Talks on Poetry

A BACK-LOOK AT MACBETH

I was not given a theme in advance. Nirod has just now said, "Talk about Macbeth — or, if you like, about the Sonnets. After all, it doesn't matter because it's the same genius who wrote the play and those poems." Perhaps he should have added, "It's the same non-genius who is going to talk." Well, as he has mentioned Macbeth first, I take it that his preference is for the play. The only trouble is that all of you have studied it very lately whereas my memory of it goes back by several decades. So, naturally, it's a little hazy. Still, it is not difficult to say a few things by way of introduction.

There has been a controversy as to what can be called Shakespeare's masterpiece. Most people plump for Hamlet. Some are devotees of Lear and some favour Othello. My grandfather was all for Hamlet and my father swore by Othello. And I believe Sri Aurobindo chose Lear on the whole. My leaning is towards Macbeth as Shakespare's top reach in dramatic art. I use the word "art" advisedly because I cannot really say that Shakespeare has written greater poetry in Macbeth than in those three other plays or several others which have not run in any competition to be his chief work — though just now I remember that Frank Harris took Antony and Cleopatra to be Shakespeare's richest creation. Although Macbeth's poetry is not any greater than that in the rest of Shakespeare's mature works, the Mount Everests here come very close together. The gaps between them are not so wide as those in the other dramas. This is a very compact and concentrated product of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry and that is why from the point of view of art I regard it as his magnum opus.

It may be that the Everests come so close together because Macbeth, with perhaps the exception of Julius Caesar, is the shortest play Shakespeare ever wrote. But that does not quite explain the recurrence of his poetic heights at such close quarters, since even if a play is short the usual range of his best and his second best and his average can continue. Why should he be in such a hurry to pack his heights together? So I conclude that it must be that he wrote Macbeth at a sort of fever pitch or concert pitch of poetic utterance. His genius reached its fullest and most abundant maturity in this drama. That is by way of introduction and by way of personal estimate of the play.

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Now there is the topic of Shakespeare expressing the various parts of himself. You know that he has been honoured with the epithet "myriad-minded". The "Bardolaters", as Bernard Shaw dubbed those who blindly worship Shakespeare's genius and assign to him evey possible capacity of mind, extol him as not only the greatest dramatic poet, which he certainly is, but also as a profound thinker and even as a mystically inclined seer. Sri Aurobindo has remarked that Shakespeare lacks the true philosophic turn of thought and that is why all attempts to ascribe his plays to Bacon who was a thinker on philosophical lines are as futile as attempts to show Bacon to be poetically gifted. Sri Aurobindo sees more thought-power in a single essay of Bacon's than in a whole drama of Shakespeare's and he marks how Bacon, in his one authenticated experiment in writing poetry, is sadly hampered by the born philosopher's characteristic way of unimaginative expression. According to Sri Aurobindo, the so-called thinking in the great plays consists of a number of vivid ideas thrown up by the response of emotion and passion to particular life-situations. The pure detached intellect is nowhere in evidence.

As to the mystic seerhood attributed to the Bard, we may grant that on occasion he comes out with astonishing insights. Thus he makes Hamlet declare:

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we may.

He has also that superb phrase in one of his sonnets:

the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

This has a certain vibrancy which to an ear attuned to the subtle music of poetry sounds almost "Overmindish". It is as if something from the Overmind plunging into the throbbing universe of the Life-Force which is Shakespeare's sovereign domain had emerged successfully. But such things are as a saying Sri Aurobindo quotes in another context in The Future Poetry, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, "rare swimmings in a vast gurge". The phrase about the "prophetic soul" is my discovery for Sri Aurobindo's consideration. He himself discovered another which occurs in The Tempest:

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In the dark backward and abysm of time,

and which he traces to the Overmind. But these snatches of mystical perception are quite untypical of Shakespeare and, on the strength of their flashes few and far between, we can hardly spell out a mystical aspect of him.

