Triveni Journal
1927 | 11,233,916 words
Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....
THE IMITATIVE AND ITERATIVE
³§±á´¡°·¡³§±Ê·¡´¡¸é·¡â€“I
PROF. K. VISWANATHAM
You will be able to make cross references to parallel incidents, characters or even phrases, to have the odd experience, after reading Macbeth, of finding in a play so far removed as Loves Labours Lost the line: “Fair in all hail is foul, as I conceive.�
�Grose and Oxley
Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable. Accommodated!–it comes from accomodo: very good: a good phrase.
�Henry IV. P 2
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed.
�Sonnet LXXVI
That here, as in some other traits of the poet’s greatest creation,
we come into close contact with Shakespeare the man.
�Bradley
Yet when Shakespeare’s heroes stand with their s to the wall defying the world, they betray a wild trick of their Marlovian ancestors.
�Levin
Students of Keats have pointed out that he is fond of words like tip-toe, nest, tease, etc. Every one, as Prof. Raleigh suggests, has to compile a dictionary of his words which mean more to him than to others. These words occurring in ordinary contexts become suddenly and surprisingly a flare of beauty and an example of inevitability as Keat’s “tease� does in “tease us out of thought.�
“Beggar� used as a verb by the second murderer in Richard III has not the poetic energy of Enobarbus� “beggared�.
Critics have written about iterative imagery and image clusters in Shakespeare. It will be interesting to note the expressions and ideas which have such a hold on Shakespeare that he repeats them in several plays. If Olivia tells Viola that to be poetical is to be feigned and Touchstone informs Audrey that the truest poetry is the most feigning then, perhaps, it is Shakespeare’s definition. If conscience and cowardice occur in more than one context to crystallize itself in Hamlet: “Conscience doth make cowards of us all� the presumption is in favour of ascribing it to the poet. To King Richard conscience is a word that cowards use. In this Shakespeare is no exception to any lover of language who jots down in his notebook or tablets (as Hamlet does) striking expressions and ideas and does not hesitate to use them in a suitable context; that is the sketch of the playwright that Shaw gives us in his playlet on the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Bradley suggests in his discussion of Hamlet’s idiosyncrasy of repetition: fie, fie; thrift, thrift; indeed, indeed; wormwood, wormwood; come, come, etc., that the poet himself had this trick of repetition. (Shakespearian Tragedy Pp. 148-152.)
The best commentary on a play of Shakespeare is another play of Shakespeare or all the plays in the canon. This is the implication of Eliot’s remark that to understand a single play of Shakespeare you have to read all the plays. The best criticism of Hamlet starts not with Goethe and Coleridge and Werder but with Claudius and Gertrude and Polonius–with a glance at Hieronimo. Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra supplement one another. Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and Much Ado are strung together by jealousy and slander. Lear and Timon are cousins. Take for instance the economy of the closed heart (as Hubler terms it) which is the opposite of economy and which Shakespeare detests with all his open heart. Man should not hide his talents under a bushel; he is sinning against light. The graces of nature should not fust unused. This is a rooted idea in Shakespeare. We find it in the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure.
Venus tells Adonis:
Torches are made to light, jewels to wear
Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use,
Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear;
Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse
Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty
Thou wast begot,–to get it is thy duty.
In Sonnet LIV the poet compares self-centred beauty to dog roses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d, and un respected fade;
Die to themselves.
The idea is repeated in XCIV:
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die.
In Measure for Measure the very expression in Venus and Adonis “Torches are made to light� is amplified, The Duke advises Angelo:
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, it were all alike
As if we had them not...
...nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But like a thrifty Goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor
Both thanks and use.
Romeo tells Benvolio:
For beauty, starved with her severity,
Cuts beauty off from all posterity.
Viola speaks to Olivia:Â
Lady, you are the cruellest she alive
If you lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.
Theseus hates the rose
which withering on, the virgin thorn
Grows lives and dies in single blessedness.
Comus tells the lady:
Beauty is Nature’s coin, must not be hoarded
But must be current and the good there of
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss
Unsavoury in the enjoyment of itself;
If you let slip time, like a neglected rose
It withers on the stalk with languished head.
II: 739-744
II
Shakespeare does not think it beneath his dignity to quote the dead shepherd’s saw of might in his As You Like It: 3-5-81. Philip Henderson writes: â€Æྱ»å´Ç Queen of Carthage appears to have been much admired by Shakespeare and is evidently the play instanced by Hamlet in his conversation with the players at Elsinore.â€� ‘Shylock’s O my ducats, O my daughter is modelled on Barabasâ€�
Oh girl, oh gold, oh beauty, oh my bliss
And Romeo’s
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun
is just a variation on
But stay, what star shines yonder in the East?
