Bearding the Bard

This is the closest thing to displacing God from heaven. If a great deal of ink is currently being spilt, in anger, angst and sorrow, over Cambridge University8217;s purported move to scrap the paper on William Shakespeare in its English Tripos syllabus, it is perfectly justifiable. One man of letters from Leeds even felt constrained to observe that 8220;there is something rotten at Cambridge8221;. He is in utter anguish over the crude attempts of Cambridge dons to make Shakespeare 8220;dwarf-like8221;, and he is clearly not alone. If God does not go quietly into the night neither, surely, does the Bard. To make him rub shoulders with the likes of Kit Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in a section blandly termed 8220;Renaissance literature8221;, as Cambridge University may well choose to do, is for the dyed-in-the-wool Shakespearewallah not just preposterous, but blasphemous to boot. Is nothing sacrosanct in these Godless, Bardless times, they cry out in despair.

It8217;s a plaint that will find an echo anywhere in the English-speaking world, where children grow up thinking, as H.C. Bunner put it, Shake was a dramatist of note/He lived by writing things to quote. It was this knack of having said with such felicitous ease what all of humanity 8212; king or beggar; Shylock or Cleopatra 8212; has felt at one time or the other but never quite expressed, that made Old William very special. Times changed of course, poets, dramatists, essayists came and went, but through four centuries and more Shakespeare continued to play to packed houses. Last year even that den of illiteracy that goes by the name of Hollywood discovered the lure of the man and heaped high praise and the Oscar on a film that purported to reconstruct his love life. Of course Ralph Fiennes8217;s energetic portrayal of the young Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, who spits on a quill and writes divine stuff at a furious pace helped immensely in keeping the flame alive. Not that a man, whom many consider the greatestfigure in the western world of the last millennium, needs much assistance to remain relevant.

As for Cambridge University and its purported move to 8220;downgrade, demote and diminish8221; Shakespeare, perhaps it was only following the lead set by India8217;s own institutions of learning which thought nothing of banishing Shakespeare from its school English literature curricula several years ago. They did this either by pretending he didn8217;t exist or getting their hatchet men to murder him through ham-handed attempts to 8220;abridge8221; his work. What Shakespeare himself would have thought of this chopping and changing, is of course, in the realm of speculation. Would he have chosen, like Prospero, to take it in his stride like a true philosopher, break his magic wand and retreat into oblivion for ever, or would he have whispered in utter sadness his own lines to himself: Like a dull actor now/I have forgot my part, and I am out,/ Even to a full disgrace.