I once tried to make him a kind of mystic thinker by quoting a long passage from The Tempest to Sri Aurobindo: Prospero's famous speech which begins,

Our revels now are ended...

and finishes with the words:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

In this speech we are told that everything will vanish and "leave not a wrack behind." Sri Aurobindo says there is no mysticism of outlook here at all in the sense that Shakespeare does not have any expression of something surviving the universal dissolution. It is wrong to believe that he imagines there is a universal sleeper or dreamer behind the sleep or the dream. Such a notion is not really couched in his lines. What is shown is simply the dream-like quality of things which strikes one at times and the only conclusion is that everything is ephemeral, everything is transitory, there is no substantial reality remaining behind the appearance and disappearance of phenomena. This was what Sri Aurobindo tried to make me realise, that you cannot read such things into a poet. You can say, if you like, that behind the poet there was some inspiration which tried to make him a medium and failed so far as the mysticism was concerned, though it succeeded so far as the poetic expression of something or other was concerned.

Now, as regards the perception of things unseen, what Words-worth calls "unknown modes of being", there are two compartments: one is the pure mystical, and the other is the sheer occult. Can we say that Shakespeare, even if he may not be a mystic properly speaking, has some familiarity with or understanding of the sheer occult?

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In the Middle Ages the presence of devils and angels was an accepted fact. People even claimed to meet angels and devils. Martin Luther records his own experience. Once at midnight when he had fallen asleep over his writing-table, a slight noise disturbed him. Waking up, he saw the devil standing in one corner of his room. Luther picked up his ink-pot and threw it at the devil, and the devil vanished. I suppose the devil didn't want to be painted blacker than he was!

So you see, all these things were taken to be there and the medieval philosophers speculated on how many thousands of angels by means of their subtlety and their insubstantiality could dance on the point of a needle. The tradition of presences behind the physical scene persisted down to Shakespeare's day although by then the great movement which swept the Middle Ages off had already come to pass, the Renaissance. The Renaissance had a great vital gusto and a sense of things of the earth and also a humanist enthusiasm which refused to take interest in religious things or in things which could not be seen and touched. Naturally, devils and angels were not very popular with the typical Renaissance thinkers. But the artists carried on the religious tradition and we have angels still in Raphael and Michelangelo though Michelangelo gave them a statuesque and sculptured quality and his God himself seems to be a very muscular man instead of a God: even his beard seems to be full of muscles the way it flies like a torn banner!

In Shakespeare's day England was unusually uneducated as compared to the Continent. Spain was considered a civilised country and so was Portugal. Many consider them backwaters at present, but in those days they were in the front rank of civilisation and Elizabethan England was pretty barbarous in the matter of education, in the matter of manners, and the English were a rough people and even the amenities of life were not so abundant. They were not abundant anywhere in fact, but in Elizabethan England they were even less so. You can imagine the condition of amenities when you know that even at the time of Louis XIV, a little after the Elizabethan Age, the Great Palace of the Roi Soleil, the Sun-King, had not a single bathroom anywhere. And all the people, the cavaliers, the musketeers, the foreign emissaries, the people's representatives, who came to wait in the beautiful hall hung with tapestries and paintings, did not know what to do when they had to

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answer nature's call. They answered the minor part of it, there and then, in corners of the huge apartment. Not much later in time, Frederick the Great of Germany had to send for a bucket of water from a well half a mile away whenever he felt like having a bath, which was not very frequent. Louis XIV never had a bath except once when he was born and once when he was dead. On both occasions others washed him. He used to pour Eau de Cologne every time he felt himself not quite royally odoriferous.

Coming back to Shakespeare and the dirt and crudity of his day, we may say the superstitions of Medieval Europe lasted a little longer in Elizabethan England than they did elsewhere. So thoughts of angels, devils, gnomes, witches persisted very much. A lot of witches were burnt in England even after the time of Elizabeth. In France I think Joan of Arc was the last witch burnt. They burnt her as a witch, you must realise. So we may expect Shakespeare to have catered to the popular taste for so-called occult phenomena. Shakespare was a great one for catering to fads and fancies and tickling the ears of the groundlings. The groundlings were the people who squatted on the stage itself while the drama was going on. They ate oranges and threw orange peels about and made all sorts of ex tempore remarks in the middle of the play's speeches. It could be that some most unShakespearean patches in the dramas have come because of these remarks which afterwards got incorporated along with the replies the actors gave to the groundlings. We shall be justified in expecting a smear, a superficial scatter, of occult elements in the Shakespearean drama and we do hear talk of agencies behind the scenes doing things. But in the plays themselves the occult activity is very seldom shown.

