KARACHI: One doesn’t know how the Bard would have reacted if he had attended the discussion on Shakespeare rules! But why? at T2F on Thursday evening, but the way the two scholars, Dr Syed Nomanul Haq and Dr Framji Minwalla, went about expressing their fondness for the genius brought to mind a line from King Lear: ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’

Noted historian Dr Haq began the conversation by saying “Shakespeare is so much in my blood, in my veins” and described the playwright and poet as someone whose art was the process of creating a parallel, autonomous and sovereign universe which had its own grammar, own poetics. He distinguished between versification and poetry, suggesting the former could be achieved through rhyming while the latter was a departure from that point onwards.

Dr Haq said there were many elements in Shakespeare’s work which could be discussed but emphasised on three. The first was the sound pattern that he created where you had a string of multisyllabic words followed by a string of monosyllabic words. Then there was the striking visual element in his poetry, finally followed by the performance aspect of it. In that context he quoted a few lines from Romeo and Juliet:

“Here’s much to do with hate but more with love.

Why then. O brawling love. O loving hate.

O heavy lightness, serious vanity.

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms.”

Dr Minwalla, who is the chair of the department of social sciences and liberal arts at the IBA, talked about Shakespeare with reference to the tradition of theatre and drama. He said he was the greatest playwright in every tradition, translated in every language imaginable on earth. He primarily wrote for a group of actors and knew the limitations of his stage. He wrote incredible poetry, so much so that if you took out his poetry, you’d be left with pedestrian, Bollywood plots. As English society was in transition (from the mediaeval to the Renaissance period), he added to English vocabulary by inventing between 15,000 and 18,000 words. His plays were complete and full creations, and translating them was a challenge.

Dr Haq at that juncture tried to steer the discussion away from a biographical sketch of the writer to his content and technique. He touched upon the ‘ambiguity’ that existed in his work, to which Dr Minwalla responded by reading out the famous lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

Continuing with the subject of ambiguity, Dr Haq pointed out the same quality in Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories. He said to say that Manto foresaw what would happen to Pakistan was an act of undermining his talent. He said when he (Mr Haq) first felt the pangs of romance, Shakespeare was his companion, so was Ghalib. This made him speak on the use of the metaphor in both Shakespeare and Ghalib’s works. He argued that Shakespeare would move from the universal to the specific, whereas Ghalib began by being specific to draw a universal principle.

To illustrate his standpoint, Dr Haq recited some lines from Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ and inferred what the poet dealt with was universal — human longings, yearnings, the tendency to destroy, to love etc — which was his enduring legacy. He seemed so moved by the lines he had read that he suggested he’d like to read Shakespeare in solitude, not in public.

Dr Minwalla agreed with him on that point in the sense that the Romantics — Byron, Wordsworth — also liked to read Shakespeare in solitude allowing his plays and poems to ‘activate their imagination’. But, he added, Shakespeare wrote for actors and wanted his actors to be better at what they did.

Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2015

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