Shakespeare
as Prospero the magician
What is the magic of William Shakespeare that 400 years after his death the world still rings with his praise? This is the central question to which Shri V.N. Venugopal addressed himself.
Shri V.N. Venugopal, Patron of the Kerala Fine Arts Society
The variety of characters and human portraiture in Shakespeare's plays are unparalleled. His female characters are equally colourful and interesting.
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Jeanette Nolan from Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948)
Longfellow summed up Shakespeare’s
work as “the rarest essence of all human thoughts.”
To read more click below ...
THE
MAGIC OF SHAKESPEARE
V.
N. Venugopal
Introduction
Shri V. N. Venugopal, scholar and city historian, retired as head of Premier Tyres. He is a graduate of Maharaja's College and has studied Physics, Sociology, English Literature, and Management! In other words, he is a Renaissance Man. He is a Patron of the Kerala Fine Arts society and has served as its President for many years. Shri Venugopal is a past president of the Kerala Management Association also.
He is the grandson of Shri K. Govinda Menon, who was the classmate at Oxford of Lawrence of Arabia and had Lawrence come over to Thrissur for Ayurvedic treatment. His father is P. Narayana Menon. He is currently involved in education and art. Shri Venugopal lists his hobbies as Reading, mainly biographies, history and literary criticism and listening to Carnatic music.
He brought out a commemorative volume on the historic Lotus Club. If the city of Madras has Mutiah to chronicle its history, Kochi has Shri Venugopal, if you judge by his many writings in papers and journals.
x— x — x — x — x — x — x
Shri V. N. Venugopal, scholar and city historian, retired as head of Premier Tyres. He is a graduate of Maharaja's College and has studied Physics, Sociology, English Literature, and Management! In other words, he is a Renaissance Man. He is a Patron of the Kerala Fine Arts society and has served as its President for many years. Shri Venugopal is a past president of the Kerala Management Association also.
He is the grandson of Shri K. Govinda Menon, who was the classmate at Oxford of Lawrence of Arabia and had Lawrence come over to Thrissur for Ayurvedic treatment. His father is P. Narayana Menon. He is currently involved in education and art. Shri Venugopal lists his hobbies as Reading, mainly biographies, history and literary criticism and listening to Carnatic music.
He brought out a commemorative volume on the historic Lotus Club. If the city of Madras has Mutiah to chronicle its history, Kochi has Shri Venugopal, if you judge by his many writings in papers and journals.
x— x — x — x — x — x — x
What
is the magic of Shakespeare? As we celebrate the 450th birth
anniversary of this great literary personality of all time, what
aspect of his literature carries all of us across time and space and
inspires us to read, talk and discuss about him? We know that many of
his plots are not original, but he had the ability to develop these
plots weaving around characters and incidents that have been made
immortal. It is this creativity, the creativity of the dramatist in
King Lear or Othello that still lure us into reading Shakespeare.
There are Shakespeare societies, reading clubs, fan clubs, symposia
and chairs for Shakespearean studies in many universities. It is
said that he who knows not Shakespeare or appreciates his work is
ignorant of something which is the greatest secular work in world
literature.
As
Shakespeare himself wrote about Cleopatra, his variety is infinite.
He knew nature well and lovingly described it. The variety of
characters and human portraiture in his plays are unparalleled. He
rarely referred to the tremendous happenings of the age in which he
lived – the defeat of the Armada, the voyages of Raleigh to America
or the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots. There is hardly any
contemporary topical allusion in his plays. Yet the gayest fancy, the
broadest humour, the most piercing wit with the deepest pathos,
strongest passion and the truest philosophy are what he has
portrayed. It is human life, not a stilted conventionality that
Shakespeare cared for. His plays are concerned with human nature,
the same unchanging facts that have remained throughout the ages –
the basic attributes of all creative writing even today. Maturity of
craftsmanship as well as maturity of poetic and imaginative power was
necessary for development of plot and character from modest
beginnings to the grand sweep of pageantry and heroically conceived
characters of the many English and roman history plays; to those high
comedies that submit to definition only in terms of themselves and
therefore can only be called Shakespearean; those tragedies whose
dark magnificence are equaled only by the ancient Greeks. Even
today, as we look around, we can see the delightful fool Launcelot
Gobbo, the braggart Falstaff, the miser Shylock, the lean and hungry
Cassius or the neurotic Hamlet weighing the future.
His
female characters are equally colourful and interesting. Portia,
full of wit and poetry, heavenly Rosalind with deep, steadfast love
of a true woman, Juliet with her adolescent passion, Ophelia and
Desdemona their foolish, fond and helpless love, Cleopatra’s craft
and sensuousness and Lady Macbeth with her unscrupulous ambition. He
created the evil sisters Goneril and Regan but in deep contrast he
also produced the gentle Cordelia, a model of filial devotion. As
themes of his plays he has mighty dramas of love, jealousy,
friendship, hatred and ambition. His plays are a perfect guide to
human nature and all sorts of men and women are represented by him
the old, the young, the wise, the foolish, kings and common men.