Othello was accused of using witchcraft in winning Desdemona. The Venetian Senate couldn't imagine how a Moor, a dark man, who could have said, like the King of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice,

Mislike me not for my complexion,

The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,

had fascinated a girl, a beauty besides, who was snow-white both in complexion and in morals. How could she ever fall for a savage like Othello? Hence they thought he must have mixed some magic potions and made her drink them. But actually it was she who used

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to bring him drinks because he was a guest at her father's house. He had no chance to give her anything like a drug to set her imagination ablaze with Othello-dreams. So he defended himself when he was impeached for witchcraft, saying that he only told the thrilling story of his life to Desdemona and she sighed and she moaned and she said in effect, "Well, if ever I were to marry somebody, I think that somebody would be a soldier like you." It was almost an indirect proposal, of which Othello with his military strategic mind took due advantage.

There are, as I have said, references to subtle and occult agencies at work in the dramas of Shakespeare. Whether Shakespeare himself had any belief in them it is difficult to say. In one passage somewhere somebody says,

I shall call spirits from the vasty deep.

Another fellow retorts, "Yes, you may call but will they answer you?" It seems to reflect Shakespeare's own scepticism. But it is very difficult to know whether Shakespeare believes in any blessed thing, because he seems to be just a vehicle, a mouthpiece, of poetic inspiration and it didn't matter one jot what he believed and what he himself thought and what he did — and he hardly seems to have done anything worth recording. Just to steal a deer in the countryside or to come to London to hold the heads of horses outside theatres or even become an actor and then, as Sri Aurobindo reminds us, be a money-lender and buy the best house in Stratford-upon-Avon are hardly incidents to give you any keys to Shakespeare as a man, much less to his mind. There are no incidents in his life that we can really fasten on. Only his Sonnets seem to be some sort of key, but even they are debated. Some people say they are just like his dramas. And the three famous unknown quantities — the "Fair Youth", "the Dark Lady" and "the Rival Poet" — are dramatis personae like any others, however vivid and particularised they may seem, as if they were reflections of real characters. All the dramas of Shakespeare are full of such reflections and he doesn't seem to have lived his life at all unless we regard his Sonnets as some sort of autobiography. So whether Shakespeare believed in Occultism or not we do not know and it is a question which is practically irrelevant, because actually he was not concerned with what he wrote! That is why he took no

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interest even in his own plays, he never revised them, he never brought out any of them in book-form, much less did he collect them, he just made his pile and retired to Stratford and lived there as the richest man in the county. Apparently, that was all his ambition.

However, in two or three of his dramas we do find a marked stamp of occult action and the two most outstanding of these dramas are Macbeth and Lear. In Lear it seems the gigantic powers, which move human beings and make them their puppets, come out in a most notable, conspicuous, gross and colossal form. Goneril and Regan, two daughters of Lear, are real devils incarnate, Cordelia the youngest is just the opposite, an angel incarnate, you might say. But those two are awful creatures. And Lear makes himself a prey to their machinations; he opens himself to them and he was a little off his chump already in giving all his kingdom to both of them and giving nothing to Cordelia and calling her ungrateful. His words were a favourite of my grandfather: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!" Just because she said she couldn't love him best, as she would love her husband best, the old man got highly enraged and said in effect, "You are a rotter and I'll disinherit you." The two other women were already married and Cordelia was not even engaged at that time, so she was just honest and the older pair who had left Lear for their husbands said, as it were, "We adore you. Our husbands are all in the background." Lear gave away his whole kingdom to them and made himself so helpless that they took advantage of their position and completely neglected him. Naturally through that crack in his brain which he already had, he admitted all kinds of perverse powers and became really a lunatic. And there in the midst of his lunacy you have the great storm on the heath and that great storm makes also Lear explode in storms of language — a manifestation of the gigantic evil force that was at work in the entire drama. It tries to find expression in dramatic situation and dramatic interplay of character and you have the real sense of agencies from behind the scene taking charge of the world-stage and naturally the Elizabethan stage too. That may be why Sri Aurobindo, being sensitive to and so aware of all these forces, ranked Lear as the greatest of Shakespeare's creations.

