By implication the title of this book may be suggestive of the influence of the Bhagavadgita on Shakespeare but there is no verifiable evidence that Shakespeare had read the Gita. There are no direct echoes of this great Indian scripture in Shakespeare as we Ind in William Blake, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle TS Eliot, E.M.forster and the American writers and philosophers such as R.W.Emerson and H.D. Thoreau. Shakespeare was born in 156-4 and died in 1616 and the first translation of the Gita to introduce it to the Western world was made by Charles Wilkins (1750-1833) in English which was published in 1785. Later on it was translated into about seventy f've world languages. In English alone more than three hundred translations were made. However, there is a historical record of its first translation in old Javanese language. In the reign of Sri Vijaya (7th to 12th cen.A.D.) India and Java were politically one and the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (the Gita is a part of this epic) were translated in Javanese language.
While I was teaching Shakespeare's tragedies and his last plays to the students of Postgraduate Department, I came across evidences of certain echoes of the Gita in them. I had written an article Echoes of Bhagavad Gita in The Tempst (It was published in the Ranchi University Journal of English Studies, 2002) which I have included in my conclusion. In the whole body of the book my attempt has been to show the deviations of the tragic protagonists of Shakespeare from the ways of the art of living discussed and elaborated by Lord Krishna in the Gita. The Gita teaches how to live and die as a human being but the tragic protagonists of Shakespeare do not know either how to live and how to die.
At the outset I would like to clarify that the present study is an interpretation rather than a criticism based on certain literary critical tools. It is purely a thematic Indian appreciation of Shakespeare's major tragedies keeping the views of the Gita in mind. The vision in the tragedies has been kept intact but the angles of perception and attitudes are purely Oriental. G Wilson knight favours interpretation rather than criticism of Shakespeare. For this well-known critic on Shakespeare "criticism is a judgment of vision, interpretation is a reconstruction of vision" Interpretation has greater freedom than criticism. The critic elaborates:
"Criticism to me suggests a certain process of deliberately objectifying the work under consideration, the comparison of it with other similar works in order especially to show in what respects it surpasses, or falls short of, those works, the dividing its 'good' from its 'bad'; and, finally, a formal judgment as to its lasting validity Interpretation', on the contrary, tends to merge into the work it analyses, it attempts, as far as possible, to understand its subject in the light of its own nature, employing external reference, if at all, only as preliminary to understanding, it avoids discussion of merits, and, since its existence depends entirely on its original acceptance of the validity of the poetic unit which it claims, in some measure, to translate into discursive reasoning, it can recognize no division of 'good' from 'bad"
Can an Indian appreciate Shakespeare?
Shakespeare's tragedies are prescribed in all the universities and even in colleges and schools in India. Mostly the Indian teachers and students enter into Shakespeare through the doors and windows set by the British and now American critics. A. C. Bradley, Edward Dowden, L. C. Knight, Wilson Knight, Dr Johnson, S.T. Coleridge, Harold C. Goddard, John F Danby and Lily B Campbell are still their guides with their torches for them to look into the mind and art in Shakespeare' s tragedies. The question is how long we should read Shakespeare through them? The answer will be, till we understand and express him without them. The present brief work is an humble attempt to read and understand Shakespeare's major tragedies purely as an Indian.
response in Indian ways. There are some miscalculations about appreciations of Shakespeare by the foreigners including Indians.
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