“Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back/ Wherein he puts alms for oblivion”.
William Shakespeare, the man who wrote this four centuries ago, is widely regarded as the world’s best dramatist of all time and one of the finest poets ever.
And so far from oblivion is he that even 400 years after his death (on April 23, 1616), this ‘Man of the Millennium’ is being remembered and his works are being revisited through writings, lectures, performances and assorted festivals the world over.
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To have an opportunity to contribute to this global Shakespeare remembrance process is a great privilege. Yet, at the same time, it is a daunting project to undertake for, what after all does one say about the bard of Avon that has not been said already? What aspect of his multi-faceted genius does one highlight in a short ‘tribute’ piece like this? Faced with this paralysing difficulty, this writer decides to not attempt any critical description of Shakespeare’s varied and sizeable oeuvre or any analysis of his great gifts.
Instead, she will simply record her own fascination with, and reverence for, a man who combined the highest pitch of qualitative excellence with being very prolific; who turned into gold whichever genre he touched; who appealed and continues to appeal to everyone; and whose works, despite being mirrors of his times, have the timelessness of true classics.
Active between 1589 and 1613, Shakespeare lived through the conflict and the confusion of changing times. The medieval belief system was being challenged and, in England, both the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church and the putatively divine authority of the monarchy came subtly under attack. The feudal value system was giving way to a modernity influenced by European currents of thought, capitalism started to develop and England began to colonise countries far and near. Shakespeare’s drama reflected the subterranean turmoil created in English society by all this, so well that Ben Jonson, one of his great contemporaries, hailed him as “the soul of our age”. Yet it was Jonson again who recognised the timeless human appeal that formed the core of Shakespeare’s works and proclaimed that he was not of one age, but of all ages.
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Indeed, Shakespeare’s keen mind plumbed the depths and sounded the torrent of every conceivable human emotion — ranging from fear, envy and greed, through ambition, lust and cruelty, to love, loyalty, allegiance and empathy — without ever being abstruse or over-subtle. To one’s mind, the quality that most defines the greatness of Shakespeare — that which makes him different from and superior to other great litterateurs of the world — is his matchless ability to combine intellectual acuity with a sure grasp of the stuff of ordinary humanity, his ability to bring out the uniqueness of the apparently typical, and vice versa. No wonder his plays have been translated into almost all living languages and continue to be performed till today in different corners of the world.
To dwell for a while on the actual contours of Shakespeare’s body of work, he wrote 38 plays, including romantic comedies, historical plays, tragedies, and the so-called ‘problem plays’ that defy classification, two long narrative poems, and 154 sonnets, which explore the intricacies of human love. The four ‘great tragedies’ — Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and King Lear — are considered to be the finest flower of English verse drama and the sonnets. While exploring the myriad moods and states of love, they illustrate a sensitivity and touch a height of poetic beauty that have remained unparalleled. Shakespeare’s contribution to the standardisation and modernisation of the English language too has been considerable. The everyday English spoken throughout the world today is replete with turns of phrases and word combinations — like ‘bated breath’, ‘forgone conclusion’ and ‘brave new world’— that Shakespeare coined and used in his drama.
Critiqued in his day for his occasional lack of finish and his flouting of Latin conventions, Shakespeare came to be esteemed highly by later ages. The Romantics worshipped his ‘natural genius’ and tried to revive his kind of verse drama; the modernists, notably T.S. Eliot, hailed him as being truly modern; and the contemporary world of critical theory has seen him from a range of perspectives, including post-structuralist, feminist, New Historicist and even Queer-Study ones.
Globally, he was admired by the likes of Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal, Hugo and Schlegel; he influenced the Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Russia; and the 20th century German playwright Bertolt Brecht modelled his ‘epic theatre’ on Shakespearean drama. Clearly, “King Shakespeare” — as Thomas Carlyle called him — had the kind of genius that transcends time while being intensely alive to the specificities of different time-place conjunctions. A master dramatist with the touch of the finest poet, an epic explorer of human situations with a lyrical subtlety of touch, Shakespeare lives and will continue to live for ages to come. “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes, shall outlive (his) powerful rhyme.”
Suparna Banerjee is assistant professor of English at Krishnath College, Berhampore.