मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, April 29, 2021

प्लेग, शेक्सपिअर, आणि वर्तमान ....What's "like the tokened pestilence"?

 James Shapiro हे त्यांच्या गाजलेल्या 'The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606' ह्या पुस्तकात प्लेगचा कसा परिणाम १७व्या शतकाच्या सुरवातीला इंग्लंडमधील समाजावर आणि नाटकांवर झाला याची १४व्या, 'प्लेग' नावाच्या,  प्रकरणात चर्चा करतात. 

हे पुस्तक लिहले गेले २०१५ साली आणि मी वाचतोय २०२१ साली त्यामुळे ते प्रकरण वर्तमानातील घटनांमुळे मला खूप अस्वस्थ करते. 

त्यातील काही गोष्टी उद्धृत करतो:

In late July 1606, in the midst of a thrilling theatrical season that included what may well be the finest group of new plays ever staged, the King’s Men lowered their flag at the Globe and locked their playhouse doors. Plague had returned to London.

In any case, by late July 1606, with the number of plague deaths well over that figure and rising week by week, public playing was finished, for the summer at least. 

To reduce the size of crowds, funeral attendance was limited to six, including the pallbearers and minister, though these and other rules were often ignored. 

The councilors had complained that too many Londoners were washing off the red crosses painted over the doors of infected households; the Lord Mayor promised that steps would be taken to use oil-based rather than water-based paint to prevent that. 

The theater, which provides such insight into almost every other aspect of daily life, disappoints when it comes to plague. Dramatists of the day delved into almost every troubling or taboo subject; playgoers saw rape victims stagger onstage and flinched as throats were slit and eyes gouged out. But one thing they never saw depicted were plague victims or their symptoms. Even a passing mention of plague is rare. Was this because it was bad for business to remind playgoers packed into the theaters of the risks of transmitting disease or because a traumatized culture simply couldn’t deal with it? Glancing allusions to plague’s devastation in Shakespeare’s works, when they do appear, are that much more striking. The most haunting is surely the dense one in Macbeth that alludes to the ringing of church bells for the dead and dying, so incessant that people no longer ask for whom the bells toll. 

आता शेवटचा आणखी एक परिच्छेद पहा:

Four centuries later, we have lost much of the shock audiences must have felt when hearing a furious Lear call his eldest daughter, Goneril, a “plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my / Corrupted blood” (7.381–82) or when in Antony and Cleopatra, a soldier, asked which side is winning, replies that the situation is hopeless, “like the tokened pestilence, / Where death is sure” (3.10.9–10). For playgoers in 1606, all too familiar with plague sores and God’s tokens, these terrifying images were more than metaphoric and more terrifying than they can ever be for us.

आज २०२१ मध्ये मात्र हे म्हणता येणार नाही. ६ वर्षांत इंग्लंडमधील आणि इतरत्र जग प्रचंड बदलेले आहे. कोविडच्या रुपाने आपल्याला आजवरच्या सर्व साथींच्या रोगाचा एक प्रमुख बघायला मिळाला आहे. त्यामुळे शेक्सपिअर च्या नाटकातील प्लेग आजच्या मानव जातीला जास्त खोलवर जाणवेल ... 


“Lord Have Mercy on Us,” from Thomas Dekker, A Rod for Runawayes (1625)

तळटीप :

वि. वा. शिरवाडकर, 'नटसम्राट', अंक पहिला, १९७१-२०११:

"... जर तुम्हीच ओतलं असेल कृतघ्नतेचें जहर 

जर या कारट्यांच्या काळजामध्ये ..." ... अशा संवादामध्ये “plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my / Corrupted blood” (7.381–82) ह्याची मजा अजिबात नाही!

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