WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

C. L. R. SASTRI

“Not marble nor the gilded monuments

of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”

–WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

I am perfectly well aware that it is “the very sea-mark of the utmost sail” of impertinence to attempt to write on Shakespeare at this time of day.

Still, he remains the world’s one and only “Bard”–the embodiment, as it were, of poetry – and, as such, it is never, in my opinion, too late to dissertate on him. Moreover, the humblest votary in his shrine has as much right, has as much “vested interest”, so to speak, to aspire to pay tribute to him as the highest: the bleating of the veriest lamb having as much a place in the celebration of his genius as the roaring of the mightiest lion.

All the same, it cannot be gainsaid that one is stricken dumb by the huge mass of Shakespearian criticism (or what passes for it): even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea at last, as Swinburne says somewhere, but this huge mass of criticism goes on and on without any hope of respite.

No wonder that, before it, “gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire” are apt to lose somewhat of their otherwise immitagable frightfulness. Even to peruse a list of the volumes that deal, directly or indirectly, with that mastermind is sufficient to drive one momentarily insane. What a thriving progeny has he not spawned, indeed!

He himself was, from all accounts, careless to a degree; and, after finishing his plays, was sublimely indifferent as to what happened to them subsequently. He had, as he seemed to have visualized it, a job to do, and he strove to do it according to his lights: it was, apparently, no business of his to rack his brains over the probable nature of their appeal to posterity. His concern, rather, was wholly with the present, with his “bank and shoal of time.”

No Vain

No author, we are compelled to ruminate, can ever have been so little vain. Those who ply the pen are not, usually, given to such a philosophic disdain of their productions (large or small); they do bestow an amount of thought upon their likely reception by the public–both the immediate public and the remote–that, at whiles, appears to be the apex, apogee, and apotheosis of absurdity.

Their incessant anxiety, in other words, is about their own work: the likelihood or otherwise of its popularity, of its permanence. Perhaps their dreams also are mainly about such manifestly mundane considerations. Nor is this, let me venture to suggest, very unreasonable. Your literary man is a sort of creator yes, even if he is only a critic and an essayist and a writer on miscellaneous subjects. His every sentence, if he is a scrupulous artist, is “one entire and perfect chrysolite”, admitting, as such, of no interference at the hands of anybody.

It had, it is obvious, not been jerked off lazily and deserves to be respected on that account alone. It requires some more than common talent to cultivate your own manner of writing out of the cornucopia or words that is lying about for everyone’s use.

This is the first step in the process. The second is to make that chosen instrument of yours so distinguished, so memorable a part of yourself, that discerning readers can instantly recognize it as yours–and as yours alone–wherever they happen to encounter it. Your professional author is, therefore, naturally a trifle self-conscious in regard to his own work: and his eyes see far into the future, a sort of crystal-gazing that is uniquely his and no one else’s.

But Shakespeare, one may surmise, did not suffer from this last infirmity of noble minds. Beyond a shrewd prognoais that he was such a lord of utterance “as never was on sea or land”, “not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes would outlive his powerful rhyme”, he did not ponder painfully over questions relating to his probable place amongst the world’s immortals.

That itself is, I submit, highly suggestive: your true Olympians have a nonchalance about themselves, a kind of “take me or leave me” posture, that well-nigh puts to shame the idle pomposities, the struttings and stampings, the frothings and tunings, of the lesser rabble of writers.

Commentaries

I have, earlier, remarked that the number of commentaries on Shakespeare that have achieved print is almost bewildering: they are very nearly as multitudinous as the proverbial sands on the seashore. He has been surveyed from every possible angle: except, may be, from the angle of having been a woman, as Samuel (Erewhon) Butler profoundly prognosticated about Homer.

There are, as is common knowledge, those who would like to foist his work on Bacon. There are those who argue that he was a crusted Conservative–that gifted writer, the late Charles Whibley, was pre-eminent among these–and those who are equally insistent that he was a fiery Radical: the ever-to-be remembered Robert Lynd was the chief proponent of this view.

There are those who hold him as a thing “ensky’d and sainted”, as Lucio says of Isabella in Measure for Measure (there are many passages in his plays that are peerless for moral excellence and for philosophic penetration): and there are those, again–and the late Lytton Strachey was the leader of these–who taunt him for words and phrases, for “the ithyphallic fun,” as Logan Pearsall Smith calls it, that (one fancies) would meet with short shrift at the hands of the censor even in our notoriously lax times.

There are those who regard him as having been a model of sanity, and those, of course, who would have nothing to do with this too, too flattering estimate. Now, is there much sanity in the words that he puts into the mouth of Othello when he raves that he will never flinch from his iron determination to punish Desdemona?

“Never Jago. Like to the Pontic sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont;

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,

Till that a capable and wide revenge

Swallow them up.–Now, by your marble heaven,

In the due reverence of a sacred vow

I here engage my words.”

As for his capacity for wringing tears (torrents and torrents of them) from our eyes –why, he has no equal. King Richard II is compact of pathos as an egg is full of meat: one can never read it without a lump in one’s throat. King Richard’s:

“..of comfort, no man speak:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth...

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

Are these lines not unequalled sobstuff? And the scene between Arthur and Hubert in King John? Is it not a fitting pendant to them? And Constance’s outbursts of unbearable grief?

Those Tragedies

There is, unfortunately, a strain of Jingoism in our bard that cannot but be a matter for our eternal sorrow. His breathtaking partiality for that ne’er-do-well, King Henry V, is too palpable: and old John of Gaunt’s rhapsody about England, “this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle..” in King Richard II, which every school boy knows by heart, and the equally chauvinistic vaunt of the Bastard Falconbridge in King John,

“..Naught shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true,”

are sickening in the extreme.

