SHAKESPEARE-SELF-PORTRAYED
Mrs. Y. SATYASREE
“How beauteous is mankind
O brave new World”!
Shakespeare
Did Shakespeare write his plays “purposely”, as Bridges thought or “instinctively” as Keats said? This is one of the fascinating questions in literature to which it is difficult to find a cut - and - dried answer. It is like the philosophical doubt whether the seed or the tree was created first. It is like the controversy in the realm of psychology regarding the relative importance of heredity and environment in shaping the personality of the child. The answer that readily springs to our lips is Sir Rogers judgement: Much can be said on both sides.
Sidney Lee refused to believe that the personality of Shakespeare could be deduced from his works and so falling back on external evidence and odds and ends of recorded biography, he concluded that Shakespeare was a fine specimen of the Industrious Boy who got on. And Sidney Lee’s “Life of William Shakespeare” was regarded as the official biography till recently. This opinion prevailed until Edmund Dowden wrote ‘Shakespeare - his Mind and Art’ - to establish his favourite theory that Shakespeare’s plays show the development of his personality in its successive stages and reflect his private emotional life to a great extent. It was on the basis of this theory that Dowden proceeded to classify Shakespeare’s plays under four categories to show how he achieved his philosophical heights after passing through the early days of immaturity, apprenticeship, inexperience and depths of suffering and sorrow. These are his (1) Early comedies (2) Later comedies and Historical plays (3) Tragedies and (4) Tragi-comedies. It is not possible for a writer in flesh and blood to remain completely aloof from the characters he creates and to express his opinion on men and matters with hundred percent detachment and judicial impassivity. It is just possible that a dramatist transposes into his, characters and situations, consciously or unconsciously, certain things which he finds in himself. This happens despite the critical cannons like ‘we must get away from what we desire to judge’ and ‘one describes summer best on a winter day’. The theory of strict impersonality is attacked by eminent writers like Goethe who gives expression to his firm conviction that a writer who describes the ocean must have seen atleast a small pond! The poet who wrote about the mountain must have seen atleast a hillock!
Plays which are full of vitality like those of Shakespeare could not have been written in cold-blood, by any author whose mind was not as sensitive as a seismograph in recording the slightest tremors in the contemporary situation. According to Raleigh, ‘no dramatist can create live characters save by bequeathing the best of himself to the children of his art, scattering among them a largess of his own qualities, giving to one his wit, to another his simplicity and constancy that he finds deep in his own character. There can be no thrill of feeling and excitement on the printed page unless they have been experienced by the writer himself. It is only those books into which the writer’s personality has projected that remain alive in the reader’s mind and escape oblivion.
It is no wonder, therefore, that some critics said that Shakespeare had identified himself with this or that of his characters, either with Henry V or Hamlet. It is undeniable that Falstaff, Shylock, Cleopatra and Prospero shone in certain situations with a lustre not always their own. We hear Shakespeare’s opinions uttered in unmistakable terms in Brutus’s prophetic forecast over Casear’s corpse, Ulysses’s praise of order, and Coriolanus’s hatred of the ‘greasy’ mob.
These constitute revealing side-lights on the fibre of his feelings and the general complexion of his sympathies, his mental attitude at different stages of his career and his over-all outlook on life. There may be a few oblique references in his plays to the contemporary political and religious situation as revealed in his frequent attacks on puritanism and prudery.
‘Hamlet’ is the most popular of his plays because it is supposed to be nearest to Shakespeare himself and the tragedy contains a substantial measure of self-portrayal. The play shows much of a temporary spirit of disillusion and embittered feeling. Brandes, the great critic, said that Shakespeare even placed in Hamlet’s mouth invective which is more appropriate to a subject than to a sovereign. So there was every temptation for venturesome critics to attribute such a sense of desolation to a gloomy period in Shakespeare’s life, when his father died in 1601, his mend Essex was condemned to death (Cawdor’s execution in ‘Macbeth’) and his patron Southampton was imprisoned. With so much grief gnawing at his heart, Shakespeare naturally presented time as ‘out of joint’.
Hamlet’s discourse to the players has been universally interpreted as Shakespeare’s commentary on the failings of the acting profession. It strikes a strong personal note. T. S. Eliot affirmed an identity between Hamlet and his creator by saying ‘Hamlet is dominated by an emotion, inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear’, Hamlet’s puzzlement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the puzzlement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem.
