A Centenary Tribute

Part II

Essays on Amal Kiran-S. Viswanathan

The Savant's Reading of Shakespeare

G.Wilson Knight once designated his practice as that of 'interpretation' rather than 'criticism'. More recently, the idea of reading Shakespeare without offering 'readings' in the New Critical or other fashion, or, for that matter, 'interpretation', has been broached as the basis of their practice by two major critics, Helen Vendler writing on the Sonnets of Shakespeare and Stephen Booth on the plays [Russ McDonald, ed. Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 25 and p. 43]. A suitable way to characterise K.D. Sethna's writings on Shakespeare is to call them the gathering of the harvest or fruit of his long-lived-with reading of the poetry of the plays and the Sonnets, the reading being, in a sense, its own reward. His Shakespeare reading is enshrined in two books of his, Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1965 and 1991) and "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen": The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets further sub-titled An Identification through a New Approach (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1984) [SAOS and TL & WP, here-after]. The ideas and material of both the books were, in germ, originally presented in the special Shakespeare quater-centenary lectures Sethna gave at Annamalai University, Annamalainagar in 1964, and were subsequently developed and expanded in the form of the two books.

In the first book in his exposition of Sri Aurobindo's invaluable comments on Shakespeare, Sethna codifies and highlights the seminal insights Sri Aurobindo expressed in The Future Poetry, the Letters and other correspondence, and illustrates both the value and implications of these findings by applying them to a number of passages, using these as

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tell-tale 'touchstones'. The book on the Sonnets is in the nature of a historical investigation or literary sleuthing a la Leslie Hotson. It is one of seeking answers to those 'still-vex'd' questions of the identities of the personages of the Sonnets, the 'fair youth', the 'Dark Lady' and the 'Riyal Poet' and two minor rival poets, to boot, and also that of the exact period of composition of the Sonnets. The questions are such as may be described by the cliche, puzzles wrapped in an enigma shrouded in mystery. But, alongside or rather anterior to the historical enquiry, the author reads many of the Sonnets closely. In fact, as the second subtitle makes clear, he em-ploys an 'intrinsic' method as his way of arriving at inferences and conclusions about such 'extrinsic' questions of who and when and their minute details. So in both the books we have Sethna as an illuminating reader of Shakespeare, in the one after Sri Aurobindo and in the other as a close reader drawing historical inferences from his reading of the poems.

As we watch him read, we are struck by the intensity with which he experiences the passages and his thorough internalisation and long possession of these over the decades. Moreover, he 'winds himself into his subject', in the process, as was said of Edmund Burke. The basic methods are those of what T.S. Eliot called 'comparison and analysis.' But remarkable is the deep engagement and at-homeness combined with a keen perception and discrimination of poetic qualities of diction, sense, rhythm and tone with which Sethna carries out comparison and analysis, whether he applies the seminal Aurobindonian insights in the matter or examines verse on his own. Needless to say, his numerous other writings on poetry also demonstrate these qualities. All this would give a good indication of the great impact Sethna must have made on generations of students and disciples at the Ashram as an impressive teacher and influential guide.

Sethna fully assimilates the Aurobindonian vision of poetry and literature. Building on the basis, he develops findings on his own, beside corroborating the insights by bring-ing up the examples already given by him and also through

