The Existential Dramaturgy of William Shakespeare: Character Created Through Crisis

256 Pages·2010·4.372 MB·English

by  Asloob Ahmad Ansari, James Ogden

THk] EXISTENTIAL DRAMATURGY
OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Character Created Through Crisis
Asloob Ahmad Ansari
With a Foreword by
James Ogden
The Edwin Mellen Press
Lewiston•Queenston•Lampeter
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ansari, Asloob Ahmad, 1925-
The existential dramaturgy of William Shakespeare : character created through crisis /
Asloob Ahmad Ansari ; with a foreword by James Ogden.
P. CM.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7734-3603-9
ISBN-10: 0-7734-3603-0
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Psychology. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564-
1616--Characters. 3. Existentialism in literature. 4. Characters and characteristics in
literature. I. Ogden, James. II. Title.
PR3065.A67 2010
822.33--dc22
2010031053
hors serie.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyright C 2010 Asloob Ahmad Ansari
All rights reserved. For information contact
(cid:9)
The Edwin Mellen Press The Edwin Mellen Press
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Box 450 Box 67
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Lewiston, New York Queenston, Ontario
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USA 14092-0450 CANADA LOS 1L0
The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd.
Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales
UNITED KINGDOM SA48 8LT
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated to my daughters
1 at Ara
Roshan Ara
CONTENTS
Foreword James Ogden
Chapter 1: Shakespeare's Characterization: An Existential View
Chapter 2: Patterns of Love in Twelfth Night (cid:9) 17
Chapter 3: The Merchant of Venice: An Existential Comedy(cid:9) 33
Chapter 4: Shakespeare's Allegory of Love(cid:9) 49
Chapter 5: Shakespeare's Existential Tragedy(cid:9) 69
Chapter 6: Richard III and Richard II: Two Forms of Alienation(cid:9) 91
Chapter 7: The Problem of Identity in Troilus and Cressida(cid:9) 107
Chapter 8: Fools of Time in Macbeth(cid:9) 123
Chapter 9: Solitariness of the Victim in Othello(cid:9) 139
Chapter 10: The Protagonist's Dilemma in TiMOT1 of Athens(cid:9) 165
Chapter 11: Marcus Brutus: The Divided Self (cid:9) 185
Chapter 12: Coriolanus — the Roots of Alienation(cid:9) 205
Chapter 13: The Ambivalence of Caliban(cid:9) 225
Bibliography(cid:9) 241
Index(cid:9) 245
FOREWORD
My good friend Asloob Ahmad Ansari has made the study of literature his life's
work. His mother-tongue is Urdu, and at an early age he was inspired by the
Indian, Persian and Arabic poets and mystics. So it is not surprising that his first
love in English literature was the visionary poetry of William Blake. His book
Arrows of Intellect (1965) and an essay on "Blake and the Kabbalah" made his
name well known among the international community of Blake scholars and
enthusiasts. Soon afterwards he became Head of the English Department of
Aligarh Muslim University, where he launched the Aligarh Journal of English
Studies, while in retirement he edited the Aligarh Critical Miscellany. Over a
period of some thirty years these biennial journals published work by established
and aspiring scholars and critics on a wide range of literary subjects. They include
Professor Ansari's further studies of Blake and his many essays on Shakespeare;
the former resulted in the recent publication of Blake's Minor Prophecies (Edwin
Mellen Press, 2001), and the latter form the basis of the present book.(cid:9) ,
Professor Ansari's approach to Shakespeare originates in his personal
response to the plays, and what he has called the "philosophical-symbolical-
imagistic" criticism of Wilson Knight, L.C. Knights, and Derek Traversi. He
rightly believes that this approach is not invalidated by the present tendency to
treat the plays as stage works, and does not preclude a focus on characters in what
may be called existential situations. His belief is supported by analogies
tentatively proposed between the implicit ideas of Shakespeare and the explicit
philosophy of the German existentialist Karl Jaspers. Professor Ansari's daughter
Roshan Ara's book, Existenz and Boundary Situations (Aligarh, 2002), offers an
introduction to the philosophy of Jaspers, but it may be sufficient for readers of
this book to be familiar with his leading ideas: Dasein, or mere existence;
"boundary situations", when individuals are tested by misfortune, evil impulses,
guilt, suffering and the approach of death; Existenz, the individual's potential for
growth and transcendence.
Shakespeare's interest in philosophy is shown by a striking exchange in
Troilus and Cressida, which Professor Ansari quotes in his opening chapter;
Troilus: What's aught but as tis valued?
Hector: But value dwells not in particular will ...
Troilus seems to be the existentialist here, but Ansari argues that there is "an
existential strain" in Hector's thinking too; Troilus's valuations of both the Trojan
cause and his own beloved may be mistaken, yet a willingness to create human
values leads to the transcendence of brute existence. However, Ansari's discovery
of the existential in Shakespeare began with an essay on Twelfth Night, first
published in the Aligarh Journal in 1976. In this play the shipwrecked Viola
explores life's possibilities, and shows us "the search for authentic being" so
