SHAKESPEARE AS A DRAMATIC ARTIST

A man of genius is no magic being suddenly leaping out of the deep. On

the contrary, he is an immaculate product of the age, to whose making his
contemporaries and predecessors alike contribute without any restraint. To him,
the past is not past, but it bears a heavenly torch to expose the present and the faint
contour of the future. Shakespeare answers all these conditions as a man of genius.

Shakespeare was a social being in the truest sense, having all his sense
organs always on the alert. The human life and nature, and the go of the world were
like an open book to him. So, he could create such characters in his plays as who
were no less than the people around him. He had an intimate knowledge of the life
and nature, thoughts and feelings, weal and woe, manners and language of the
people belonging to the different strata of the society; and he shaped the characters
of his plays accordingly. His characters are not merely “type” characters – they are,
on the contrary, really living - really human. His SHYLOCK does not typify or
symbolize “the Usurer” or “the Jew” but he is primarily a human being, and so he
cannot forget his dead wife LEAH, who gave him a ring of turquoise when he was a
bachelor. Thus Shakespeare was a seer and interpreter of human life.

Shakespeare was endowed with Coleridge called “….plastic power”, that

is , the power of creative imagination capable of uniting and moulding different raw
ingredients into forms and shapes. And his work of creation was marked with
wonderful precision and conciseness of expression without sacrificing the truth of
the substance expressed. So, he did not present Shylock on the stage lamenting for
his daughter who had run awaywith her father’s ducats, but made Salanio tell the
audience all about it in few words – and to what a great effect.

Shakespeare’s diction, though a bit loose in his earlier works became

more and more compact as he grew in years, and, during the fourth stage, after
HAMLET, he was at his height. He could, as Shaw has pointed out , “invest all this
world with a magical garment of words to transfigure us and uplift our souls till
earthen flowers into a million heavens”. But he did not attain this power all at once.
His work shows a gradual development of genius. He had no mannerism in his style,
his rhetoric was only occasionally overcharged, yet his style was amazingly flexible,
its texture exquisitely beautiful.

To conclude, even so many years after his death the excellence of

Shakespeare remains unapproachable and unchallenged . His plays have even a
wider range of influence than what the BIBLE has, in as much as the BIBLE governs
only the Christian world whilst Shakespeare’s plays guide peoples of all creeds and
climes.