Shakespeare

The Radio Orient station had organized a series of lectures under the title "The Inspired," in which a number of men of letters took part. It was intended to publish those lectures in a book, and for that reason only a few of them appeared in the press. Here is one of those lectures, never published before today:

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And of the master Shakespeare, what shall I say, when the minutes allotted me would scarcely suffice to enumerate his works and the names of those who have written about him?

A poet, actor, author, and English playwright who has occupied mankind for nearly four centuries, and their interest in him goes on increasing day by day; and I fear that dozens of generations will pass before a single man succeeds in understanding him as well as he, in but part of one generation, managed to understand all men.

As a creator he comes second in rank only to the Creator; as a builder, before all. And if in creation there is giving, and in giving there is love, then Shakespeare is he who gave the most, and loved the most!

The nineteenth century went so far in deifying him that some counted him above mankind, while others went to the opposite extreme in reaction and made of him, as they made of Homer, a name rather than a man: now he is Sheikh Isbir, now he is Bacon!

Historical fact, however, reconciles the two theories, and shows us that William Shakespeare, like other geniuses among men, stands on the frontier between men and gods!

The date of his birth is not known exactly, but what is certain is that he was baptized on the twenty-sixth of April 1564 and died fifty-two years later on the twenty-third of the month of April as well — which, in the opinion of the story-tellers among his historians, was his birthday!

His father was one of the notable figures of the village; he engaged in trade and farming and held certain municipal posts. His mother was the youngest sister among the eight daughters of the great farmer Robert Arden. In surroundings of this kind William should, by rights, have obtained a deep and comprehensive education, had not his father's financial circumstances declined, cutting him off from study and making of him, for a while, a herder of cattle... But he was not, it appears, a good herdsman, for when he was angry he would kill the calves, and when he was pleased he would deliver speeches and odes to them.

Yet that material crisis did not prevent him from marrying, at eighteen years of age, a girl eight years his senior. As for his haste in that adventure, it goes back to what may not be proclaimed before the public... a phenomenon in the history of genius worthy of study!...

After this marriage eight years passed over William during which he blackened the face of his respectable father: a drunkard, a gambler, a troublemaker of the first order. But God alone knows what our friend stored up of experience in that stretch of the turbulent Elizabethan age!

In the end he was forced to flee from the face of his creditors to London, where he was entrusted with guarding and tending horses at the door of one of the theaters. From there he rose step by step until he became a minor actor, then a great actor, then a playwright who baptized the theater with his name, then a poet for whom heaven envies us!

As for his theater, it would be a mistake, and a squandering of time, to expatiate on studying it and setting forth its merits and defects, saying with Jonson: it lacks art; and with Milton: it is a wild art... I say it is a mistake to begin with a play otherwise than by seeing it on the stage, for then we should be like one who eats the rose instead of smelling it...

Yet if we analyze him now as literature rather than as theater, we find in him, for all his shortcomings, a relative perfection, if the expression is sound. There is in him a richness which, if it does not all come from culture, comes from that obscure period Shakespeare passed after his marriage, storing up from life what yielded its first positive fruit: a comprehensiveness without limit and a power of deduction, an understanding of the corners of the human soul and its corridors, together with an instinctive genius for presenting ideas, emotions, characters, and events with a lavishness that grants art the freedom of life itself. Yet he rises and falls like every genius whose gift exceeds the craft of his art and his culture, and he runs to extremes in everything, with an astonishing power of balancing between opposites. He breaks away with novelty as far as the soul can break away, without ever cutting himself off from truth; and he penetrates into the heart of truth without touching it with the vulgarity of the commonplace. Every word of his is steeped in the feeling of love, beauty, and goodness, and in a thousand sweet feelings that men have not yet baptized with a name.

In his first plays he falls under the influence of the various schools, but in the play Richard III he begins to be himself, master of the great school of Shakespearean design and of the free verse of which he later became lord. There then passed over him a period of experiment among the genres: from a comedy of raillery in the play "Love's Labour's Lost" to a lyrical comedy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; from a lyrical tragedy in Romeo and Juliet to a lyrical history in Richard II, to a romantic blend of tragedy and comedy in the Two Gentlemen of Verona and in the immortal masterpiece of this kind, "The Merchant of Venice."

And he may come before us as a political idealist in the character of Brutus in the tragedy of Julius Caesar, or a cultural idealist in Hamlet; and at last the great Shakespeare appears, the dramatist beyond the bounds of description, in King Lear and Macbeth.

As for his poetry, it compels us, like his theater, to doubt the truth of what history tells us of the poverty of his culture, for it stands upon a lofty summit; and I — as I said in the introduction to al-Mawa'id by Salah Labaki — hold that poetry, like every human creation, comes into being only after humanity has grown complete in the gifted soul, and it does not grow complete without culture. For that edifice — the edifice of civilization, which has been man's concern ever since man existed — is built by the inspired, those whose souls have accompanied all the stages of humanity and then summed up, through themselves, nations and ages, so that if they suffer, a people suffers, and if they yearn, a generation yearns!

The edifice, meanwhile, is one: it rises and grows complete and remains one through all the difference of ages and the multiplicity of the modes of expression — poetry, painting, and music; science, philosophy, and conduct. Whatever of all this belongs to the core of truth is a stone of that edifice.

As for the stamp of the individual gift, the difference of age and region, and the change of the expressive genre — these may affect the luster of the stone, its measure, or its position, but they do not take it out of being a stone, and a stone in that self-same edifice.

We hear of schools in poetry — realist, symbolist, impressionist — and of doctrines in philosophy that demolish one another; we hear of one age of literature that differs from another age, and of one climate of thought that stands far from another; then we wait patiently upon time, and behold, all of it, rightly seen, is summed up in a single human treasure, which we usually call the classical, or the edifice of civilization as I have called it here — in it every art has a wing and every thought a corner, every age a course of masonry and every genius a stone.

The design, however, is one, created by the genius of humanity, not the genius of a man; and its building takes the whole lifetime of history, which is not generous even with the lifespans of geniuses. And how many are the stones the generations have cast down far from that edifice, because their bearer could not reach the topmost course, or because they came from outside the design! For a builder who has no ladder adds nothing to the edifice — nor does one who has reached the top of the ladder with no new stones in his hands.

Culture and talent are both necessary in the building of civilization.

How, then, can we doubt the culture of one who has in the edifice, like William Shakespeare, corners of alabaster and courses of marble!

And if I have tried to clothe this brief study in the simplest possible dress, it is for the sake of ease for the listeners. But I do not claim to have introduced anyone to Shakespeare, or to have known him myself. The trifling problems around him — how the scholars have studied them to satiety: the spelling of his name, the reality of his existence, the date of his birth, his errors of orthography, the authenticity of his portraits — on all these, volumes have been written; how much more, then, on his age, his life, his plays, and his poetry, which are what matter most?

Therefore I advise whoever wishes to enjoy what this great master has offered to the culture of man, and to its province of beauty in particular — I advise him to turn away from everything that has been and is being written about him, including this talk, and to read him calmly and attentively, time after time, and times after times, until he finds his way to the keys of his genius; then he will be assured a constructive delight, renewed every day to the end of his life, though his life should rival eternity!