Charles Lamb presents a relationship he has noticed in
reviews of his day, two centuries after the first performances of Shakespeare’s
plays, which create a relationship between the texts of those plays, the poetry
that is, and the celebrated performers of the plays. He calls this relationship
of actor to text, “the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a
place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities” (313). The poetry, Lamb
is surprised to find, is as much a product of its sound and presentation as it
is of its text and idea.
Lamb reminds us of a basic fact about poetry that was
inherent from its creation in the folk life of the first poetry collections. We
can readily interpret this duality of poetic intention in the collections made
by the Japanese monk Dogen in medieval Japan (information given in the work of
Steven Heine, such as 1997.) Dogen collected both sound pieces, haiku, meant as
sound pieces or performances, as well as pieces meant for pure thought, such as
koans, small parables told in a form that blended poetics with prosody – prose poems
that present a paradoxical idea to a philosophical initiate. Heine, through the
study of Dogen, shows that the purpose of poetry has a two-fold character,
sound oriented and idea oriented.
Lamb, in his realization of the actor’s role in the validity
of Shakespeare, finds that this same two-fold purpose is present in the poetry
of the Western world, at least inasmuch as it coincides with drama in verse.
Lamb’s purpose, in his essay, is to speak to inherent artistry in an attempt to
define what that term – inherent artistry – means. In Lamb’s words, he searches
for “what connection that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man,
which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks of the eye and
the ear, which a player…can easily compass” (314).
The two-fold nature of poetry shown in juxtaposed
circumstances such as Dogen and Shakespeare, lends a validity to the aesthetics
of prose-poems as an equal artistry to poems meant to be heard, complete with
their proficiency in meter and sound. Lamb further eschews the commonplace
practice of his day to subordinate the idea-orientation of a poem through a
heralding of its memorization and performance: “I confess myself utterly unable
to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning ‘To be, or not to
be,’ or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled
and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its
living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a
perfect dead member” (315-316).To Lamb, the idea behind the “To be or not to be”
poem is lost to the dominance of its performance quotient. This trend of his
society towards the reception of Shakespeare ignores the reality of the
excellence of Shakespeare’s poems, poems full of the aesthetic beauty of idea.
Today, we continue to define what the term “inherent
artistry” means. By looking to Lamb, as well as to Dogen and other folk-based
collectors or the earliest written poetic fragments, we can go beyond the structuralist
model that defines performance and modernism, even in its surrealist aspects.
We can look to the idea of the words and define the poem by that idea rather
than simply a collection of beats and afterbeats and subjectively beautiful
melodies.
__________
References
Heine,
Steven. “Putting the `fox’ Back in the `wild Fox Koan’: The Intersection of
Philosophical and Popular.” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 56, no. 2, Dec. 1996, p. 257. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.2307/2719401. p. 258.
Lamb, Charles. “On the
Tragedies of Shakespeare [sic].” English Essays from Sir Philip Sydney to Macauley. The Harvard Classics. Vol. 27. New
York: Collier & Son 1910. 311-331.
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