Reading Mystical Shakespeare in Secular Times

If we have read Shakespeare we must be joyous, playing our parts on the stage, not taking affairs of life too seriously; taking beauty and love seriously, knowing little sorrow or understanding any trouble currently facing as goad to redemption. While travelling in a bus or watching people on streets and even in mosques and shrines we see mostly serious somber faces, anxious (meaning living in future) or depressed (living in past).

Most of us daydream for hours on daily basis. This shows we aren’t in the present. Very few are like Cordelia who know the grammar of gratitude. Few know here we must laugh in the world of fools, in the long run we all die as Keynes said. Understanding, forgiveness, compassion and creativity are what are final lessons from the drama of life depicted in Shakespeare. Eternity of beauty he implicates in his great sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” reminds us of the old Platonic and mystical theme of Beauty as the signature of God, as splendour of Truth. Embracing voluntary retirement at the peak of one’s career, as Prospero does in The Tempest remains a standing invitation to all of us who identify too much with their careers and fear retirement or keep lobbying for extension. King Lear is an invitation to ripeness, to detachment and preparation for death.

As a student of literature one often wonders how come Shakespeare continues to be taught as part of the canon but is generally approached with a hermeneutic of suspicion. He is little researched now, at least in his own terms and not in terms of reigning ideologies, especially historicist, cultural materialist, psychoanalyst and feminist, as if Shakespeare has little to teach us and our job is to show his ideological proclivities or failings. Most critics don’t read Shakespeare as foremost Shakespeare critics from Johnson to Coleridge to Eliot to Wilson Knight to Bloom have read him – for instruction, for moral-spiritual edification, for illuminating our dark odyssey called life, for showing how to live with doubts and uncertainties, for making life a work of art – instead they seem to have something to teach Shakespeare, to remind him of what he overlooked or failed to see due to his cultural prejudices – class, religion, gender.

Although “Shakespeare is like life” and “There are almost as many ways of taking him as there are ways of living” the grand task of taking him as an artists, as a man of letters who proposes redemption through art, has been increasingly forgotten and we now find its greatest practitioner – Shakespeare – effectively written off as a humanizing force, ignored as a sage, trivialized as a witness/ teacher of trans-historical verities and historicized as if art itself is not something as a challenge to immanent order that history delinked from transcendence is taken to be in our age of historicism.

It is shocking for the lovers of classics to note large scale ignorance of most of his works (not-paraphrased, original ones) amongst most graduates and postgraduates of literature.

One can’t resist indignation and irritation on being repeatedly asked why Shakespeare, a question to which one needs to respond in Bloom’s words - “ Who else is there?.” Indeed, “our education has been Shakespearian… even now when Shakespeare is truncated and battered by fashionable ideologues, ideologues themselves are caricatures of his energies.” With the author of The

Meaning of Shakespeare, I believe that we “are nearer the beginning than the end of our understanding of Shakespeare’s genius....I cannot conceive a time that will not be able to ask, with profit what Shakespeare has to say specifically to it.” There remains much that is compelling in Bloom’s – probably the greatest literary critic in recent history – as noted by Andy Martin – provocative statement: “There is no god but God and he is called Shakespeare” and crediting him with inventing the human or modern human subject.

For Bloom, Shakespeare bequeathed us an art so infinite that “it contains us,” knew pretty much everything there is to know about humankind… After Shakespeare, we are all Shakespearean, whether we like it or not, all doomed to strut and fret our hour upon the stage.”

After teaching him for decades Bloom confesses that he is able to see him “only darkly” and unhesitatingly recommends that “our attitude must be one of awe before him.” Johnson concurred by noting that we owe Shakespeare everything as he taught us the art of understanding human nature. If we distill the essence of estimates made by the heavy weights of criticism and art, we find this substantiated. Indeed, as Morgan tells us, “Shakespeare deserves to be considered in detail; a task hitherto unattempted.” Martin Lings who has the distinction of being an influential expositor of little known but vitally significant and increasingly influential traditionalist school of criticism, has expressed in superlative terms significance of Shakespeare in the light of sacred art as a providential spokesperson of ultimate verities that higher art must embody if it is true to its nature and function.

The question of meaning assumes added urgency in the wake of postmodernity that has revoked age old commitment to live on little crumbs, idolize cult of surfaces and far from the vivifying shade of the Sacred/eternity. Hamlet explicitly rejects the option of suicide for otherworldly reasons. Lear is born in the higher world – redeemed – thanks to the heart rending detachment operation epitomized in storm scene. Lady Macbeth shows how one is powerless against the guilt transposed on cosmic or otherworldly scale. Death and our hope for a better life seems to inform much of Shakespeare’s work.

For instance, The Winter’s Tale discusses reunion, dualism, death, and afterlife. “For the unfolding of doctrine of patience and hope Pericles depends on transcendence of time.” The Tempest “illustrates the paradox of temporality and how time moves forward to reform the past.” The ideal world notion helps explain shaping up of last plays. Shakespeare critic Marshall has lucidly elaborated on these points in his Last Things and Last Plays : Shakespeare’s Eschatology. Shakespeare’s work, in a singularly compelling fashion, puts complacent posturing towards the otherworld we find today on trial.

In order to see how far Shakespeare informs modern man’s changed view of the otherworld, one may propose to look at two influential but divergent ways of framing Shakespeare – in terms of immanence (one finds in Bloom) and in terms of transcendence (one finds in Martin Lings) and examine how far Harry Morris succeeds in illuminating the central concerns of Shakespeare in terms that put last things first. With Wilson Knight we better appreciate how immersion in Shakespeare enacts a sort of salvation today. “Poetic perception, like religious faith, is no passive acquiescence, but rather an active cooperation, the very truth concerned being dynamic and needing, as does the actor’s art, a lively response for its realization.”