Reviews

Heywood (A Prose Shakespeare) by M. V. Rama Sarma, M. A., ph. D. (Wales), Professor and Head of the Department of English, Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, India. Published by Blackie & Son Ltd., Glasgow & London. Pp. 155. Price Rs. 5 or Sh. 7/6.

The citizen play–of which the domestic drama is a segment–belongs properly to the native tradition in British drama, and Dekker, Heywood and Ben Jonson were among its most consistent practitioners. The word ‘citizen’ was a technical name given to a special group of people, who acquired their ‘freedom’ from the city after seven years of hard apprenticeship and it was these people that formed the so-called middle class of Elizabethan or Jacobean England. The purpose of the three dramatists–Dekker, Heywood and Jonson–was to present the life of this class in vivid detail, although their angles of vision and consequently their treatment varied. Broadly speaking, Dekker and Heywood belong to the romantic stream, while Jonson was the protagonist of the satiric type. The ‘citizen’, however, is as much present in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair as in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and one can ill afford to omit a play like Edward IV when one talks about domestic drama with A Woman Killed With Kindness in mind. But, of course, critical categories are largely devices of convenience.

Heywood was a ‘journeyman-dramatist’ with a miscellaneous career. He veered between play-acting and play-patching for quite some time, and it was in 1596 that there was the first mention of a ‘bocke’ by him. He claimed to be the author of as many as two hundred and twenty plays, and tried his hand at diverse dramatic types: classical plays and chronicle plays, domestic plays and romantic plays, plays on current events and pageants for the Lord Mayor’s Shows.

Professor Rama Sarma, however, makes it clear in the introductory chapter that he is concerned only with a few ‘indisputable plays’ of Heywood and his aim is to show the affinity between Shakespeare and the prose Shakespeare–as Lamb called Heywood–in ‘some of the dramatic practices’.

In the second chapter, the author discusses the nature and origin of the domestic drama, with its stress on the normal life ofthe ordinary people, as against the tragedy with its ‘horrors’ and the comedy with its ‘types’. The common theme is family honour. The husband suddenly discovers horns on his head, and how is he to deal with the guilty? The time-honoured solution is, of course, murder, but it is here that the domestic drama differs from the usual pattern and constitutes an ‘unquestioned contribution of the English stage.’ The guilty are treated with sympathy and given a chance to repent. This moral earnestness pervades the whole of the domestic drama.

The third chapter is addressed to an examination of the domestic plays of Heywood. The author examines A Woman Killed With Kindness, The English Traveller, The Wise Woman of Hogsdon and The Fair Maid of the West: domestic discord is presented in varying intensities in the first two, the third deals with superstition, and in the last there are quite a few ‘domestic’ scenes, although the play is a blend of romance and realism.

A Woman Killed With Kindness is Heywood’s undoubted masterpiece, and so the fourth chapter is appropriately devoted to this single play. The author convincingly argues that the main plot and the sub-plot are ably dove-tailed and that they actually run on parellel lines. Having thus met the usual critical opinion about the construction of the play, the author proceeds to say that Heywood handles the theme of illicit love with ‘sensitiveness, understanding and even sympathy.’ He then discusses the seduction scene from the theological point of view, in terms of the conflict between free will and predestination. The moral earnestness of Heywood is unmistakable–his Mrs. Frankford could easily be a Francois Mauriac heroine–but one wonders whether the scene should be necessarily viewed theologically. The conflict can as well be psychological, and what is called predestination may actually be passion superseding reason. Even this view does not detract from the value of the character, since her final penitence anyway redeems Mrs. Frankford.

The fifth chapter is a study of A Woman and Othello. It is quite likely, as the author suggests, that the one might have lent the cue for the other. The sixth chapter again is a discussion of Othello, A Woman and Love’s sacrifice. While Shakespeare is in favour of romantic love, Ford presents love without ‘degree’ and deals with ‘abnormal sex cravings and incestuous relationships’. Heywood, finally, is a moralist and the essential peace of domestic life is his concern.