Now these occult agencies are also at play in Macbeth and from the first you have the keynote set with the witches and their

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mumbo-jumbo and abracadabra, their "Fair is foul and foul is fair." Macbeth is shown to be in subtle tune with these witches: he has an urge to rise in life, an unexpressed ambition at the back of his mind and the witches have an intuition of what he is thinking. because the witches and he are in tune somewhere in their psycho logies, they come along in the same direction and cross each other. That, you might say, is Shakespeare's preparation of the action of the occult powers, and Macbeth is greatly stimulated by what the witches say. He has a faith in them, and they know how to create faith by telling him what he did not know but what had already occurred — an event which they could find out, namely, that he, already "Thane of Glamis" had been made "Thane of Cawdor". The witches are naturally aware of this, I mean they should be aware of such things — otherwise what's the fun in being a witch? So he was very much struck and quite convinced that they had the power of prophecy. They also told him he would be king.But they made a faux pas by foretelling the future of Macbeth's comrade-in-arms, Banquo. They said Banquo would be "father to a line of kings." Macbeth was so convinced of their truthfulness that somehow he couldn't get it out of his mind that his own children would not be kings and thus his own dynasty, if ever he wore a crown, would come to an end. This complicated the whole situation terribly. Perhaps if he had not known the future of Banquo as predicted by the witches, he would not have muddled up his life so much by trying to have Banquo murdered, and thus given Banquo's ghost a chance to appear at the table and expose Macbeth's conscience and frighten him almost out of his wits. Anyway, we have there the occult power set at work and we have more than once again the manifestation of the same agency.

An instance is when Macbeth hears a voice after he has killed the sleeping king Duncan: "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep," and he tells of the lovely nature of "innocent sleep" at some length. When Lady Macbeth asks him what he meant he answers:

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!"

But here we have, we might say, the opposite of the power which

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works for evil, because there is a retribution at work on the occult plane, be it vital or any other. You don't have powers working only for evil. Some work also for good and avenge evil doings. Just as they try to confuse the results of good deeds, so also they strike at excesses of evil-doing. Through the extreme action which Macbeth precipitated by becoming, along with his wife, the murderer of Duncan and taking the movement of things into his own hands and forcing results, he oversteps the mark, you might say. When we say "oversteps the mark" we have to think of two things. There may be certain ideals we may set up for a human being. That is what the Greeks believed. They held that man should not go beyond a certain limit. There should not be hubris, overweening pride or ambition. And man must observe his own human measure. That by the way is the interpretation some Hellenists give of the two great aphorisms that have come to us from Greek times: "Know thyself" and "Nothing too much." These Hellenists say you must act moderately, not cross the limits and "Know thyself means to them that you must understand what you are, you are human and that is why you must not cross limits but do everything in moderation.

We Aurobindonians don't agree with these interpreters. We think "Know thyself means what Socrates had in mind: you must know your true being which is more than human, your soul which is divine. Ours is exactly the opposite of the other interpretation. Of course with our interpretation we would not be able to syn-thesise the two aphorisms. If you know that you are divine, why should you observe the other rule of "Nothing too much", unless we take the words to mean "Don't do too much evil." But then it might mean we can do small evil! So there is an inconsistency there. But we can keep the two sayings quite apart and take it that in one of them some sort of moderation in life in general is recommended, not because man is man and has limitations but because moderation is itself a virtue We can interpret the adage in the light of Greek Art. There also you have a fine restraint, you don't have abundance as you have in Oriental Art. You have a chiselling of lines and everywhere a kind of divine perfection limited or moderated to human terms. You can consider the meaning of "Nothing too much" to be: however divine you may be, you should still remain a humanist and not forget the human life that you have to lead in the world. That would be something

