William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon

               

William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon

William Shakespeare was not only the name of a playwright, but also, he was a versatile genius in the sky of English literature who led his pen through the intensive problems of human beings irrespective of caste and creed and even with his gallant touch, the common phenomena of human societies have been reflected systematically. As he has entered English literature as a Play Writer, he has thought about the poetic diction in the world which speaks about nature, love and the superiority of natural aspects virtually. In his flow of writing, he has included all sorts of literary content very tactfully and used his dialect in the creation of world literature, for which he had the recognition of the world as the greatest author and dramatist.

William Shakespeare, England's national poet, is best known by synonyms and epithets like the Bard of Avon, The Swan of Avon, The Immortal Bard, and the Renaissance dramatist. Often celebrated for his brilliant mastery of human emotion, he is also referred to as a literary genius

                William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in Stratford where he was brought up. It is learnt that his father was a carpenter in a Weaving factory. He received his primary education from Stratford, and afterwards, he joined to a drama club from where he had started his career as a playwright. Afterwards, he had written many world-class books on English literature, out of which King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Measure for Measure are the greatest. In every one of his literary creations, he added the dimension of poetic diction, and thus he ornamented his literary stringency with full aspects of human problems and their solutions. His poem in English literature is unforgettable because he has brought the contrasts of feelings between man and nature. As has been reflected in Sonnet XXIX by William Shakespeare, a true love of his beloved with nature has been vividly contemplated in a significant manner. The poet thinks that his love for his beloved will never end. Even some changes may occur in nature, which always show the sequence of the transient trend of life. The influences on the changeability of nature over the earth are melancholy and transitory. Human beings are developed on the earth and flourish through some changes day by day after a short span of time, causing decay and destruction, he dies, and everything on earth fades away as a symbol of the transient growth of nature. The poet thinks that he has unlimited love towards his beloved, and this love is never changed as nature changes and develops and withers. The beauties on earth are temporary, and as such, a melancholic strain prevails in its every influence over the plants, environment and the situation that occurs after change. The earth is changing with the changes of nature, and his love cannot be changed, which is permanently bedded on integrity, peace and faith in his heart. The poet presents a true love, which is uncommon, but an illuminating conflagration will occur spontaneously.

               

                According to William Shakespeare, nature is encountered with an unbounded sequence of earthly objects, and beauteous outpourings occur in the mental attitude of the poet. To speak the truth, the poet has an immense love for his beloved and in exchange for anything it is pure and unparalleled. The poet envisages that due to changes in nature, his love will never be changed, it will be hidden forever. In this poem, the theme is ideally judged in terms of the allegorical meaning of real love and the purity of life. The poet's love is heavenly dedicated, which lies forever. It is neither perishable nor changeable. According to him, his perpetual and happy love always remains in his inward eye, which reveals the utmost sphere of livelihood. His life is without love, for his beloved does not show any significance of real life in that sense.

                There is no denying the fact that once there was discernment that brought about popular religion during the 16^th century in England. It was in a fastidious proliferated by the Tudor rulers to ensure the prolongation of their rule as the system of kingship was supposed to be fixed by the deity himself, where men’s willingness was fake and fabricated. This doctrine affirmed that the king was God-specified, self-governing and a direct representative of a supernatural being on earth. Therefore, under no state of affairs was the king to be aloof, put back as this throne appropriated on this would be alongside the strength of character of God. Once a king was named, he was to remain one until he died or by natural death, and even to step down from the kingship was not permissible.

                In his famous book, ‘Troilus and Cressida’ William Shakespeare verbalizes, “Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark, what discord follows” where he sought after to articulate explicitly that for the Elizabethans, the dominion was not minimally a well-designed role where it was a fundamental part of a pecking order predestined by God himself which accommodates the celestial, saintly, human being, mammal and materialistic world. Everything had its selected place in this progression. To dislocate was to provoke pandemonium. The king was God’s right to be heard on earth and whichever attempt to squeeze the throne from him would lead to mayhem and suffice it to pronounce that it was not some far-flung theory which subsequently several Shakespeare’s plays are apprehensive with the remove from power of kings – and that cataclysm perpetually tag along – is a manifestation of the implication of the impression, and of Elizabethan fretfulness about the chain to the queen.