In the seventh chapter, the author proceeds to discuss the homiletic tradition in Heywood’s plays. ‘Order’ is honoured and family relationships are respected. The quality of mercy is never strained and even lust–as in the case of Susan and Sir Francis in A Woman–is transformed into love. Even such a ‘white devil’ as Mrs. Wincott in The English Traveller finally qualifies for grace.

The eighth and ninth chapters are devoted to a study of the scenes of recognition and characterisation respectively in Shakespeare and Heywood. Although, in both these respects, Shakespeare gets an easy walk-over, Professor Sarma tries to show that Heywood exhibits a keen and sympathetic understanding of human nature.

Professor Rama Sarma has packed a good deel of scholarship and perceptive criticism into a relatively slender volume. His powers of argument and analysis are excellent, and he does not cumber his point with needless documentation. The style too is effective and has a gusto all its own. The book brings into perspective an important aspect of Heywood’s work and illumines a facet of Jacobean drama, and deserves the careful attention of all students of English drama.
–L. S. R. KRISHNA SASTRY

Shankara’s Hymn to Shiva: Text in Devanagari and Roman and Translation with an English Introduction and Commentary by Dr. T. M. P. Mahadevan. Published by Ganesh & Co. P. Ltd., Madras-17. Price Rs. 2.

Dr. T. M. P. Mahadevan is a philosopher of international reputation. He is a Professor of Philosophy in the University of Madras. He has made a special study of the Advaita Vedanta of Sri Shankaracharya and has expounded the Advaita Philosophy in his books and in his articles with great clarity and conviction.

This book Shankara’s Hymn to Shiva is a well-known poem by the Great Sri Shankaracharya in praise of Lord Siva and is justly styled as Sivananda Lahari, which means the flood of Shiva Bliss. It is with the bliss that is Shiva that the mind must be filled. Dr. Mahadevan has given us a fairly accurate and good translation of the hundred verses of this poem.
In the 98th verse the poet makes an offering of the whole poem to the Lord as one who offers his daughter in marriage to the bridegroom he has chosen. The poem is conceived as a young girl with all good ornaments. The word for ornaments in Sanskrit is “Alankara” which also means figures of speech. The girl has a graceful gait for which term inSanskrit is ‘pada’; and ‘pada’ has also the meaning of words. Therefore, in regard to the poem, it means that the poem consists of several words. The bride is of a very good character. The word “Vritta” in Sanskrit also means meters; and in respect of the poem, it means “good meters”. In this way, he has used in the poem apposite words denoting the characteristics of a good poem and also of a daughter. This description of the poem given by himself will be appreciated by all as a true and faithful description of the poem.

The characteristic of Shankara is that even in his devotional hymns, he adverts to the truth underlying the rituals and the symbology implied in the rituals. The flowers that are given as an offering in the worship of the Lord truly represent the devotion of the heart of the devotee.

In the 9th verse, he deprecates the unnecessary effort on the part of the devotee to gather flowers when he can offer the flower of his heart to Shiva in love and in happiness. That flower, he says, is the single Heart-Lotus. By this verse, Shankara enunciates the principle of the spirit behind all worship, namely, the sincerity of the surrender of the devotee to the Lord.

