Bard's Craft

                                  The Craft of The Bard

What more pleasure than to set upon a project to know the Bard more, when he is going to be 450 on 23^rd April, 2014.  In my attempt as a reader and celebrator of literature, I am devoting the coming 2 years to the study of William Shakespeare and his works.  I began the year by revisiting his 154 sonnets. The singing of the Shakespearean sonnet is an ongoing delight with me still, and moreover it is too short a time, since I began, to have devoured them all. But rather than just indulging in one genre of his writings I am also on to his plays. The four great tragedies:  King Lear, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth, have the greatest following, and I am with Macbeth this season.

The triumph of the Macbeth lies in the portrayal of Macbeth as a Dostoyevskian character, an Aristotellian tragic hero, with his penchant for self-reflection.  He is a tragic hero indeed, because we, the audience, can see ourselves in him. The play has startling power and is akin to a modern work of art with its thick, poetic language and fast-moving pace, which makes it feel like a modern political thriller. The weird sisters, evil and grotesque, add darkness, mystery and doom to the play.  The powerful imagery is steeped in blood, the supernatural and shafts of conscience warring with serpents of desire.

Macbeth is introduced as a brave warrior, bathed in a bloodbath. He slays the enemy mercilessly and wins the war for his king, King  Duncan. He is a loyal subject to the monarch, a good friend to Banqo and lover and friend to his wife.  Lady Macbeth herself illustrates that Macbeth’s nature is "... too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness/To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great/Art not without ambition, but without/The illness should attend it." A compassionate, intelligent, honorable man whose dormant ambition ignites after listening to the prophesy of the weird sisters "Thane of Glamis!", "Thane of Cawdor!" and "King of Scotland hereafter". Macbeth’s grandeur is then suffused with acts of murder; he commits regicide propelled by his wife, Lady Macbeth.  Our awareness Macbeth’s grandeur  at the onset of the drama is important when we later witness his downfall and mental decay to the point where his persona, his rule and dear wife, all degenerate into the abyss of disease, instability, psychological trauma and finally death. Macbeth is a potent rendition of a tragic hero, the epitome of good and bad. Course of events and a flaw in his character makes him befriend the devil, and therein begin his downfall. The soliloquies, interior monologues give the readers access to his inner turmoil and descent into the realms of the underworld. We identify with him closely; ambitious, yet ambiguous; warring persistently with his conscience to achieve his desires. His strife is our strife and in his death we sympathesize and stand by him.

It is when we read the sources of Macbeth, that we get a peek into the genius of the Bard. It makes real interesting study to compare the sources and what Shakespeare finally achieved after altering and mixing historical records of Scottish period from the 11^th century.  The exercise then turns into a writing class – How to craft a dramatic, enthralling  story  from a raw material of history and fact.  Shakespeare's chief source for Macbeth was Holinshed's Chronicles (Macbeth), who based his account of Scotland's history, and Macbeth's in particular, on the Scotorum Historiae, written in 1527 by Hector Boece. Other minor sources contributed to Shakespeare's dramatic version of history, including Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, and Daemonologie, written in 1599 by King James. The Bard wrote the play during the reign of James I from Scotland in the early 17^th century , to hail the king’s Scottish ancestry, his interest in witchcraft, and the supremacy of Kings. He altered the character sketches and intermixed stories of periods of time, to render a dramatic account of a tragic hero, (original Lord Macbeth in Scottish history kills a weak and scrupulous King Duncan, to rule admirably for a decade, before he is replaced by Malcolm the heir to King Duncun).  

The nymphs and angels were reworked by the Bard into witches based on writings on witchcraft of the times and by the king himself.  They are grotesque wiry women but bearded , dole out a bizarre rhymed speech which makes  them seem ridiculous, but the undertone of doom is irreplaceable. They are the harbingers of  the supernatural and fate. Shakespeare has them speak in rhyming couplets throughout “Double, double, toil and trouble, / Fire burn and cauldron bubble” which separates them from the other characters, who mostly speak in blank verse. Despite their resemblance to the Fates of Greek mythology, they are the most dangerous characters in the play, found in the intersections of the human and the outer world, wickedly toying with human lives. Reading the play, we are not really helped in deciphering them, but their sure presence and meddling with the tragic hero (with whom we identify) imbues the story with layers of uncomprehending ominous darkness and palpable dread.
Reading his writings is not just about another story, but lessons in fiction writing, human psychology, the cosmic consciousness, poetic language and the Bard himself.  I feel closer to him every time I read him.
Watch out this space for more interludes with the Bard!