Shakespearean Riddle

Shakespearean Riddle

- Indira Parthasarathy

A good deal has been written about the plays by Shakespeare, which could fill the shelves of several libraries, but not much has been told about his sonnets. Like, as in the case of our own Subramania Bharati, whose poems have drawn much attention more than his equally illuminating prose works.

I must confess I started reading Shakespeare’s sonnets much later as suggested by one of my literary friends in Delhi. To my great surprise, I found that Shakespeare’s sonnets have a close resemblance to the Tamil ‘akam’ (interior) poems of the Sangam era. The sonnets can be interpreted as ‘drama’. They have action and heroes. The action consists of lyrical sequences, which slowly mount to tragedy. There are three characters, a man, a youth and a woman. They go through all stages of love, physical infatuation, sentimental odysseys, separation, infidelity and death.

In Tamil akam poetry also there are three main characters—the hero, heroine and the heroine’s alter ego, an inseparable female companion. All aspects of love are exhaustively studied in these poems, except, true to Tamil culture, the heroine can never be shown as given to faithlessness!