In verse 61, Shri Shankaracharya has given a beautiful account of the characteristics of Bhakti and has illustrated them very aptly. The innate attraction of every created being to the Creator is illustrated by the attraction of the seeds of the ankola tree to the tree itself. The attraction to the Lord is illustrated by that of the needle to the magnet and the conscious cultivation of the love to the Lord is exemplified by the love of the chaste woman to her husband. The yearning for God as a support to man is illustrated by the support given by the tree to the creeper and the inevitable necessity of man seeking union with God is very aptly portrayed by the illustration given of the river which runs to the ocean and merges its name and form inthe ocean itself. The whole of the content of Bhakti and its inherent nature and its goal have been very beautifully portrayed in this one verse. And then Shankara proceeds in the 63rd verse to show that Bhakti and Bhakti alone is required by the Lord to bestow His grace upon his devotee and not any other qualification such as learning, caste, creed or sex. For this, he has given the famous example of Saint Kannappar who he says is the foremost among the devotees of Shiva. Kannappar was a wild hunter who worshipped the Lord in his own crude way with the utmost sincerity and devotion which went even to the extent of his taking out his eyes and fixing them on the image of the Lord. The greatness of worship, he illustrates by referring to the fact that the putting of the sandals on the head of the Lord’s image was regarded by the Lord as if the sacred Kusa grass was put as part of the ritual. The water blown out of the mouth by the hunter was considered by the Lord as if it was purified water poured as Abhisheka and the meat tasted by him and offered by him to the Lord was considered by him as a sacred Prasada offering. Shankara emphasises in this way that the formalities of the ritual are not so essential as the spirit behind them.

Though the philosophy of Shankara expounds the qualityless Brahman as the Ultimate Reality, still he has at the same time emphasised the necessity for devotion and the operation of the Lord’s grace. As a practical Advaitin, he laid stress on the necessity for the right method to realise this Ultimate Reality. And even the personality of the Lord is, according to him, an efficacious method of obtaining the Lord’s grace, and through that, of realising the truth ofthe Ultimate Reality behind the universe. To him, as it was to Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, God to the devotee is both personal and impersonal–impersonal in the highest plane of consciousness and personal in the other lower plane. The method we adopt is to rise from the lower plane to the higher by devotion to a personal God and by the illumination he gets by His grace. This is the underlying principle in his beautiful hymns to the various aspects of God that are worshipped in the Hindu tradition, namely, Shiva, Narayana, Shakti, Subrahmanya and Ganapati.

Dr. Mahadevan’s edition of the Shivananda Lahari with translation and notes will be of great use to the devotees of Lord Shiva. And we commend his work to all readers.
–K. BALASUBRAHMANIA IYER

Poet Philosophers of the Rig Veda by Dr. C. Kunhan Raja. Published by Ganesh & Co. P. Ltd. Madras-17. Price Rs. 20.

The Rig Veda, the earliest recorded literature of the Aryans in India, is not a mere pastoral as many Western scholars are prone to believe. It is a combination of art and literature with religion, science and philosophy. Its poetry is however mixed up with a lot of symbolism, mysticism and rituals and it requires a lot of skill and scholarship to get behind the apparent symbolisms to find out the philosophical truths sought to be conveyed. The late Dr. Kunhan Raja, who was a Visiting Professor in Sanskrit at Tehran University for some time, and later was associated with the Andhra University, brings in a lot of clarity and originality to bear in this, probably his last, work on the poet-philosophers of the Rig Veda.

The author explodes many popular myths sedulously propagated by Western historians to the effect that the Vedas represent the literature of a Nomadic Tribe and that the Iranian and Greek civilizations were anterior to the civilization of the Vedas. With much internal evidence, Dr. Raja points out that there must have been a great and developing civilization with a high class literature prior to the Vedas in India. The authors of the Vedas considered themselves as heirs to a rich, longstanding and progressive civilization.

The author has described only a few of the great poets of the Rig Veda–Dirghatamas (for whose poetry the author has personal admiration), Brihaspati (“a great teacher in religion” and at the same time “the originator of the most materialistic way of thinking about the problems of life”) Sunassepha (to whom the author attributes the starting of the later-day Bhakti cult), Yama (who proves, according to the author, that Truth, and never a personality, dominated the minds of the people), Manu (the law-giver) and Angiras. He is all admiration for the combination of wisdom (represented by poetry) with power which has been our ideal in the Vedic Times. (“It is the condemnation of power that resulted in the downfall of the country. And such a condemnation arose out of the opponents of the Vedic ideals” p. 188). The author also gives an account of the theories in the Rig Veda concerning the origin and evolution of the world. The later day philosophies–Sankhya and Vedanta can be traced to the divergent viewsin the Rig Veda itself about evolution from Prakriti and from Brahman described in the Purusha Sukta. The author does not fail to draw the moral from the prevalence of these divergent views. It shows the widespread spirit of tolerance and catholicism that has always marked the character and genius of the Indian people. The author closes his illuminating study with a chapter on a poem of Samvahana praying for harmony and unity on earth.