How
did Shakespeare craft his play? As Bradley said, the Shakespearean
tragedy in simple terms may be called a story of exceptional calamity
leading to the death of a man of high standing. He goes on to say
and rightly so, “no amount of calamity which befalls a man
descending from the clouds or stealing from the darkness like
pestilence alone provides the substance of a story.” His skill in
crafting his plays lay here, the acts or omissions characteristic of
the doer. Thus his plays do not merely concentrate on the character
but also the actions of the character. Even though we can find spots
where he has given indulgence to his love of poetry, he was “dramatic
to the tips of his fingers” as Bradley has said. An appropriate
assessment of Shakespeare’s plays will lead us to the conclusion
that performance is the end to which they were created. Yet no one
can argue Shakespeare’s works can be understood and appreciated
without concern for their place in history. The language, the idiom,
the ambiguity and the metaphor form the bulk of the interpretations
and appreciation of Shakespeare in the 20th century. As Richard
Levin said “Shakespeare can teach us more about the ideas of his
time than ideas of his time can teach us about Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare
always insists on the tragedy of love – love that is more powerful
than death. His plays enshrine some of the most poignant love
passages ever written. His sonnets, the most perfect of their kind
are symbols of overwhelming passion and could only have been written
by someone who had experienced all the ecstasies of love, its
pleasure and its pains. Sonnets, one of the most fashionable poetic
forms in the last decade of the 16th century abound in the amount of
personal and autobiographical matter. The beauty of the power of
their verse, their imagery and their emotions are matchless. “Not
marble, nor the gilded monuments/
Of
princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” (Sonnet 55).
Magic
of Shakespeare’s influence on other writers and artistes that
started during his lifetime continues to this age. The house at
Stratford on Avon where Shakespeare was born in 1564 continues to be
a pilgrim centre, a Mecca for Shakespearean scholars and tourists
alike. Many are the European authors who borrowed themes or ideas
from Shakespeare. Ivan Turgenev's ‘Lear of Steppes’ (1870),
amusing variations of comic Shakespearean phrases in P G Wodehouse
(1930), T S Eliot’s Prufrock “I am not Prince Hamlet” (1930),
Saul Bellow in his novel ‘Seize the Day’ (1956), quoting from
Shakespeare’s sonnets, Pushkin offering his own version of ‘Measure
for Measure’ in his poem ‘Angelo’ (1833) and Victor Hugo in his
preface to the play ‘Cromwell’ (1827), are only some examples.
He used English language as a raw material for his works. His style
is not any stringing of words, not any naive untrained grouping of
language. The following lines from Measure for Measure “God in my
mouth / as if I did but only chew his name”, the wonderful lines
from Antony and Cleopatra from Cleopatra’s death scene “Now from
head to foot / I am marble constant,” –
the examples are many as Goneril in King Lear, says “Sir I love
you more than words/ can wield the matter.” The memorable lines
from Macbeth “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/ creeps in this
petty pace from day to day/ to the last syllable of recorded time,”
the touching last words of Othello “Why should honour outlive
honesty”and “An honourable murderer if you will / for naught I
did in hate / but all in honour,” and King Lear’s dying words
“why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and dove no breath at
all.” These are some of the lines that stand out as examples of
his wonderful craftsmanship. Here is the music of the gods and the
splendour of Euripides. Words and expressions reared and modeled
like temples which made him a god of style, the patron saint of men
of letters. The element of language in each play determines its tone
and colour, its range and its metaphor.
Finally,
the sense of justice that pervades most of his plays meting out an
apt punishment for the wrong-doer is very relevant. Cleopatra and
Othello meeting immediate death for their wrongs while Brutus living
a life of remorse and welcoming death as an atonement for his
wrongdoing. In King Lear, Albany’s pronouncement in the last scene
that “All friends shall taste the wages of their virtue and all
foes the cup of their deservings” or again in Hamlet Laertes
moaning “I am justly killed in my own treachery,” explain the
Bard’s Philosophy which is visible throughout his works. A
consummate master of language and rhetoric, irony and humour, he did
not try to escape the tyranny of environment.
In
our own fevered, changing and precarious age where all is in flux and
nothing is accepted we must survey with respect a voice singing
lyrics in the distant scented darkness that inspired generations of
readers. In classical times when Cicero has finished speaking people
said “How well he spoke” but when Demosthenes had finished
speaking they said “Let us march.” Shakespeare inspired us. The
world still lies before him waiting for his invading footstep. The
tempest of his creativity rises from oceanic depths. Longfellow
summed up Shakespeare’s work as “the rarest essence of all human
thoughts.”
References :
1) Shakespearean Tragedy ( A C Bradley )
2)
Shakespeare ( Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin )
3)
Shakespeare Criticism in the 20th Century ( Michael Taylor )
4) Literary Masters of England ( Nelson Bushnell, Paul M Fulcher
and
Warner
Taylor )
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