Shakespeare will always inspire

Literature is not just words within hard bound covers, but a length of yarn that weaves our lives with that of reality, dreams, happiness or sorrow. There have been numerous writers for decades but no one has been able to push Shakespeare off his perch. Despite writers like Christopher Marlowe and Bernard Shaw, the Bard of Avon will never gather dust on forgotten shelves in libraries. No one can bethink his writings to be subliminal and no vitriolic attack on his genius will ever be able to knock him off his power pyramid.

My ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ is meticulously marked with jottings that came to mind as I read through his plays in college. His rhetoric tugs at my heart and mind simultaneously. His beautifully woven words can correlate to the ordinary lives of everyone.

Most often in the morning, these words spoken by Macbeth come to my mind, “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

Who else could have personified ‘sleep’ so well and no one other than us could relate to it better than the exhausted souls in Dubai, who are ready to hit the bed every night to rejuvenate and wake up to another day!

You can find a ‘Lady Macbeth’ in almost every household ambitiously goading her husband to earn more in order to buy that beautiful house. The oratory skills of Mark Antony, from Julius Caesar made me a great fan of his. The play could be an eye opener for many politicians in today’s world. Many of us still use the ‘mouse trap’ idea from Hamlet to catch a conniving relative red handed, or we could also bear in mind the shrewdness that Portia used to deal with Shylock and use the same to arm-twist through life at work and also at play!

Don’t many of us stop by Tarot card readers to check our fortune and then are led astray by their predictions? Again, a lot lessons are to be learnt from Macbeth and Julius Caesar! Similarly, the younger generation, too, could learn from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and look at love in a less practical manner.

2016 is celebrated as the 400th anniversary of the death of the Bard of Avon and it was his sanguine and energetic temperament that made him foresee the world in the past, present and will continue to do so in the future.

— The reader is an Indian teacher based in Dubai