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sampling on his own. Starting with Sri Aurobindo's placing of Shakespeare in the highest rank in the orders of the eleven world's greatest and best so far of poets in his estimate, along-side Valmiki, Vyasa and Homer, Sethna re-emphasises that Shakespeare is the supreme poet of the vital, the elemental and the human plane of life-force, informed and impelled by the creative demiurge. The phenomenal creative range, scope, power and energy of the dramatist is his distinction. It is complemented by his 'architectonic' power as a great builder of dramatic structures with dynamic movement and his easy mastery over expression that is characterised by 'in-evitability'. Thus an individual modification and reapplication is made by both Sri Aurobindo and Sethna of the concepts of'architectonics', 'inevitability' and 'touchstones' of Matthew Arnold. Sethna appropriately stresses the Aurobindonian description of Shakespeare as a Hiranyagarbha in contradistinction to a Virat, in the sense that he was a creator of 'forms' with fully internalised qualities rather than those with only external features, and the dramatist's creation of 'brave new worlds' in the manner of the rishi Viswamitra who called up the special world of 'Trisankuswarga' mid-way between earth and heaven. That is, Shakespeare's drama does not content itself with 'hold(ing) the mirror up to nature' or with being 'a just representation of general nature' alone. The overplus of Shakespearian creative poetic energy goes far beyond in that it conjures up new worlds or invents the world anew, this latter 'the invention of human nature' that Harold Bloom has recently celebrated in Shakespeare in his recent book of that title. This point of Sri Aurobindo, emphasised by Sethna, would remind usthat the same Dr. Johnson who in his Preface to Shakespeare praised the playwright's enduring supremacy as consisting in his 'just representation of general nature' declared in his poem (which is a good critical statement as a whole), the 'Prologue written for Mr. Garrick at the Inauguration of his Drury Lane Theatre'

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.. .immortal Shakespeare rose,

Each change of many-colour'd life he drew,

Exhausts worlds, and then imagined new;

Existence saw him spur in her bounded reign,

And parting Time toiled after him in vain.

Sethna acutely points out that Sri Aurobindo recognised not only the limits which Shakespeare could not go beyond at that stage in his time in the overall universal evolution of poetry in his view. He also detected 'an unfailing divinity of power in his touch' (SAOS, p. 28) within the limits. Sethna instances Hamlet's lines

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

(5.2.10-11)

and

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,

When our deep plots do pall.

(5.2. 8-9)

Sethna remarks: 'it is a profundity almost in excess of the occasion' (p. 28). But when he goes on to aver that Shakespeare is 'not a poet of the thinking mind proper' (p. 28), he may be missing how much of the mind thinking (in the fashion of Emerson's 'man thinking'), which is to be preferred to 'the thinking mind', is there in Shakespeare. However, his main corroboration of the Aurobindonian perception of 'an unfailing divinity of power' in Shakespeare is Valuable. It is the kind of idea which John Bayley on his own developed to good purpose in his book, Shakespeare and Tragedy. We may also compare Eliot's statement in his unpublished Edinburgh lectures on the last plays of Shakespeare (1937) that the final plays were 'the work of a writer who has finally seen through the dramatic action of men into a spiritual action which transcends it.'

Sethna outlines the master's gradation of poetic expression and style into five kinds starting with the 'adequate'

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through the 'effective' or 'dynamic', the 'illumined', the 'in-spired' and reaching up to the supremely 'inevitable' style. He emphasises the quality of 'pulsing palpable life itself' in such verse. Such stress on the quality of life, life-force and energy in Shakespearian verse is, in one perspective, akin to F.R. Leavis's celebration of the quality of felt life, its living force, as the hall-mark of Shakespeare's poetry. Sethna's unravelment (SAOS, pp. 14-15) of such a quality in Macbeth's lines

Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:

'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor

Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more!'

(2.2.4345)

is an example of his keenness and subtlety of response and lucid formulation, as also are the analyses of pas-sages elsewhere like, SAOS, pp. 39-41. The keenness of his analysis is, no doubt, to a large extent, imbibed from the phenomenal master as shown in the examples Sethna quotes of Sri Aurobindo's close analysis in the best ways of practical criticism and yet going beyond its bounds well before its day. Sethna illuminatingly sets one pas-sage beside the other in terms of the Aurobindonian clas-sification of poetry into planes - for example, his contrast -of Othello's (p. 33)

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,

Chaos is come again.

(3.3. 90-92)

with Chaucer's Troilus's lines to Cressida who has actually broken faith with him.

Through which I see that clene out of your minde

Ye hen me cast, and Ine can nor may,

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For all the worlde, within my herte finde

T'unloven you a quarter of a day.

from the poet's Troilus and Criseide.

