| Homage
to Shakespeare
Iqbal’s Urdu poem
‘Shakespeare’ (see Chapter
45 in A Novel of Reality) was written between
1910 and 1916. It was first printed in A Book of Homage
to Shakespeare (1916), got included in the third book of
Iqbal’s poetry, The Call
of the Marching Bell (1924), and now adorns a commemorative
plaque in the Birthplace Museum, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.
Consisting of seven
couplets — totaling fourteen lines, like a Shakespearean
sonnet — the poem can be read in several different
ways. It may be interesting to even draw a parallel between
the seven couplets of the poem and the career of William
Shakespeare (1564-1616):
- London stage in the Elizabethan
age was a place of notoriety. For a genius like Shakespeare
to go there was rather like the fly walking into the
spider’s parlor or Adam getting tempted by Satan.
Yet, the river flowing in mud mirrors the glow of dawn
that adorns the sky and the dumb silence of the evening
is the opposite of the beautiful song for which it serves
as a mirror.
- Having found a mirror to his soul
in the least likely place, Shakespeare mastered the
craft so well that his own masterpiece and not the general
conditions of the theater in his age became his next
mirror: just as the spring finds a mirror in its own
creation, the rose-leaf, and so on.
- In the list of the four mirrors
that appear next, (a) Truth has a mirror in (b) Beauty
which has a mirror in (c) human heart, which in turn
is mirrored by (d) Shakespeare’s verse. Where
does Shakespeare’s verse find a mirror for itself?
Quite possibly, it does in Truth itself, since that
is the only item in the list of four which has not been
described as a mirror to anything else.
- This would also explain how Shakespeare
could rethink the thought of Divine Creation: his drama
laid bare the same “outward and inward forces
of the universe” which are being revealed here
again. Hence the art would have already found perfection
in the drama of Shakespeare even if the present Garden
was never to be built – Was your luminous nature
the goal of Life?
- Since his craft consisted of the
same principles that sustain the very fabric of life,
the unity of imagination he forged between the high
and the low by making the queen and the pauper watch
the same play was real. Freedom of imagination, equality
of imagination and brotherhood of imagination were followed
by freedom, equality and brotherhood as real ideals
in the real world two hundred years later. That’s
when attention was diverted fully on him but most traces
of his biography had vanished by then, so that some
even doubted if he was the man who actually wrote the
plays attributed to him – they could only see
the sun hidden in its own radiance.
- Like Nezami before him and the
Poet afterwards, Shakespeare also foresaw the future.
At least from the vintage point in the Garden it seems
as if he could tell that his civilization would yield
two types of products after him. The first type would
be a magic similar to his, and the second the drunken
fantasy of imperialism. In the colonies, the spirit
of freedom groaning under native tyrannies for centuries
would aspire to inherit the liberating effect of Shakespeare
as its own. Slave mentality produced by centuries of
native tyrannies would want to inherit earth-rooted
territorialism from the drunken master of the West.
For Iqbal, personalities like likes of Mirza Ghalib,
Sir Syed and Mir Hasan personified the native spirit
of freedom while the newborn Indian nationalism represented
the slave mentality. Together with the drunken masters
of the West, they are only too willing to send back
the Joseph of the West to the prison but it seems as
if Shakespeare, hidden from the eyes of the world in
his own times, had seen the brave new world exposed
and bare several centuries ahead.
- Like Shakespeare, Iqbal himself
is now going to hide away from the world now, and although
he too can foresee the shape of things to come, he declares
that masters of Shakespeare’s caliber have ceased
to appear anymore since their purpose in history has
been served: Nature guards its mysteries so jealously
it will never again create one who knows so many secrets.
Thus with a graceful courtesy, he has left the presiding
chair for the playwright on the very eve of his own
ministry as a prophet of Nature’s secrets. His
gesture has declared Shakespeare a counterpart of Rumi
in the West.
|
Special
thanks to Iqbal Academy Pakistan
