try however much, I can have no rapport with him. He would make me feel a mere straw that is carried swiftly along the onrushing stream of his creative genius, and buffeted by its turbulent waves. Unlike every other poet and playwright, this is how Shakespeare makes me feel in his company. Tolstoy too is a giant in his own field, te novel, but you could at least sit at his feet, though not by his side; you could converse with him, though not dare contradict him. All you could do with Shakespeare is to worship him from afar or to disdain him outright.
For different reasons, Voltaire, Byron, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw were severe on Shakespeare. “He was a savage,” said Voltaire. “who had imagination. He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada.” And he boasted that he had been the first to show the French “some pearls which I had found” in the “enormous dunghill” of Shakespeare’s plays. Byron, in his turn, said that Shakespeare was “a damned humbug.” “The content of Shakespeare’s plays,” fulminated Tolstoy, “is the lowest, most vulgar view of life which regards the external elevation of the great ones of earth as a genuine superiority; despises the crowd, that is to say, the working classes; and repudiates not only religious, but even every humanitarian, effort directed towards the alterations of the existing order of society.” The denunciation by Shaw was no less trenchant. He said : “With the simple exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.”
In his day, Shakespeare aroused jealousy, angry and explosive, in his fellow-poets and play wrights. Here, they felt, is an uncouth fellow, of humble origin, of no university education, a mere actor and a minor one at that, “an absolute Johannes fac totum” (Jack of All Trades), who not only dares to presume that he could cut and prune, add and embellish, and totally refashion the plays of the University Wits, but also write new plays. He is “an upstart Crowe beautified with our feathers”. And yet he thinks “in his owned conceit the one lie Shake-scene in the country.” We should be wary of him; e has a “tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide”. Though it would be unjust to accuse Voltaire. Byron, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw of a like professional jealousy, it is conceivable that unknowingly to themselves they may have felt a hidden impulse to tell themselves and the world that they are no less tall than the Avonian Bard.
I am too small to denounce or denigrate Shakespeare, nor have I a desire to do any such thing. I stand at a safe distance and salute him. When I desire to learn a lesson or two in dramatic construction, I do not go to him but to Sardou and Ibsen. When I want to inspiration to Synge and Lady Gregory. When I seek to raise a laugh. I prefer to follow Moliere and to wring a tear, Bhavabhuti. When my aim is to drive home a moral. Shaw and Tolstoy are more approachable models for me. For giving a modern interpretation to an old myth, O’Neill and Anouilh are safer guides, and for philosophical slant, Sartre. For making people sit up and think of socio-economic problems and their impact on contemporary life, Hauptmann and Galsworthy are, I feel, within easier reach. For symbolism, my vote goes to Strindberg, for imaginative realism to Chekhov, for the experimental play to Pirandello, for the wistful to Barrie, for the bizarre to Ionesco. In my more daring moments, I sometimes venture to look up for instruction to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, but never to Shakespeare. He is as towering among play wrights as was Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
It is true that the work of the other play wrights is of a higher uniform quality. In Shakespeare, “there is”, to quote J.W. Mackail, “slovenliness, disproportion, impropriety, bombast, Vulgarity – one need not enlarge the catalogue. He is often barbaric. But no one has ever called him, from his best to his worst, un dramatic.” Even Tolstoy, in spite of his low opinion of Shakespeare, had to admit that “however arbitrary the positions in which he puts his characters, however unnatural to them the language he makes them speak, however lacking in individuality they may be, the movement of feeling itself, its increase and change and the combination of many contrary feelings, are often expressed correctly and powerfully in some of Shakespeare’s scenes”. From my fairly wide reading of world drama. I can say that besides his dramatic power there is something in Shakespeare which can only be called elemental, primordial. He thunders like a Jupiter, declaims like a Jehovah, proclaims doom like a Jeremiah, and curses like a very Satan. With him, if it is love it should be all-pervading; if hate, all-consuming; if murder, all gory. Nothing by halves, not even clowning and bawdiness. His clowns should be like no other clowns and his bawdiness should be more salty than the worst of billingsgate. He is so prolific that he has created about a thousand characters, major, middling, and minor. They range from Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear to Puck, Prospero, Touchstone, and Falstaff, from Desdemona, Juliet, and Cleopatra to Rosalind. Portia, and Katharine, and in between we have a whole blood of villains headed by Iago. Barring the very minor characters, each of the rest has a life and individuality of his or her own. “The characters created by Shakespeare”, as stated truly by Pushkin” are not, as in Moliere, types of this or that passion, this or that vice, but living beings, filled to overflowing with many passions and many vices; circumstances mould their varied and many-sided characters before the eyes of the audience.”
The uniqueness of Shaskespeare is that he is great even in his faults, and they are more than covered up by his command over words, his mastery of rhythm, his flash of phrase. As Ivor Brown has rightly said, his is the “supreme verbal genius that raised words not only to a higher power but to the highest power ever achieved by any writer in our language.” This “verbal genius”, coupled wit his dramatic power, made Shakespeare the greatest of world’s play wrights. At his magic touch the grossest material springs into pulsating drama. Marx and Engels said that in the philosophical writings of Bacon “matter smiles upon the whole of humanity in all its poetically sensual radiance.” This is even more true of his supreme genius one has to see him on the stage. Twice I tried to see him at his birthplace in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but to my great disappointment I was told on the first occasion in 1954 that every available seat was booked for weeks to come, and one the second, during the early part of this year, the season had not yet commenced. I had, however, the pleasure of seeing him performed at Aldwych Theatre by the Old Vice Company, as also by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company. In all I have seen five London productions of Shakespeare, and each one has been a living, thrilling, abiding experience.
But I hold that every age has its own theatre and its play. Let alone others, even the British cannot go back to the Elizabethan Theatre or to the Elizabethan Play except as a matter of historical interest. In his day, Shakespeare’s plays were modern, but now, in spite of their undimmed beauty, power, and excellence, they are period pieces. Shakespeare was the son of his age, the Age of Renaissance, when the European mind broke loose from its chains and the European spirit soared into new and hitherto undreamt of realms of freedom, knowledge, and enlightenment. Not only metaphorically but also literally, the Western man, by circling the globe for the first time in history, discovered new continents and opened up new vistas. Shakespeare was the trumpet voice of this new age in Europe. We in India have also stepped into a new age, but it is a pity that while we are now politically free and united after centuries of bondage, our mind is still imprisoned in the dead past and our spirit is poor and timorous. If we were to have new drama and new theatre, there should be a reawakening of the mind and a resurgence of the spirit. I am convinced that trying to imitate Shakespeare without steeping oneself, as he did, in the spirit of one’s age, without his matchless genius for words, or his instinctive feel for the theatre is a futile as it is foolish. And, in any case, Shakespeare is inimitable. No less a poet than Milson felt that Shakespeare had a paralyzing effect on his imagination and complained to the ghost of the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon thus :
But thou, our fancy of itself bereaving
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving
As no plant can thrive under the spreading shadow of the mighty banyan, no playwright could flourish if he were to come too much under the spell of Shakespeare. During the past sixty or seventy years we have had in my part of the country at least one Andhra Shakespeare for each generation, and, by and laarge, their work has turned to be "sound and fury signifying nothing".I may therefore, say that Shakespeare in the final analysis, means to me a poet to be enjoyed but not emulated, a playwright to be admired but whose petrifying influence has to be avoided as far as possible. (1964)
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