Niladri Mahapatra
Guest Lecturer, Department of English, Bhatter College, Dantan, Paschim Medinipur, India. Email: niladrimahapatra222@gmail.com
Prof. Tirthankar Das Purkayastha was the former Head of the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal and ex-dean, faculties of Arts and Commerce of the same university. He is a well known Renaissance scholar in India and abroad. He was the principal investigator of a UGC funded project entitled Teaching Shakespeare: Trends in Shakespeare-studies in the Indian Universities since Independence, with Special Reference to West Bengal. He has also coordinated a Vidyasagar University funded project entitled Coloniality and Post-Coloniality: Adivasi Society in Transition from 2015 to 2017. Many scholarly literary articles written by him have been published in many national and international journals. He is a bilingual poet, translator and editor, with keen interest in drama. He has authored books like Witches in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays, Bristir Debata (A Collection of Poems in Bengali).
The Interview
In this interview prof. Tirthankar Das Purkayastha talks with Niladri Mahapatra.
NM: Greeting from the Golden Line! Thank you so much for managing time for the magazine. I think both the students and teachers will be enriched by your opinions, advice, suggestions and guidelines.
TDP: Thank you Golden Line for the opportunity given here for reflecting on some of the plays of the great dramatist.
NM: You are an ideal academician, renowned poet and professor and an inspiration for both teachers and students. Please tell us how you became interested in literature and especially in Shakespeare.
TDP: It is difficult to precisely locate the point of time when my weakness for Shakespeare really began. In our student life the study of Shakespeare was almost de rigueur, although for most of the students the acquaintance with Shakespeare was based on the few plays that figured in the college or university syllabus. I was personally benefited by my exposure to some learned teachers of Shakespeare, and especially, Dr. D.C. Biswas of Jadavpur University, who was a Shakespeare-critic in his own right. I may say that I started reading Shakespeare more widely when I began my research on Elizabethan and Jacobean plays under his supervision.
NM: The current situation for us is really threatening and horrible for the outbreak of COVID-19. We are full of doubts and questions about how to encounter this epidemic and how it will shape our future. So, literary scholars have started to dig out the history to detect how literary figures depicted the contagious diseases in their works. What is your point of view on this regard with especial reference of Renaissance period?
TDP: Yes, we are going through one of the most trying moments of human civilization. Mankind has witnessed a few other pandemics before but never one of such enormous scale. The outbreak of the deadly plague in Europe commonly referred to as Black Death led to the representation of death as a dancing skeleton in the medieval iconography reflecting the widespread sense of fear. We find references in the contemporary records of seventeen century England to the courtyards of English houses being transformed to graveyards as the piled up corpses were too huge in number for decent burial. There are innumerable references to plague, either overt or covert, in Renaissance English poetry and drama. The Censor was too stringent in England for the playwrights to provide explicit descriptions of the contemporary situation and one strategy to skirt the law was to shift the locale to countries other than England. Remember Claudio’s words in Measure for Measure? : ‘Our natures do pursue,/Like rats that raven down their proper bane,/ A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die’. This talk of rats and death should send cold shivers down the spine, but well, the place is Vienna and not London. But it is a fact known to all students of English theatre that the City fathers had ordered the playhouses to be closed down because of the fear of contagion in places where too many people sat huddled together. A student of English drama may be reminded of how the acting of plays was shifted to the provinces and of how Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus had to be abridged to meet the exigencies of the situation.
NM: One of the great themes of literature is death and Shakespeare leads in this field. His plays are full of death and the exploration of death. Why did Shakespeare’s dramas deal with deaths?
TDP: Yes, you are right. Shakespeare seems to be obsessed with death. One has only to turn to Hamlet to understand the degree of this obsession. But, with regard to Shakespeare, we had better not ask why. Arnold had this to say about him: “We ask and ask – thou smilest and art still…”
NM: As far as tragedy is concerned, “the term is broadly applied to literary and especially to dramatic, representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist”. So, does hamartia really demand death of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes inevitably to display “disastrous conclusion” or was it Shakespeare who was fond of consequences of Karma?
TDP: It was Bradley who pointed this out as one distinctive characteristic of a Shakespearean tragedy. While other tragedians may speak of other forms of tragic suffering, blindness in the case of Oedipus, for example, in Shakespeare the tragedy culminates invariably in death. Since death in each case is the outcome of past action, it is definitely an offshoot of the protagonist’s karma, if one chooses to use this word loosely as an equivalent of action. But the Indian word is loaded with metaphysical meaning that is entirely out of place in this context. Karma implies that human life is a continuum, stretching beyond the points of birth and death. The Shakespearean play is focused, on the other hand, on the here and now.
NM: Although both Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra are composed during 1606-1607, the two plays have different treatment regarding ‘guest’. Macbeth, a brave and resourceful general, stabs Duncan without paying heed at the honour of the guest although he is pricked by his conscience initially whereas Pompey the younger graciously invites Antony, Lepidus and Octavius to celebrate their new truce and inspite of being tempted to have his enemies murdered, he resists himself as it would be dishonorable to kill his guests. Would you like to comment on the different treatment?
TDP: It would be unfair to compare two plays based on two different sources, Holinshed, in the case of Macbeth and North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, in that of Antony and Cleopatra. Moreover, Macbeth gives the theme of murder a weight of moral content which is missing in Pompey’s rather casual decision not to have his guests murdered. His rather ambiguous reply to Menas’s suggestion about murder tries to keep the martial ethos outside the scope of moral scrutiny. A murder which is morally unethical may well pass, within that ethos, for service when performed by someone as an act of duty. Macbeth, who is Duncan’s general, views his own act of murder as a violation of social ties.