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almost Aurobindonian. Here we have to think of human limits as such. The human temperament, the human sensorium is so balanced that it can stand a certain amount of pressure and no more from occult forces. Even spiritual forces at times send people crazy. In the Ashram itself I have known some people becoming quite irrational, to say the least. Not so much of late but in the early days when the Yogic pressure seems to have been much more, people used to lose their heads quite often either temporarily or permanently, until they were packed off from here and then they regained their heads. Here they were asked to keep their minds aside, so they did it very literally and lost them actually. If even spiritual powers, which have some concern, or some conscience you might say, for the human organism, can drive people crazy, how much more craziness can we not expect from sheerly occult forces? They don't care a fiddlestick whether a man goes mad or stays sane or does good or does evil; but a certain pitch of power from behind the scenes can steal away a man's wits or bring about calamities in his life and upset his life altogether if he oversteps purely human bounds.

There is also another consideration. Every man has got his own little limit. If you are a person of a particular type with a particular cast of mind, with a particular type of nervous system, you can't stand the pressure of forces beyond a particular pitch. Macbeth is considered to be a man of very sensitive feelings, he had even an artistic side, it seems, and he was full of the milk of human kindness. If left to himself, he would not do anything to hurt anybody. That was one part of him; another part of him was ambitious. And when that ambition took charge, all the lactic litres of benevolence would not have much weight and, in case of a conflict, we don't know which part would come out on top. Perhaps it would depend on Lady Macbeth being present or not, because she was a very powerful personality who could influence him with her iron will. He was always irresolute, but she knew her mind, whatever she wanted to do she went straight to the mark. Yet even her we cannot consider absolutely an incarnation of evil because she too talks of some aspect of herself which is quite human, she talks of her having given "suck" and known how tender it is to love the babe that milks one. She also feels a restraint when she goes to kill Duncan in his sleep but finds him looking like her father. In her state of somnambulism she remarks:

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"Who could have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" There are some sensitive reactions in her and actually if there had not been this element she would not have become half crazed towards the end. And in the somnambulist scene she would not have been rubbing her hands and trying to wash them. Nor, if she had been a born murderess, would she have exclaimed that all the perfumes of Arabia would not sweeten the little hand that had once the smell of blood on it — that is, when she had gone into Duncan's chamber to smear with his blood the faces and clothes of the grooms sleeping there so that they might be suspected of murdering the king in their drunken state.

So both of these characters have something in them which is open to good influences, Macbeth much more than Lady Macbeth; that is why Lady Macbeth who goes to the limit of wickedness with hardly a care in the world is the greater sufferer because we must remember how the forces which are occult are also retributive forces; they can avenge an evil action which has been caused by an intervention of evil occult forces, and it is they who rob Macbeth of his sleep and it is they who make Lady Macbeth a sleep-walker, the very opposite of Macbeth. Macbeth, poor fellow, had to pace up and down because he couldn't sleep: he was very restless. She had to pace up and down because she couldn't wake up and rest! So these are sort of balances and the retribution is according to the amount of evil resolution in either. So we find on more than one occasion these occult forces at work and it is they that give the play a weird glow, that strange intensity which is sustained and comes out even in the poetic quality because here you might say that some occult force is behind Shakespeare, goading him on, intensifying even his capabilities so that he is all the more Shakespeare than he usually is. Hence the constant occurrence of his ne plus ultra of poetic effect in Macbeth, and many of the passages which reach the height of Shakespeare's poetic bent are precisely passages which have to deal with these occult forces.