The load star of my life, if Abigail
in The Jew of Malta. The celebrated
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of IIium?
of Dr. Faustus is remembered in Troilus and Cressida
Why she is a pearl
Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships
And turned crowned kings to merchants
King Richard repeats this apostrophe thrice:
Was this face the face...
Was this the face...
Was this the face...
4-1-281
Marlowe is notforgotten by Pistol:
Shall pack horses
And hollow pampered jades of Asia
Which cannot go thirty miles a day,
Compare with Caesars and with Cannibals
And Trojan Greeks?
As Levin remarks: Shakespeare’s journey work is full of unassimilated Marlowe and smells no less of the Classics than it would be if he too had gone to the university (The Overreacher, P. 170). That Shakespeare copied almost verbatim Plutarch in his Antony and Cleopatra is too obvious to be stressed.
III
All through Marlowe’s work, it is said, there is the habit of improving on his best lines and outdoing his best theatrical effects. It is no less true of Shakespeare. In Marlowe the earlier
And he will make me immortal with a kiss
captures later the frenzied despair and complex grace of
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Likewise
That after burnt the pride of Asia
becomes the haunting and sounding
And burnt the topless towers of Iliam.
Similarly in Shakespeare consider Othello’s
Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them
Good Signior, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons
Bradley regards it as a miracle even in Shakespeare who is full of miracles. Eliot in his Drama and Poetry discusses this line as one which is a happy marriage of drama and poetry. Drama lends grace to poetry and poetry lends effectiveness to drama. Othello’s Keep up your bright swords steps upon earlier rungs. Even Viola says: Pray, Sir, put up your sword; Antonio too uses the same expression. In King John the Bastard tells Salisbury:
Your sword is bright, Sir; put it up again
Prospero addresses Ferdinand violently: Put thy sword up, traitor. Othello’s Keep up far outstrips Viola’s or the Bastard’s or Prospero’s Put up. After long gestation Keep in Othello delivers itself as a miracle. Waves of suggestion flow out of a simple Keep up your bright swords:
(a) the mention of dew indicates time;
(b) dew rusting the blades shows the professional knowledge of Othello;
(c) the courage and fearlessness of Othello is evident;
(d) the imperative mood betokens the habitual tone of command in him;
(e) the lines evidence the unwillingness of the General of the Venetian forces to be involved in a street brawl;
(f) there is grave irony and sarcasm and a touch of contempt in his tone;Â
(g) there is reverence for age;
(h) there is respect for law and order;
(i) the fearless advice shows that regard to Desdemona he did nothing of which he need be ashamed.
The line is not ‘self-approving self-dramatization.� No wonder if critics hold it up for our admiration and appreciation.
IV
°ä´Ç°ù»å±ð±ô¾±²¹â€™s
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters
To love my father all
finds its echo in Desdemona’s
And so much duty as my mother showed
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor, my lord
The daughter of Brabantio and the daughter of Britain are the same women in their ideals.
Imogen envies “the senseless linen happier therein than I.� Cleopatra envies the happy horse that bears the weight of Antony. Romeo muses:
O, that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek!
Linen, glove and horse belong to the same world of love thoughts–with contextual variations.
Shakespeare seems to have been much fascinated by the following lines about a woman.
Suffolk in Henry IV -PI says in an aside:
She is beautiful, and therefore to be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore to be won.
Demetrius tells Aaron:
She is a woman, therefore may be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore may be won.
In the Sonnet XLI the poet writes:
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed.
The syntax of this sentiment reminds one of Kalidasa’sÌý
           Jnaatasvaado vivritajaghanaam kovihaatum samarthah
Juliet’s thought
They are but beggars that can count their worth becomes a weighty cosmic observation.
There is beggary in love that can be reckoned
on the lips of Antony. Its worth is unknown although its height be taken.
Excessive happiness makes us weep. Miranda says: I am a fool to weep at I am glad of. Coriolanus reprimands lovingly his ‘gracious silence� that weep’st to see me triumph.
Launce’s To be slow inwords is a woman’s only virtue in The Two Gentlemen is echoed in Lear’s loving tribute to his daughter:
Her voice was ever soft
Gentle, and low–an excellent thing in woman.
There is Slender’s tribute to Mistress Anne Page: Speaks small like a woman.