conspicuously abandoned by Malvolio. Essays on The Merchant of Venice,
Richard III and Richard II, while noting romantic elements and political
commentary, concentrate on the psychology of characters still more tragically
alienated: Antonio, Shylock, and the two beleaguered monarchs. The great
tragedies offer the clearest examples of characters in "boundary situations", facing
hostile forces, tempted to despair, yet achieving new insights and sometimes a
measure of transcendence, as Hamlet famously does in realising that "the
readiness is all". In Shakespeare's and Ansari's last play, The Tempest, tragedy
still looms large, and civilized man must assert all his powers to achieve what
may well be only temporary harmony. But Caliban, though outwardly "a savage
and deformed slave", may yet "sue for grace", and in him Ansari sees "those
potencies and comprehensions that sustain one in the midst of bounded
existence".
It is said that we live in a global village, and if the metaphor has validity
we must admit that many of our quarrels are trivial. Writers and critics sometimes
participate in them, but ideally they are peacemakers. In this book an English
dramatist of a remote age, a German philosopher of a century ago, and an Indian
scholar happily still with us. come together to explore the foundations of human
understanding. And I am honoured to write its foreword.
James Ogden
Aberystwyth, Wales
CHAPTER 1
Shakespeare's Characterisation: An Existential View
Some of Shakespeare's major characters, both in the early and the later
plays, exhibit modes of feeling and perception that bring their motivations in
consonance with the postulates of one of the modernist perspectives of thought,
namely, existentialism, which emerged as a post-first world-war phenomenon. It
may well be distinguished as not only a sort of inverted Hegelianism but a
reaction against any and every kind of rigidity of response. It may broadly be
regarded as a protest against Hegel's stress on the Universal, his endeavour to
explain everything in terms of a comprehensive, rational system, and dissolution
of all differences by invoking the all-embracing unity of the Logos. It may be
conveniently summed up as a rejection of essentialism and an acceptance of the
concreteness of lived experience as against pure speculation and arid
abstractionism. It dispenses with the naive Cartesian distinction between mind and
body and does not encourage us to separate cognition, emotion and will from one
another but fuse them into a totality. It has been very succinctly defined as an
'intuitionism of the particular situations'. Existentialist categories like alienation,
dread, transcendence, nothingness, nausea, absurdity, the ambivalence of
experience or what Sartre designates as 'sympathetic antipathy or antipathetic
sympathy' are components that are reflected in the being of these Shakespearian
characters in the exceptional moments of their life.
In the most mature of the early Comedies, Twelfth Night, Viola is the
conspicuous example of the ambiguity that frames the action of the play from the
beginning to the end. The use of disguise is a conventional, theatrical device for
2
objectifying the inner processes of Viola's being. She is not only involved in the
delicate task of winning Olivia for Duke Orsino by proxy but herself feels
fascinated by the charm of his personality. She is embarrassed because on the one
hand she has, as Cesario, to resist the overtures of love made to her by Olivia and
on the other she keeps her own flame of love for the Duke burning without
betraying herself to him. Within Viola-Cesario duality there is the relation of the
subject to itself which forms an indissoluble unity and yet it suffers from tension
and difference. There is thus a perpetually unstable equilibrium deriving from the
existence of this self which cannot achieve a kind of self-coincidence. This is
referred to time and again as I am what I am not'. This may be a source of the
comic on the face of it but there is implicit in it a seriousness of undertone
because Viola's real self remains in a constant state of tension. In Much Ado
About Nothing's persistent concern with 'appearance' and 'illusion' the device of
the mask as employed by Shakespeare acquires a special significance. It affords
ample opportunities for the achievement of both 'confession' and 'parody', and
these have been very skilfully exploited by Shakespeare. What initiates the plot of
the play is the confusion of identities occasioned by the wearing of the mask in a
formal dance and what brings about the climax is the act of unmasking in the
course of another dance that rounds up the action. The mask device inevitably
becomes the integrating factor for the various motifs that are operative in the play.
For Benedick and Beatrice the theatrical unmasking turns into a metaphor for the
self-vision attained by each.
The illusion that is set up between the real and the imagined constitutes the
main fabric of the play Macbeth in which the Weird Sisters function as the agents
of equivocation in respect of their truck with the protagonist. Macbeth's entire
career from the moment of Duncan's murder at his hands till he himself is killed
by Macduff towards the end is nothing but an extended epiphany of this illusion.
The Witches may be conceived as no more than projections of Macbeth's
psychological reflexes which are given a bodily incarnation. Macbeth is not only
thrown into an emotional turmoil but his whole process of thinking is determined