The Bard never ceases to interest us

by Gwen Herat

Shakespeare was such an extraordinary playwright, unquestionably the greatest to date. He had lost regard for his characters and plots that were later to become legends and every scholar to every critic was in no mood to question his authority. They accepted everything he wrote; total historical follies to improbabilities as well as impossibilities.

He failed to portray contemporary manner and was unhampered with shakles of time. Never a historian of his time, he raced back to history to come up with a mixed bag of improbabilities. Some of the strange events in his plays were censured gravely and never was possible with the time he wrote there events.

Tragedies

But that did not matter as many thought. Some of his plays would not have been tolerated at the Globe. Many still wonder why he did not cast Hamlet as an Englishman or Romeo's birthplace as in York instead of Verona. These plays would have had a wider appeal if they were sustained in their original sites.

But Shakespeare was different.

He was a master of his craft who drove shock into heart-rending tragedies and next minute turn around to create humour. Thus his characters were created to meet such situations. The horror found in his plays cannot match today's crime scenes that appear listless.

No other author has written words that are simple and poignant that interpose history or tragedy and rise to fiery heights as the play gathers momentum. He used subtle preludes to an oncoming terror-filled scene as found in many of the plays and reach a climax only to delight a director who later mounted such plays for hysterical audiences.

And who is the real Shakespeare?
How did he rise to be the world's greatest playwright?
How did he collect his colossal vocabulary?
How did he change the course of English language?
How did he influence the English literati already in existence?

And most of all, how did he survive the jeers and snobs of his contemporaries who called themselves the university-wits?

Solutions

No one has found the answers todate. But I find these solutions in the boyhood of his background in the rural setting from which he emerged. He was a very observant youth. He trudged across valleys and dales; climbed mountains before the sun set. His love for the forests of Arden and the swans in River Avon did not diminish.

He was a nature man, there was nothing he missed in birds and bees nor the ever-changing four seasons the way composer Vivaldi had scored. He paid much attention to his observations and the great writer who did not care to find characteristics, made them rise to immortal figures.

A historian to illuminate the historical plays with the inspiration of England's past by the most historically-minded dramatists was way out for the Bard. In his approach to Shakespeare's life and works that related to the age of his time can never even out during the Elizabethan period if one spends a lifetime trying to do so.

However, historical investigations by determined scholars have brought many things to light, especially in the sonnets that have baffled generations due to the careless handling of historical events by Shakespeare.

Many scholars feel that the key to the resolution of their problems is now cleared except for his mistress. However, a firm establishment of a chronology that took place year after year resulted in an enrichment of contemporary content that critics had been looking for. It cleared the doubts that many carried over his ‘lost’ years between 1587 – 1592 but it was also a tall order.

Sonnets

All the problems of the sonnets had worked out consistently without knowing who the famous ‘Mr. WH’ was. He could have been young Southampton's step father. Sir William Harvey but his stepdaughter could not prove it.

It had to be a Elizabethan historian to trace the circumstances and the data to put together the results and come up finally to pinpoint the ‘Dark Lady’ often mentioned in the sonnets.

People came to realise that the dark Rosaline in Love's Labour Lost was inspired by the playwright's mistress.

However, was Rosaline the Dark Lady?

Divorce

Again Shakespeare gave rise to doubt. Why did he go out of his way to make Henry Vill an exceptional play? Was it to play down Henry and Anne Boleyn as mere lay-figures and blame Henry's divorce from Catherene of Aragon and lay it on Cardinal Wolsey? Catherene being Spanish; why was she made the heroine in the play.

That was in keeping with James l's policy invested by Shakespeare seeking an alliance to make way for a marriage to his heir. Tactfully and prudently he became the only playwright who never got into trouble. Because one third of his plays are either English, Roman, Scottish or even ancient English but his corroboration of events and sites were muddled.

But that did not matter because most people of his time were ignorant of history and paid less attention to it. They were more concerned and elated about their right royal Englishman who was on the way up. His plays were so colossal, spectacular and vibrant that England had never seen or heard such magnificence or seen them staged. They swept aside the other playwrights who were good in their own right and those who had taken centre-stage before Shakespeare's rise. Some were the university-wits. Shakespeare simply swept them to oblivion.