Lust, of course, is one of the topics scorched by the poet’s consuming violence of language and vocabulary like tup, mount, cover, colt. It burns in Tarquin’s hurried strides, rages like a tempest in Sonnet CXXIX:
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Snarls like a vicious hyena in Hamlet, gathers round itself toads, goats and monkeys in Othello making a beast with two s and blusters ungovernably in Lear’s demented speech on Adultery and Lechery:
Beneath is all fiend’s; there is hell, there is darkness
There is the sulphurous pit burning, scalding, stench, consumption;
Viola’s witty “Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we� becomes the bitter observation in Hamlet: “Frailty, thy name is woman.�
Venus draws the contrast between love and lust to Adonis:
Love comforteth like sunshine after ram,
But lust’s effect is tempest after sun
After greeting his fair warrior Othello expresses the soul’s fullness in
If it were now to die,
It were now to be most happy
Likewise Pericles recognizes his Thaisa and appeals to the gods:
You shall do well
That on the touching of her lips I may
Melt and no more be seen
Keat’s My heart aches in the Nightingale Ode is abundantly explained by Cymbeline’s
The gods do mean to strike me
To death with mortal joy
and Pericles�
Give me a gash, put me to present pain
Lest the great sea of joy rushing upon me
Overbear the shores of mortality.
The poet recognizes that being good or doing good is no defence against the predatory world. Marina tells Leonine:
I never spake bad word, nor did ill turn
To any livingcreature;
believe me, la,
I never killed a mouse, nor hurt a fly...
Lady Macduff knows it as woman’s defence:
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world; where to do harm
Is often laudable; to do good, sometime
Accounted dangerous folly; why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defence,
To say I have done no harm?
Lover’s requesting to take the kiss isa quaint idea we find.
Romeo requests Juliet: “Give me my sin again�. The Queen implores King Richard: “Give me mine own again�.
Lovers� exchanging eyes is a deeply metaphysical idea. It goes to the root of this four-lettered mystery. When A loves B, what a really loves is his own self; he loves B that B loves him; he is mirrored in B’s eyes and sees his own self. It is, in the vocabulary of psycho-analysis, narcissism and the philosophy of Aham in the Aesthetics of Bhoja’s Sringaara Prakaasa. Prospero discovers that
At the first sight
They have ’changed eyes.
Benedick wishes to lie buried in Beatrice’s eyes. That this is not a far-fetched interpretation is clear from Louis� reply to King Philip in King John:
I do protest I never loved myself
Till now infixed I beheld myself
Drawn in the flattering table of her eye
The same idea is found in Sonnet XXIV:
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done;
Mine have drawn thy shape and thine for me
Are windows to my breast.
The frequent reference to Black brows is commented upon by critics. It is the influence of the Dark Lady: “The worser spirit coloured ill�.
The poet tells us in Sonnet CXXVII.
“But now is black beauty’s successive heir.�
Byron refers to
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes.
Phebe tells Silvius that “He said mine eyes were black and my hair black�
Mamilius informs the ladies in the Palace:
Yet black brows, they say,
Become some women best.
I wonder if this black mystique is behind Proteus� remark in Two Gentlemen:
“Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies� eyes.�
Parolles may say in All’s Well: “A young man married is a man that is marred.� The poet cries up the marriage of true minds (though to Donne this is all ‘bunk�
That loving wretch that swears
It is not the bodies marry; but the minds...)
The first citizen in King John describes this ideal:
He is the half part of a blessed man
Left to be finished by such a she
This is the ideal symbolized in Siva’s being half-man and half-woman. True marriage is ‘advaitam� in the happy characterization of a great poet. Man and wife, as Hamlet says, sarcastically is one flesh. Lady Hotspur shows her wifely devotion in
for since you love me not,
I will not love myself.
Doll Tearsheet is no less when she tells Falstaff: Prove that I ever dress myself handsome till thy return. Virgilia is firm: Indeed, no, by your patience, I will not over the threshold till my lord return from the wars. Miranda is even prepared to be
your servant
Whether you will or no.
Even the ill-used Mariana pleads against all sense for Angelo:
O my dear lord
I crave no other, nor no better man.
Helena abases herself before Demetrius: “I am your spaniel.� Desdemona dying says divinely “Commend me to my kind lord.� Juliet’s body is the sheath for Romeo’s dagger. Imogen wails:
Or in my life what comfort when I am
Dead to my husband?
Even Cleopatra can say: Husband, I come. Portia’s loving indignation
If it be no more
Portia is Brutus� harlot, not his wife
speaks volumes of the wife’s status. Both Brutus and Hotspur have doubts regarding woman’s ability for secrecy. A woman is said to be a miniature relay station. Hotspur pays a jocular compliment to his wife:
I well believe
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know.
Another Portia tells Bassanio:
yet for you
I would be trebled twenty times myself.
Instances can be multiplied. (As against this there is Emilia’s protest against husbands:
Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them...
and have we not affection
Desire for sport and frailty as men have?)
No wonder if C. S. Lewis remarks that Shakespeare is not only the greatest love poet but the only love poet in English. His is the love that gives; it is the story of the Clod.
Cleopatra’s beauty
makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.
Hamlet is unhappy that
she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.
Pericles is reminded of his Queen
Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry
The more she gives them speech.
Ophelia narrates to her father what the distraught Hamlet did:
He falls to such perusal of my face
As he would draw it.