Robertson, another critic of no mean repute said that Hamlet’s mental disorder was a legacy of which shakespeare made liberal use to let out a little of his own pent-up distemper. The psycho-analyst Dr. Ernest Jones declared that Hamlet suffered from “Oedipus complex” because Shakespeare did also. A strain of sex-nausea runs through all his plays written after 1600. The dark-eyed lady of the Sonnets keeps on popping up like King Charles’s head. The strain should be associated as Dover Wilson suggested, with jealousy “the green-eyed monster”. “Othello”, “Hamlet”, “King lear” and “Macbeth” are timeless tragedies where intense passion, emotional fervour, frantic imagination and hectic madness cast their spell on the reader. These at long last resolve themselves into an enveloping peace and serenity when we come to read his tragi-comedies. The twilight plays “Winter’s Tale”, “Cymbeline” and “The Tempest” end in conciliation, forgiveness and philosophic resignation.
“How beauteous is mankind, O brave new world!” seems to be the keynote of Shakespeare’s personality. It is a triumph of optimism. Critics find a close identity between Prospero of ‘The Tempest’ and his creator, especially in Prospero’s abjuration of magic after achieving his meaningful miracles. They interpret it as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. He too had wrought wonders through the alchemy of his art and had for his guiding principles, forgiveness and reconciliation. Dowden emphasised the parallel between Prospero and his maker in more than one personality - trait. The redoubtable Bradley too lent his support to this theory, Harris went to the length of associating Shakespeare with Jaques, Henry the Duke in “Measure for Measure” Hamlet and Prospero in the evolution of his character.
The fact that Shakespeare did not seek to impart teaching or to propound a philosophy is a sure compliment to his catholicity. Philosophy was no doubt “Adversity’s Sweet Milk”, but it was of no use to Romeo if it could not restore Juliet to him Commonsense and worldly wisdom were more important to Shakespeare than any philosophical doctrines. “There are more things in heaven and earth than philosophy dreams of”.
Unlike George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare never stepped into the role of the propagandist. “There is no moral lesson to be learnt in Shakespeare expect accidentally”. There was no poetic justice in his tragedies in the sense that reward and punishment were mathematically distributed among the characters according to their merit or demerit. Evil was punished often but good was not always rewarded.
“Measure for Measure” is the only play in which there is direct treatment of the moral problem. But here Shakespeare’s answer is negation of morality.” Against the dark background of sin-ridden Vienna rises the snow-white figure of Isabella preaching the gospel of chastity. The picture makes a good enough Christmas card but it is not Shakespeare”. He never approved such dry asceticism, such cloistered and fugitive virtue. He could say: “there is a soul of goodness even in things evil”. Despite difficulties and every adverse circumstance, the poet remained an optimist with his unshaken faith in the ultimate vindication of God’s ways.
Shakespeare held the balance even “between men of imaginative power like Richard II, Brutus and Hamlet and men of practical ability like Hotspur, Octavius Caesar and Faulcanbridge”. It is nature divided against itself by inexhaustible sympathy with opposite sides. Forgetting that he was myriad-minded and many-splendoured, some critics try to label him with partisanship. In his book “Marxist Interpretation of Shakespeare” Alexander Smyrnov introduced the fascinating thesis that Shakespeare was opposed to the ownership of private property! Where Shakespeare is concerned one should avoid this kind of sectarian and partisan approach. After all reductions and deductions, the fact remains that he was a supreme observer, a superb artist and a universal poet, but in experience, habits and attitude to life, a pretty normal Elizabethan man. The stuff of his plays is the same common Elizabethan humanity, ‘transmuted but not effaced by his art’.
‘I have obtained knowledge which won the admiration of emperors.
I have procured many things coveted by man here on earth.
But what next? What next?’
–Adi Sankara.
‘Alas! I have mastered Philosophy, Law and Medicine,
And over deep Divinity have pored
Studying with ardent and laborious Zeal!
And here I am atlast a very fool
With useless learning curst
No wiser than at first
Thou bearest thy hearing risk has but a journey,’
–GOETHE’S “FAUST”
If thou art rich thou art poor
For like an ass whose back with ingots bows
And Death unloads thee’
William Shakespeare.