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RECENTLY released by the Australian Theatre Director, Professor Paige Newmark, at the annual international seminar,`A0"Subalterns in Shakespeare", held at St. Bede’s College, Shimla, the two books by Prof. Bhim S. Dahiya, president of The Shakespeare Association of India, form a part of the sequence of publications, comprising international scholarship, that the Association has brought out in the last five years. It is owing to the activities of the association that a worldwide interest has been generated in its annual conferences and its prestigious biannual,`A0Journal of Drama Studies,`A0receiving appreciation from the top Shakespeare scholars such as James Harner, editor,`A0World Shakespeare Bibliography, and John Mahon, editor,`A0The Shakespeare Newsletter. Dahiya is bound to provoke debates among modernists, new critics and structuralists who either deal in abstractions or take Shakespeare out of the ambit of wider meaningful appreciation. The West-centric studies that Dahiya critiques in his evenly written and engaging book, Shakespeare’s Speculum, are concerned merely with metaphors, symbols and inane interest in linguistic minutiae, as they unabashedly gloss over Shakespeare’s relevance to our life today. Dahiya pulls Shakespeare out of the restraints of academic discipline, compellingly placing the writer at the centre of travails that inundate the modern world. Insofar as Dahiya is concerned, the constraints of academic scholarship are limiting and distance the scholar from the private and the public experience. The strength of the book consists in its brilliant conception as well as its stress on humanism, values of tolerance, and conversely, criticism of all that is inimical to rational secular values and collective existence.
For Dahiya, "Critics like Harold Bloom, interested only in ‘the mysterious special relationship between Caesar and Brutus’, do not care to even mention the Plebeians. The narrow specialist interests in contemporary criticism perforce leave out so much that surrounds the play’s centre". Dahiya goes on to argue that Shakespeare’s plays are "integrated wholes, with the foregrounded major characters and the backgrounded minor characters firmly fitted into their respective spaces, both reflecting each other, and both related to each other". Such insights draw the reader both towards the realistic depictions in Shakespeare and the larger issues in the world they dwell in. The book also takes a sceptical look at the interest that the author’s biographical details have evinced; these, as Dahiya says, do not help us grasp the values and postures the author cherished in the course of writing. In Shakespeare’s case, says Dahiya, "No knowledge of his worldly life can enhance or diminish our appreciation of his plays which speak for themselves and need no extra aid to reveal the speaking voice they embody."
It is argued that Shakespeare recognised the reactive or responsive tendency in each human being irrespective of their location, may it be the powerful and privileged or the laity. R.W. Desai in his essay "From Scholasticism to Humanism in Shakespeare" examines the ideological position and the movement towards concern for material social life. Equally affirmative, R.S. White’s paper takes up the development of rational, secular thought in the 20th century in "Shakespeare’s scholars as Postmodernists". Stuart Sillars in his "Shakespeare and the Ambiguities of Knowledge" goes into the realm of knowledge suggesting "as much about ourselves as about our ostensible subject". The perceptive essay "Prospero Versus Faustus", by Lisa Hopkins, takes us closer to scholarly pursuits in Elizabethan-Jacobean England assigning distinctive value to Shakespeare. Her comment that that The Tempest "blends and blurs old and new ... and effortlessly crosses time zones" is significant. Discussions by Payal Nagpal, Hema Dahiya, Swati Ganguly, Monika Sethi, Subhajit Sen Gupta and Pratibha, all young scholars, tease the Shakespearean reader into alert attention about the numerous "minor" characters we meet across the plays. It goes to Prof. Dahiya’s credit for not only giving the impetus but laying a foundation for contemporary studies in Shakespeare, allowing the reader to map the rapidly growing Shakespeare scholarship. Together the two books provide a rich diversity and absorbing perspectives on the past, present and possible future of Shakespearean studies.
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Shakespeare’s
Speculum is a collection of
Dahiya’s essays written in the last few years, covering Shakespeare’s
major plays, and significantly a lesser known play, Pericles. The
stress, however, is not on the texts but on what the title calls
"social issues". The point is amplified by provocative
discussions on "Shakespearean Dialectic",
"Plebeians", "Poetic Perceptions", "Beauty,
Truth and Art in the Sonnets", and "Shakespeare’s Life:
Known and Unknown". His analyses of modes of matrimony, of scholars
in Shakespeare and Shakespeare as a critic brilliantly go beyond
conventional Shakespearean criticism.
The other book, Scholars
in Shakespeare, edited by Dahiya and Sharma, is a compilation of
essays distinct for their emphasis on the thinking characters such as
Horatio and the Fool who stand and speak from the margins. It is a novel
subject that sets out to meaningfully tie up the bard with the
contemporary world. The anxious thinking individuals can be identified,
especially as they are so imaginatively created from our midst. This
brings to the centre of attention the universal factor of living and
reflecting in common humanity across time and space.