As for his wit and humour, the two parts of King Henry IV are replete with these. Take Falstaff away and how poor does Shakespeare become? And then look at those tragedies!

Any one of them could have assured immortality of fame to an author. And how to pick and chose from among them? Hamlet, of course, is the prime favourite, the primus inter pares. But is King Lear much below it in grandeur? The same question may be asked of Macbeth and Othello and Antony and Cleopatra. To me each one of these is almost equally fascinating: one quality predominates in one and another in another.

For sheer cerebration, for instance, Hamlet does bear away the bell: for pathos, King Lear: for a sort of macabre speldour, Macbeth: for that “green-eyed monster,” jealousy, Othello: and for coruscating literary fireworks, Antony and Cleopatra. For sheer pathos I have already quoted from King Richard II. What now about these lines from King Lear in the matter of the utter breaking down of one’s feelings? Lear is saying to Cordelia, that daughter of his whom he has grievously wronged:

“No, no, no, no! Let’s away to prison:

We two alone will sing like birds in the cage:

When thou dost ask me blessings I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news...”

There is a kind of “Cut-and-come-again” glory about these tragedies that is a perpetual delight. Read them for the hundredth time, and not a jot or a little of their beauty, of their magnificence, is abated. And let us give up odious comparisons.

I own to a liking (if only in parts) of even the three sections of King Henry VI. I have read Titus Andronicus and am not visibly the worse for that (traumatic) experience. There is not much of Shakespeare in that blood-curdling play, it is true, but what of that? If he has merely looked over a sheet of blackened paper–blackened, that is, with writing–then that very moment it takes on a prettiness all its own. As Matthew Arnold rightly says, “others abide our question: he is free.”

And he is really (Ben Jonson’s trope) “not of an age but for all time”. Speaking for myself, I have long since ceased to regard him as a mere mortal, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Rather should he be described as a demi-god: as one who lives in the suburbs of Paradise and who was born into the world just to instruct us in the art of adding word to word in such a fashion as finally to bring forth an inimitable verbal orchestration: like Beatrice, “a star is born”.

A Divinity that shaped his language

Anyhow, it is certain that there was a divinity that shaped his language–rough hew it how he might on occasion. It may, indeed, be remarked of his utterance that

“…it robs the Hybla bees,

And leaves them honeyless”,

as he himself caused it to be said of Antony’s. His command of words was, to put it at the lowest, not of this earth. It came “from afar”; and was “apparell’d in celestial light”. Who can presume to sing his glory–that glory which he defines in The First Part of King Henry VI as being like

“…a circle in the water,

Which never ceases to enlarge itself

Till by broad spreading it disperses to nought?”

His pen can range the whole gamut of human experience with a sureness of touch that would be incredible if we had not the proof of it by our side. Wherefrom he acquired that knowledge, and wherefrom he picked up that vocabulary, it is not far the likes of me to suggest: and, perhaps, even the acknowledged savants may be hard put to it to explain adequately, either to themselves or to others.

He was, as reports have it, a man-about-town and had his multifarious engagements. He had his theatre to attend to and his plays to be written (or oftener still, to work upon plays that had already been written, transforming them, in the process, out of all recognition and giving to “airy nothings a local habitation and a name”). Besides, there were hours to be spent in carousing in the Mermaid tavern and in breaking a dialectical lance with “glorious Ben”.

It is (lamentably) true that he was not under any tyrannical necessity of inventing his own plots, because he was not too nice about filching from the older authors, being, like his own Autolycus, “a picker-up of unconsidered trifles”. Plutarch’s Lives, to take only one example, were a veritable mine of information for him.

He was content–nay, supremely content–to reap where he did not sow, to garner where he did not glean, and to let that ancient Greek do the journeyman work for him. Probably, Enobarbus’s famous description of Cleopatra’s barge (wherein she first met Antony on the river Cydmus) is nothing but pure Plutarch in metrical form.

An “Omnipotent” Pirate

Where detail was concerned Shakespeare was–let the horrible truth be confessed–a most “omnipotent” pirate, even as Poins was a most “omnipotent” villain, according to the worthy testimony of Falstaff: though, to be sure, it is not to be denied that, when he was in the mood, he could riot in detail as well as next man. (Read Mistress Quickly’s terrific challenge to Falstaff.)

For the most part, however, he did not scruple to borrow right and left: he must have been indolent to a degree. The fact to be borne in mind is that he never let the process stop there: he could always be relied upon to transform that base mental into gold of the finest. His real forte lay in converting the raw material into the immortal stuff of poetry.

A Magician with words

Shakespeare, in short, was a magician with words: with his Prospero’s wand he could summon them (as it were) out of the vasty deep. He had, more than anyone else, “the poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling: “and thus could give

“….to airy nothings

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That, if it would apprehend joy,

It comprehends some bringers of that joy.”

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

On looking back I find that there is still a lot more to be written and that there is no room to write it in. Shakespeare was “a turn of” an author, as Falstaff was “a tun of a man”, and he cannot be adequately treated inside a few columns or pages. My only excuse for writing about him is that I admire him “this side idolatry.”

I shall however, stop here: permitting myself to say only that he was “the noblest Roman of them all”, and that, for the perfect utterance of beautiful thoughts, he was “the pillars of Hercules of mortal achievement”, as the late Mr. Maurice Baring said of Sarah Bernhardt’s acting.

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