                The Elizabethans would have found it easier said than done to comprehend Lear’s renunciation. Even of inferior quality, carving up the kingdom and thus generating scope for potential rivalry: such an accomplishment could not be tolerated by a people for whom the internecine bloodlettings of the wars of the Roses hang about as a folk reminiscence. Shakespeare’s social group would understand Lear’s tribulations: a worn-out, aged king with no son to succeed to his favourite daughter uncommitted. But they would have distinguished no answer but for the king to endure: God had placed him on the throne and, in the comprehensiveness of time, God would remove him. If they implicit Lear’s dilemma, they would recognise even better the chaos mechanism from his wrong-headed resolution.

               

                There is a supplementary delicate standpoint in which we have to view this premise of kingship. The play seems to point toward the idea that the altitude of the throne can distort the person who occupies it. Lear has been congregated for so long with adulation that he can no longer make a distinction between sincerity and deception. He has for so long been obeyed in every scrupulous detail that he cannot stand for the slightest delay in the observance of his wishes. That which in the young king might have been forthright and assertive has now degenerated into the vain, harsh and imperious. It is an inquiring feeling whether it occurs in the case of all leaders, rulers and kings. Perhaps, but what we know for certain is that Lear has to undergo an agonised flaking away of accumulated layers of insensitivity and obtuseness before finding himself. Would he have needed to do so if he had been a humble servant rather than a sovereign?  It seems by a hair's breadth likely. Is a king a sufferer as able-bodied as a ruler?

                Even supposing, misfortunes in King Lear shoot up to a paramount celestial height, the chronicles finds its pedigree in an awful status like run of the mill, which envisages the apprehension between parents and grown-up children, which prompts readers to be more intensive to have eagerness to know the situation ahead.  At its simplest, the play concerns itself with the expectations of aged parents and the differing responses of their adult children. Shakespeare’s Macbeth had no doubt about ‘that which should accompany old age’, which he clarifies as ‘tribute, devotion, submission’. King Lear would certainly say amen to that, although he would add gratitude. His antagonism with Cordelia stems not only from mortification and hurt pride, but also from rage at her apparent ungratefulness. As  he is progressively broken by Goneril and Regan, his torment resonates on this theme, and even until he begins to learn through suffering, Lear’s thoughts are for himself  of what his children’s obligations are to him, of what he has done for them and how it should be rewarded. The key problem is that both parents and children are confronting a time of changeover, of exchange of power and authority. The parents are in taking a rain check, the young are at the peak of their power and energy. We see two responses from the children. One, from Cordelia and Edgar, is to love and succour their parents, accept their faults, bear no grudge, and bide their time. The other, from Goneril, Regan and Edmond, is ruthless, self-centred, annoyed and heavy-handed. The old are past it, no more than an encumbrance and an obstruction. They must be hard-pressed aside and inheritance detained. The best expression of this comes from Edmond, in the words he attributes to Edgar:’ I have heard him of mountain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son and the son manages his revenue’. Lear, of course, receives similarly short shrift, and in scene iv, Goneril speaks repeatedly of his dotage. The point is driven home later by Regan. As his daughters strip him of his retinue, Lear brokenly points out,’ I gave you all’. The retort expresses well the philosophy of usurping. And in the nick of time, you bestow it, and as such, the fool drives home the point:

‘The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long

That it’s hard if the head is bitten off by its young’

                Lear, Gloucester and Kent cherish a conservative view in which family bonds, commitment, amazement and reverence for pecking order are paramount: Gloucester, surveying the crumbling of Lear’s world and his own, laments: “We have seen the best of our time, Edmond, Goneril and Regan are the hard-headed, clear-sighted progressive – modernists who have no time for antiquated ideas. They are of today and the future, ordering their lives and very much in charge of their fate. The conflicting attitudes of the children reach their apotheoses dramatically. Goneril and Regan combine to break their father; Edmond contributes to the blinding of Gloucester. Nothing will be allowed to stand in their way. A corresponding apotheosis restores the old values; when Edgar leads his blinded father to some retrieval of hope and happiness, when Cordelia reassures the bewildered Lear, they are not being obedient, not responding to any hierarchical imperative. They are simply expressing a love, loyalty and regard too strong to have been undermined by the rash misjudgment of their father.