Sethna focuses on the 'interpretative power' (another Arnoldian concept in origin) which Sri Aurobindo identifies in Shakespeare's poetry, he cites and discusses the astute comparisons which Sri Aurobindo institutes between Shakespeare and Kalidasa and Shakespeare and Browning. He shows how, although Sri Aurobindo would set Kalidasa close to Shakespeare but at the same time a notch or two below him in view of his lack of the Shakespearian range and scope of creativity, he gives credit to Kalidasa in two respects, his portrayal of children and his delineation of mothers, in which he finds Shakespeare lacking in spite of his overall superiority. Thus, what Sethna offers in the first three of the five chapters of his book Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare is an examination of the 'intensity of revealing speech' (SAOS, p. 73) of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry in terms of the 'styles and planes' distinguished by Sri Aurobindo in poetry in general. Sethna then goes on to probe the 'essential movement, the process by which it takes birth, the process commonly termed inspiration' (SAOS, p. 73) of Shakespeare's poetry. It may seem that Sri Aurobindo and Sethna stress the 'intensity' of the verse, whereas the Western critics especially of the twentieth century have focused on its 'complexity'. But the two Indian critics' actual reading and analysis well recognise the 'complexity' and incorporate their response to it. After all, Shakespearian verse is distinguished by its blend of intensity and complexity; what makes the lines inspired is in their estimate what they call the 'intuitive' quality they often attain. The 'intuitive' quality, which they instance examples of and analyse, lifts the poetry above their 'illumined' style and on to what they call the overhead plane - a plane in the highest reaches though it just falls short of the very highest, the overmind plane to which belong the mantras such as the Rig Veda and the Gita.

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The main example celebrated by Sri Aurobindo is the lines on sleep:

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge...?

King Henry IV, Pt. 2 (3.1.18-20)

As Sethna points out, Sri Aurobindo, with fine discrimina-tion, would deny the same level of quality to Cleopatra's

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows bent: none our parts so poor

But was a race of heaven.

Antony and Cleopatra (1.3. 35-37)

He would limit the passage to the vital plane 'the vital in its excited thrill' and cite as counter-example of poetry with the Overhead touch the lines of Hamlet:

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain.

Hamlet (5.2. 351-52)

And also the phrase from The Tempest, 'in the dark backward and abysm of time'. Interestingly, Sethna recounts an inter-pretation he offered of the famous lines from The Tempest

We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

 Is rounded with a sleep.

He suggested to Sri Aurobindo that since the actors con-jured up by Prospero for the masque he presented for the betrothal of Miranda and Ferdinand vanish at the end of it, but not altogether and only into the spirit-realm where they came from, Shakespeare's lines may be construed as indi-rectly conveying the idea that our annihilation from the world is only apparent as we revert to our original mode of

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existence and to our home in eternity, our immortal des-tiny. But Sri Aurobindo would not read any such connotation into the lines and would regard such an interpretation as against the grain, in spite of Sethna's persistence in his argument. Similarly in the later chapters, Sethna presents as good examples of Sri Aurobindo's delicately poised and nuanced judgment as literary critic his contrastive comparison between Shakespeare and Whitman and his rejection of the view of A.E. Housman who claimed superiority for Blake over Shakespeare as a pure poet.

Along the way, Sethna brings forward several acute incidental observations of Sri Aurobindo sparked off in the course of other discussion. Examples are such as the one about Marlowe (p. 61) excelling mainly in 'strong detached scenes and passages and in great culminating moments', that is, in a trompe l'oeil manner, and the one on the principle of tragedy, the Aeschylean drasanti pathein, 'the doer shall feel the effect of his act' (p. 63), in other words, the Karmic view expressed by Anouilh in his statement about the 'ever so slightest turn of the wrist' causing dire consequences.

Thus, Sethna provides not only an elucidation of Sri Aurobindo's ideas about poetry and Shakespeare but abundant examples of his own application and development of these. It would be beside the point to ask if the study does not betray an insufficient recognition of the theatrical dimensions of the verse and the drama. It is a poetic reading of the dramatic verse that is on offer.

In SAOS (p. 50), Sethna quotes Sri Aurobindo [Kalidasa: Second Series (Pondicherry, 1954), pp. 13-14].