That is what Othello also does when he is distraught and Desdemona is upset by the horrible fancy of Othello; “Let me see your eyes� as if Hamlet and Othello are searching for truth and fidelity in persons they are made to suspect.
The quality of Mercy so closely associated with Portia droppeth as the gentle rain in Measure for Measure:
No ceremony that to great ones ’longs
Not the king’s crown nor the deputed sword,
The marshal’s truncheon nor the judge� robe,
Become them with one half so good a grace
As mercy does.
How is this different from Portia’s
it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown?
Portia and Isabella are sisters of mercy. Brutus echoes the same:
The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power,
Tamora appeals to Titus in the same strain:
           Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?
           Draw near them in being merciful;
           Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.
The opposite view is also expressed by the Prince in Romeo and Juliet that “Mercy but murders pardoning those that kill� and by Escalus “Pardon is still the nurse of second woe.�
This latter view is mentioned by Justice Overdo in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair:
I see compassion may become a justice, though it be a weakness,
I confess, and nearer a vice than a virtue.
Edgar and Hamlet and Othello and their creator are all one family. The King’s tribute to Hamlet is all the more worthy as it is the tribute of an enemy:
he, being remiss,
Most generous, And free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils.
Edmund’s tribute to Edgar stresses this same unsuspecting quality:
a brother noble,
Whose nature is so far from doing harms
That he suspects none.
Iago’s compliment to Othello is of the same complexion:
The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.
It was pointed out by Bradley in his lecture on Shakespeare the Man that these are the very words used about the poet by Ben Jonson: He was indeed honest and of an open and free nature.
It has been noted by Eliot that all the tragic heroes are very much concerned with their good name. Loss of reputation is loss of life. Cassio laments that he is hurt past surgery because his reputation is gone. Antony is disqualified with very shame. Othello is for nothing extenuate nor aught set down in malice. Hamlet requests his friend to tell his story aright. Shakespeare hates slander and vilification. Hence his tremendous assertion in the Sonnet:
For why should others� false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No,–I am that I am.
I Am That I Am–issaid to be one of the proudest lines in literature like
Not to know me argues yourselves unknown
or
           Kim sevyaate sumansaa manasaapi gandhah
           Kasturikaa jananasakti bhrita mrigena
A critic comments on this thus: These words are Shakespeare’s single and final self- criticism. These are appalling in their superb brevity and concentrated insight; beside them even the pride of Milton dwindles and grows pale, for here Shakespeare, for one revealing moment, speaks not as though he were God’s elect but as though he were God himself.
           I Am That I Am–isrepeated in various contexts. Antipholus in The Comedy of Errors tells Luciana:
But if that I am I, then well I know
Your weeping sister is no wife of mine.
The Bastard in King John asserts proudly: “And I am I, however I was begot.� King Richard in Richard III states: “Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I�
This has to be contrasted with Iago’s: I am not what I am. (Viola utters precisely the same sentence but it belongs to a gentle different world.) Iago tells Cassio that reputation is a false imposition but tells Othello that filching one’s good name is impoverishment. Then only we can visualise the gentle Shakespeare drawing himself to his fullest height and shouting at the pitch of his voice against the detractors and the vilifiers and scandal-mongers: No–I am, that I am: This self-assertiveness is un-Shakesperian in one sense that it goes against the gentleness and good sense, and Shakesperian in another that it is a recognition of unalterable facts. The real Shakespeare is in his Prospero who says:
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason, against my fury
Do I take part; the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance
is in his Posthumus who spares his enemy:
The power I have on you is to spare you;
The malice towards you to forgive you; live,
And deal with others better.
A son-in-law teaches his royal father-in-law:
We will learn our freeness of a son-in-law:
Pardon is the word to all.
According to the poet we commit a most mischievous foul sin in chiding sin. No one is a moral Olympian. Leonato’s
There was never yet philosopher
That could endure toothache patiently
is confirmed by Mariana’s “They say best men are moulded out of faults.�
I will chide no breather, says Orlando, in the world but myself. This is almost verbatim copied by Burke in the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol when he says that one who condemns the world succeeds in convicting only one, that is, oneself. Forbear to judge, says King Henry, for we are sinners all (Henry IV-P2). The Lord Chancellor tells the lord Archbishop in Henry VIII:
We are all men,
In our own nature frail, and capable
Of our flesh; few are angels.
Hence it is said that Shakespeare has a God-like understanding of sin whereas Milton is saturated with sin.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough
If she unmask her beauty to the moon.
Slander leads to saintliness. Pisanio states expansively:
It is slander
Whose edge is sharper than the sword; whose tongue
Outvenoms all the worms of the Nile; whose breath
Rides on the posting winds, and doth belie
All corners of the world; kings, queens and states
Maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave
This viperous slander enters.
(To be concluded)