                This straightforward fiction of two impulsive men, betrayed by self-interested progeny and redeemed by the feelings of affection for a wronged child, has a widespread significance. As children, we have all got to come to terms with our attitudes to our parents, to their and our shifting needs. As parents, we must brazen out the fact that our children will outgrow us and supersede us. There is no easy answer, no superficial ethics. Conceivably, however, we learn with Lear and Gloucester, Cordelia and Edgar, that the old must not anticipate receiving all, must continue to give, to realise to learn- and the young must hold out care for and respect for as long as we are concerned with or for craving to receive in question. Things cannot be hurried, for which it is universally noted that ripeness is all.

               

                Not only in King Lear, but he has written many tragic plays where he enlightened the problems, love and enmity of human beings. In Hamlet, he added the beauty of Hamlet with nature and supernatural aspects. In this book, he used many literary techniques like simile, metaphor and soliloquy with which he led his pen about Hamlet with unbounded courage and hardihood. When Hamlet came to learn the news of his father's death, he became amazing, and he was also surprised that his mother had married his uncle Claudius. By supernatural aspects of his father’s ghostly spirits, he learnt about the conspiracy of his uncle and mother, and as such, he promised to take revenge against the murder of his father. William Shakespeare very nicely represented the character of Hamlet, and finally, he became successful when Hamlet had his revenge at last against his uncle and mother.

               

                All the way through suffering, Lear learns a new ethical view of his life and human relationships with one another, specifically if the relation is framed with close human ties. According to him, it is a judgment nowhere in signal in early stages of the play, which develops in a mood of ruthless materialism, of that which can be counted and measured. Gloucester and Kent have a discussion of the sharing out of the kingdom; Lear wants his daughters to express the dimensions of their love; the actual number of knights becomes a crucial symbol of selfhood. A man, it appears, is what he owns, an expression of his belongings having been stressed by his daughters into justifying his need for a retinue. Lear’s speech,  beginning ‘O reason not the need’, is magnificently moved, but cracks down in confusion. He seems to be asserting that man needs superfluous items to mark him off from animals, but the line of thought will not hold. It is, in any case, a view that he will draw closer to discarding.

               

                It is throughout the storm that Lear loses his footing towards a conception of what a man really is, what his true needs are. From uncontrolled against charlatan, he turns to sympathy for the unrehearsed -‘meagre nude wretches’ before becoming one himself by dragging off his clothes in emulation of poor Tom. He, by his cosmopolitan outlook, enunciates through the world of surface impressions: he recognises and expresses that he is one of the lowliest.  Lear continues to learn of the keen necessity of honesty, sincerity, simplicity and openness. It is a theme which culminates in his reunion with Cordelia and particularly in his birds in the cage speech. The important thing is to be with those one loves and trusts, to seek and offer forgiveness as may be necessitated to make merry in each other's company. And regarding the justice of human beings, we find in King Lear that the wealthy and mighty don’t guarantee even-handed justice; those with the whip-hand of power and authority often abuse it. Considering Lear’s trial of his daughter’s affection, his disgusting punishment of Cordelia and Kent, the flaying of Lear and Gloucester by the newly installed high and mighty, and the cruel death of Cordelia. The demented trial of scene iii, act vi, somehow projects the deceptiveness of it all, while Lear’s eruption in scene IV against the rascal beadle and robes and furred gowns is a fulminating attack on evil motives virtually. Gloucester contributes to this understanding in that his blinding, by the rich and elevated, is a catalyst which simply attracts goodness from the ordinary servants and the old man who guides him. This is why, like Lear, he comes to see the importance of sharing affluence and ruination excess. The best certification of righteousness seems to lie not in setting one man over another, but in mutual sympathy and regard for each other's dignity and needs. As we are to conjecture that lusting after riches and belongings is eventually self-slaughter and severe death, Cornwall, Goneril, Regan, and Edmond seem to point to this. On the other hand, Lear and Gloucester- two old men who suffer and lose so much –seem in a sense to be triumphant, for they achieve some grasp of man’s need for outspokenness, justice, truth, absolution and love.

                In his literary creation, he had shown that being overambitious in life is a dangerous thing. In Julius Caesar, Brutus was an overambitious person, and he had a long-cherished desire to become a king overnight. But after killing the king Caesar, he had been cut into pieces, let alone being the king. Similarly, Macbeth was overambitious, but the consequence was very fatal. He had written many historic plays and romantic comedies. In all of his creations, he was second to none in creating history in English literature by his unbounded race towards the reform process of human defects and the maxim of nature.