Sunday, July 28, 2002		Books

Signs & Signatures
Shakespeare’s eternal truths
Darshan Singh Maini

A popular notion, nay a fallacy, often is in evidence where the question of writers and politics is concerned. Such a ‘romantic’ notion has in reality little validity, as we shall see. However, it’s not sufficiently realised, even by thinking men in general that it’s eventually this very desire that drives a great artist into the "heart of darkness", and, thus into the metaphysics of politics.

Man is homo politicus in the very condition of his existence. Who, then should be ideally more concerned with the politics of being and with the essence of politics than the poet? His politics are essentially integral and constitutive, and show up in idiom and imagery, in symbol and metaphor, if they do not, in some manner, surface in story and plot, in thought and argument.

When we, therefore, come to the question of Shakespeare’s politics, it’s not difficult to see that even if he had not written his English ‘histories’ and Roman plays, he could not but have deeply pondered the problem of power in its largest context, such being the pitch and reach of his imagination, and such his compulsive insights into the evolved institutions of civilised life — state, kingship, church, etc — in relation to the rights of man, and of society. As it happens, we have over one-third of his plays directly concerned with the business of politics and governance, and even the remaining plays — tragedies, comedies and romances — are, in one manner or another matters of politics in an extended sense.

Broadly speaking, there are two distinctly opposed views in regard to Shakespeare’s political vision. While such earlier critics as G. Wilson Knight and E.N.W. Tillyard see him as a bard of the royal soul of England, upholding the institution of monarchy, the divine rights of kings, and the mystique of the crown. Other critics, notably Wyndham Lewis and the Polish Jan Kott, seem to endorse the view that Shakespeare saw through the whole elaborate game of power politics, and was not deceived by the forms and aspects it acquired with a view to sanctifying the human urge for power and control. In other words, the throne and the crown were hollow symbols of an essentially Machiavellian situation from which there was no reprieve.

Similarly, the popular view that Henry V is Shakespeare’s ideal monarch embodying the concept of ‘the Christian king’, and subsuming in his person all the graces and poetries of royalism now appears suspect to some modern critics. They see in him a chip of the old block, a crafty, cynical, pragmatic ruler who covers his sins and lapses — the heartless treatment of that jolly knight, Falstaff, being symptomatic — in a cloud of patriotic, sentimental, jingoistic rhetoric. Indeed, it’s the high-toned rhetoric which really gives him away. And that’s how Shakespeare uses a hidden code and a hidden signature to show his distrust of all such royal pageants and parades of power.

It’s time we turned briefly to Shakespeare’s Roman plays — Titus Andronious, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus for his attitude towards the questions of republicanism, democracy, populism, on the one hand, of elitism, ‘degree’ and hierarchy, on the other. Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, in particular, are profoundly insightful enquiries into the nature of the dialectic of politics per se. With the English ‘histories’ behind him, he seems to have brooded long over the mystery of political power to see that such power in the end turned nearly all rulers and leaders into despots, and those led into objects, things and commodities.

It was a dehumanising process either way. He appears to have had a particular horror of rulers who would unleash wild incensed crowds and mobs on the streets with a view to rousing base passions.

Undoubtedly, the mob-scenes in these plays reveal Shakespeare’s profound distrust of raw, untamed, brutal energies, even as they show his contempt for empty ideologies and barren theoreticians. But, again, this is not to aver that he had a patrician feeling of disdain in regard to the common man.

The canaille or the rabble or the plebian who roused his ire were not to be confused with the generality of mankind. For no writer who despised man as such, or even men in mass, could have hoisted such a grand humanistic vision, and worked out such a beautiful ethic of relationships in play after play.

If we read the Roman plays carefully, we find that both dynastic politics and patrician come a cropper in the end. What really mattered for Shakespeare was the quality of character a ruler brought into play in order to raise his subjects into their ‘higher selves’. Where the masses were merely roused into a blind, feckless fury, and made instruments of tyranny to suit his purpose, a leader or a ruler was no better than that "hydra-headed monster" he had willed into existence.

Even Shakespeare’s ‘conservatism’ — if that’s the expression we must use — is more a question of preserving human values and received and evolved pieties than a question of preserving the status quo in relation to the structure of power. His ‘elitism’ too, then, is, in essence, a tribute to the aristocracy of the human spirit in labour and in love. I share the view of Kenneth Muir that the speeches of order, "degree" etc., are to be seen not as absolutes, but in their dramatic contexts.

Shakespeare, on the whole, appears to have accepted the idea of enlightened monarchy . Incidentally, monarchy was a progressive institution in the time of Shakespeare as against the rank, centrifugal feudalism of the pre-Renaissance period — but, as I have tried to argue earlier, his innate ambivalence always permitted him to retain the courage of his imagination. He did not allow ideas to petrify into still ideologies, or his feelings, into blind, irreversible sentiments. The hospitality of his imagination is truly amazing in its reach and richness.

Finally, it has been argued by certain critics that in The Tempest, believed to be his swan song, Shakespeare, moving on from the human plane to the religious and the mystical, adumbrates a utopia embodying the vision of a "brave new world" a world of love, justice, peace and plenty. It’s not really a Marxian vision of the shape of things to come, though in the evening of his life, the poet does dream up a world of fantasy as insubstantial as that glorious pageant which prospero dismisses with a wave of the wand. He has seen too much of evil in high places to imagine that mankind could in the foreseeable future create a paradise on earth.

Which brings me back, for the moment, to two speeches in King Lear and another in Measure for Measure. The speeches on "Appetite and Authority" in King Lear spouted by the mad king on the heath go into the heart of the power problem. To my mind, few writers in the world have seen a symbiotic relationship between man’s two most urgent and destructive drives, power and sex, in the manner of Shakespeare. Here we have at last the Adlerian instinct of power merging into the Freudian Libido, creating an irresistible imperium or authority.

I suppose, it’s fair to conclude that all these Shakespearean thoughts on the nature of politics are pertinent today as when aeons ago man set out to exercise authority over his fellow human beings. The form of authority and the instruments of power may change, but King or President or Prime Minister, a rare soul really manages to rise above his "glassy essence". For power is a primordial brute which can as little change its ways as the tiger its stripes, or a leopard its spots.

Shakespeare has variously been regarded as a ‘royalist’, a ‘reactionary’, as a ‘patrician’, as a ‘republication’, as a ‘papist’, and yes even as a ‘Marxian’. It’s the miracle of his genius that his ambivalence subsumes all manner of faiths and creeds, and yet permits him to project a whole and healthful political vision.