It may matter to the pedant or the gossip within me whether the sonnets were written to William Herbert or to Henry Wriothesley or to William Himself, whether the dark woman whom Shakespeare loved against his better judgment was Mary Fitton or someone else or nobody at all... but to the lover of poetry in me these things do not matter at all....

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It may surprise us why Sethna came to write a whole book in an attempt to take up and revolve exactly these and related questions which the master would deem irrelevant. Indeed, Sethna starts his book with a rebuttal of exactly the same argument about the irrelevance of these questions advanced by W.H. Auden. Sethna's defence of the legitimacy and value of his enterprise is that he anchors his enquiry and whole case firmly in the internal evidence of the Son-nets themselves, the Dedication and especially the diction and certain other literary features of the verse, this in correlation to the same kind of evidence available in the plays and also in correlation to such findings of historical and editorial scholarship as he relentlessly examines. Sethna finds that in such a reading the Sonnets date themselves (Ch. 1, 'The Sonnets Self-Dated: The Method of Internal Chronology'). On the basis of such an analysis, he concludes that they were almost all written during a nine-year time-bracket, 1598-1607; he goes on to suggest both an order and a closer periodisation if not dating of their composition. In successive chapters he builds an elaborate and detailed, step-by-step argument, picking his way carefully but assuredly amidst a mass of conflicting evidence, by way of a precise identification. The 'fair youth', friend and patron and what not, is William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. Sethna sees in the Dark Lady, the other love of the 'two loves' in the Sonnets, a continental lady with the name he conjectures to be Anastasia Guglielma. Sethna would identify Ben Jonson as the major 'Rival Poet', and Samuel Daniel and Francis Davison as the minor rival poets shadowed in the Sonnets. Sethna would seem to put rather too high stakes on the inference that the name 'Will' ('Willa' in the feminine) was common to all three, poet, youth and lady, in the Sonnets, from the play on the word 'will', some of it quite bawdy, in several Sonnets (especially 135 and 136, 'Will will fulfil', 1.5, 136) He arrives at the speculative conclusion that the Dark Lady had the name Anastasia Guglielma and that she was a London citizen of continental origin.

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There is much to be said for the positive side of the whole conduct of the argument of the book, for the eagle-eyed spot-ting, careful weighing, accepting or rejecting of evidence of a variety of kinds. For one thing, Sethna starts from and generally takes care, in centripetal fashion, not to cut loose from the centre which is the verse of the Sonnets. Secondly, in all fairness, he takes into account findings of scholars which may work against his case, and examines these and reasons out his rejection. His demolition (TL & WP, pp.159-163) of A.L. Rowse's case for the candidature of Emilia Lanier, an Italian lady of London, as the Dark Lady is an instance which is also a good demonstration of Sethna's polemical skills. In his research, Sethna amasses a vast amount of material. Besides, the cross-referencing and the comparison and contrast between parallels, analogues, and verbal and ideational similarities and identities take him wide a-field, as he ranges between Sonnets and play-passages, passages from other poets and playwrights, major, minor and some obscure. But the reader, while fully appreciating such deep engagement and the basic Tightness of the general way of proceeding, may also detect a certain literal mindedness or literalism in the argument and interpretation in a few places as in the attempt to fix the age of Shakespeare at the time of writing particular Sonnets, and also a shade of laboriousness of a protesting too much in a few instances. In the givens of the nature and circumstances of Sethna's enterprise, it would be beside the point to complain that he does not adequately address the question of the likely role of homo-sexuality in the relationship between poet and friend or that the writing is slightly on the expansive and leisurely side for the purposes of a research study. Also, there is not much attention paid to the ways in which themes and images and rhetorical devices function in the Sonnets though the diction is closely and acutely analysed.

The overall impression is, however, that of an excellent opportunity given to us in this second book as well as in the first (SAOS) of watching and responding to a remarkably

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committed, keenly sensitive, highly perceptive and subtle reader and expounder of poetry who shares his valuable response to poetry and literary issues with us with true gusto, a quality rare in critics of the present day. We cannot but be unqualifiedly thankful for it.

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