NM: Deaths were placed only in Shakespeare’s plays. Like Ben Jonson and others, he didn’t write grief-stricken poems and elegies about the loss of beloved children and didn’t leave any direct record of his paternal feelings. Could you enlighten us more about this?
TDP: One must not lose sight of the fact that Shakespeare is primarily a dramatist and drama, being the most objective of all art forms, leaves little room for the dramatist’s self-projection. One can look for traces of Shakespeare’s personal experiences of love and friendship in his sonnets, but that too is not beyond all doubt. The sonnets are preoccupied with the problem of death for its possible impact on his love and poetry. If we regard the sonnets as his personal testament, they are strikingly reticent about his personal loss by death in the family. His son Hamnet died young. As Dr. Hall, his friend as well as son-in-law, was a famous apothecary in Stratford, the great dramatist was undoubtedly aware of the state of health in his native town.
NM: Shakespeare’s overcrowded and rat-infested London with dirty Thames was the hub of the deadliest diseases like plague, Syphilis, Typhus, Ague or Malaria etc. How did Shakespeare depict the terrible Elizabethan scenario caused by these diseases?
TDP: I have already said that unfortunately one does not find as many references to plague in Elizabethan dramatic literature as one might wish. The word ‘plague’ is used both literally and metaphorically a number of times but the dramatists have generally chosen, for reasons best known to them, to avoid dealing with the subject of plague. A typical case in point is Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, which comes closest to describing London in the time of plague but chooses to deal rather with the larger theme of moral corruption. Measure for Measure describes a state that stinks and is full of brothels that are breeding-ground of diseases. One can, however, only speculate about its possible links with the contemporary London.
NM: Other writers of Elizabethan time like pamphleteer Thomas Dekker also depicted the epidemic scenario of Elizabethan time. How were they different from Shakespeare in representing this topsy-turvy Elizabethan scenario created by diseases?
TDP: Thomas Dekker was a great recorder of contemporary events which he generally depicts with both sympathy and accuracy. His The Witch of Edmonton can serve as an example of his broad-minded sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden. Although no one would rank him with Shakespeare as a dramatist, the importance of his works as social document cannot be denied. His Plague pamphlets, written during an outbreak of plague in London, are similarly valuable on that account. ‘The Wonderful Year’ is somewhat baffling for its jocular tone, but this, to my mind, is a characteristic reaction of an English playwright to a seemingly hopeless situation.
NM: Could you believe that Epidemic played a crucial role in Shakespeare’s personal life?
TDP: Frankly speaking, we know precious little about Shakespeare’s ‘personal’ life. I come across writings on the internet where authors indirectly thank the epidemic for providing Shakespeare with the leisure he might have needed for his work. These, however, speak more about the authors themselves than about their subject. At any rate, the epidemic did not take the Elizabethan authors by surprise, who were more or less accustomed to it. Death had been stalking the streets of London since the days of Chaucer. Thomas Nashe’s “A Litany in the Time of Plague” is within a tradition of memento mori lyrics, while remaining starkly contemporary. So, to my mind, it is immaterial to ask how much Shakespeare contributed to this body of writings.
NM: Alcohol and opium were commonly used to curb the pains of the first stage of the ague paroxysm. In The Tempest, we see the character Stephano tries to cure the symptoms of ague, the Elizabethan name of Malaria, with alcohol. Could we say that Shakespeare tried to make familiar his audiences with such details?
TDP: I would prefer to read the Stephano-Trinculo-Caliban episode in The Tempest for the sheer fun of it all and think that Shakespeare knew better than to project Stephano as a repository of knowledge.
NM: The history of epidemics and even the present epidemic show that the only way to save lives from any epidemic is quarantine. In Romeo and Juliet, we see the fatal plot twisted because the messenger, whose duty was to reach the letter of Juliet’s plan to pretend to have died, is forced to have quarantine before he can complete his mission. So, was it the duty of Shakespeare, being a popular cultural icon, to give awareness to his audiences about the importance of quarantine?
TDP: I agree with you but do not exactly think the way you do. You are perfectly right in reminding us of the way Shakespeare has put the contemporary experience of ‘quarantine’ to excellent dramatic use in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. But I do not agree that Shakespeare does this in order to bring home to the audience the need of being quarantined in the time of an epidemic. On the contrary, when you come to think of it, the protagonists’ lives could have been saved had there been a violation of the quarantine.
NM: When an epidemic occurs, the poor, the beggars, petty thieves and prisoners become the most infected; and it was also seen in Shakespeare’s time. Did Shakespeare feel the pain of the commoners and write about them?
TDP: Undoubtedly. Remember Lear’s famous lines about the ‘poor naked wretches’ in the Storm scenes? Does world literature have anything comparable to these lines and the sympathy they embody? I think I need not reiterate the obvious.
NM: How Shakespeare was optimistic about a better world without diseases?
TDP: I do not believe that Shakespeare ever indulged in any pipe- dream about a ‘better universe’. His imagination took within its sweep all humanity, good and bad alike. He is infinitely tolerant of human failings and all that flesh is heir to. There are some revolting references to diseases in King Lear, where these are associated with the evil daughter: “Thou art a boil,/ A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle/ In my corrupted blood”. Lear dreams of a peaceful life with Cordelia. If this dream is rudely shattered, well, human existence is all about making the best of a bad job.
NM: Thank you so much for your scholastic views. Your views shall enrich and illuminate all students, scholars and academicians.
TDP: Thank you for this interaction and allowing me to state my opinions for what they are worth.