Now. that passage about a voice crying that Macbeth has murdered sleep — Sri Aurobindo considered it to be an expression which belonged to the highest range of poetry. When here we talk of the highest range we don't mean the Overmind as such, which is the home of the Mantra. Sri Aurobindo is here talking of the various styles of poetry, and the perfection possible in them. They differ one from another in a certain intensity of speech. You have

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the adequate style in which something is said in a happy manner which just suits the occasion. There is no special flight of imagination, there is no special movement of rhetoric, there is no special inwardness of expression. But something is said smoothly, beautifully, with some kind of general light in it. The blithe sunshiny style of Chaucer, for instance. That is the adequate style. Then you have the effective style when something is said with force, a passion comes in and becomes quite prominent, rhetorical effects are there — not necessarily false effects; they are very genuine effects, you have figures of speech and you have a compact, concentrated, quick expression such as we find mostly in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's style is very often effective in the true sense of the word but Shakespeare has also another side in which he is full of similes and metaphors and lights and glimmers and picturesque phrases. That is what you may call the illumined style in a semi-decorative form; the illumined style as such in its proper functioning is something which is beyond both the vital being and the mental being. You have some inward glow of things by which you feel the hidden significance of objects and of persons and of occasions. You have the illumined style wherever imagery is at play but the true illumined imagery is revelatory. It doesn't merely paint pictures and spread colours, however beautifully. Beyond the illumined style you have what Sri Aurobindo calls the inspired style, and there you have a kind of rapt attitude in the utterance, the poet is as if in a trance and he speaks from a depth or a height which is beyond himself. In each of the styles at its top you have that inevitable pitch where there is poetic perfection past which you cannot go, on a certain level, so that, poetically speaking, you have the utmost. But there is a fifth style which breaks completely out of this fourfold classification. To this you cannot give any exact name at all. Sri Aurobindo designates it the "sheer inevitable" or "the inevitable inevitability". Inevitability you can have in all the styles but here is inevitability in itself — the pure poetical style, if you like. The archetypal poet would always talk in that style and of this style you get very few examples. Few comparatively, of course, because even Shakespeare has quite a number, but as compared to the number of his examples in the effective, illumined and inspired styles, these are few. Sri Aurobindo has given some other examples than the sleep-murder lines — examples from Latin and from Greek as well as from English. Three of the

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English instances are:

...magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep

and

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

are from Wordsworth. The last two verses are at the same time Overmind lines. But nowhere has Sri Aurobindo clearly indicated whether the levels of style correspond to the levels of inspiration in the sense of planes. He touches on the idea that the adequate style might be said to be the mental style, the effective the style of the Higher Mind, the illumined the style of the Illumined Mind, the inspired the style of the Intuition, and the sheer inevitable the style of the Overmind. But he adds that it is not always possible to affirm this, because on each level there could be the sheer inevitable and hot only the inevitable proper to that level. For instance, in Shakespeare, King Henry the fourth's question to sleep —

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge? —

is, according to Sri Aurobindo, from the Illumined Mind and yet it belongs to the inevitable inevitability. Thus some research in aesthetics remains to be done in order to arrive at a conclusion in the balancing or coinciding of the planes of inspiration and the levels of style-perfection.

Just as what I regard as one of the top peaks of dramatic poetry in Macbeth comes with the expression of the retributive occult forces, so too the whole invocation by Lady Macbeth to occult evil is Shakespeare at his most wonderful. There are those terrific unforgettable phrases —

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts! unsex me here,

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And fill me from the crown to the toe top full

Of direst cruelty —

and the culminating appeal, a veritable spell of devilry:

You murdering ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

To cry, "Hold, hold!"

This, to my ear, is a sustained piece of the sheer inevitable style. It is created not only with a burst of mighty language but also with a rhythm that evokes by a brief yet tremendous alliteration the sinister invisible presences and renders, by foot-variations as well as by metrical movement and retardation, the future event a vivid overwhelming imaginative present.

To match all this dumbfounding hubbub of inspiration with what I may term a quiet soul-piercing exquisiteness reaching an equal supremacy of poetic speech, a level of pure inevitability, I would choose that single line about Duncan being in his grave:

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

Simplicity of expression and subtlety of suggestion could not go further — art and insight attain here their climax within Shakespeare's psychological dimension. By means of apt sound and image a vision of the trouble and uncertainty of life is coupled with a profound sense of release and salvation.

We may take leave of Macbeth now, remembering its most powerful moment and its moment of deepest peace.

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