The learned author had planned many other works on the Vedas. It is a pity that a dedicated life should have been cut short. The volume under review is itself a commendable tribute to the well-known scholarship and erudition of Dr. Raja.

Sankara’s Bhaja Govindam by DR. T. M. P. Mahadevan. Published by Ganesh & Co. P. Ltd., Madras-17. Price Rs. 2.

The Bhaja Govindam (or the Dvadasamanjarika stotra as it is otherwise known) has always attracted scholars and devotees alike. In this celebrated work, Sankara expounds, as it were, the meaning and significance of his teaching–Brahma Satyam Jagat Mithya Jivo Bramhaivakevalam (‘Brahma is the truth, the world is non-existent and Jiva is Brahma.’) The work is a call to all humanity to rise above the delusions of earthly existence, give up empty rituals and vain pursuits, cultivate detachment and attain true wisdom. DR. T. M. P. Mahadevan has adopted the popular text of the work, giving short and apt commentaries and parallel references for all slokas. Svayamprakasa’s text of the Dvadasamanjarikais given separately as an appendix and his views are referred to in the commentaries on all the slokas. This is the seventh volume in the Sankara Jayanthi series of publications. A study of the work is a rewarding experience and lifts us to a higher level of existence.
–T. C. A. RAMANUJAM

TELUGU

Andhra Vangmaya Charitra Sarvaswamu (A complete History of Telugu Literature) Vol. I (from the beginning to A. D. 1375) by S. Rama Krishna Sastry. Published by the Madras University. Royal Size. Pages 36 + 776. Price: Rs. 20.

An exhaustive and comprehensive history of Telugu literature from its early beginnings up-to-date, dealing with the evolution and growth of all literary types, and with all the poets and their works correlated with the social, political and religious conditions of their times, including in itself, at the same time, a critical estimate of each work, is a long-felt desideratum. The scheme of this publication emanating from the pen of a Research Scholar of the Madras University, who was awarded a Gold Medal for his work on Vira Saiva Literature by the Andhra University, goes a long way to fulfill that want.

The chief characteristics of poets and their works, commencing from the pre-Nannaya period upto Nachana Soma 1375 A. D. are dealt with in this volume. In the introductory chapter, the author devotes himself to the enunciation of principles of literary criticism, to a succinct but clear dissertation on the history of the Andhras, the origin and development of Telugu language and the influence of Kannada, Tamil and Samskrit on Telugu literature.

In the next chapters dealing with the pre-Nannaya period, Nannaya and other poets, the author presses into his service almost all the important research material published upto the time of publication of this work and we are sure he will refer to the views expressed by later research scholars in the second edition of this book. In these chapters, the author gives us a picture of the personality of the poet and his times. He discusses the sources of the contents of the work and the deviations effected by the poet, and the method of translation, if it is one. Points of literary appreciation and linguistic peculiarities are thoroughly illustrated by proper quotations. Even metres and yatis do not escape the attention of the author, though one wishes he had illustrated these also and quoted from the original works also, especially from the Mahabharata whilecomparing the translations with the originals, though sparingly, to make this work self-sufficient. Poets are compared to each other wherever necessary. Some of the vexed problems like the authorship of Ranganatha Ramayana and Bhaskara Ramayana are also discussed. The author, after mustering sufficient internal and external evidence, concludes that Ranganatha and Hulakki Bhaskara are the authors of the two works respectively. Balasaraswati but not Nannaya, the author declares, is the author of Andhra Sabda Chintamani. One may differ from him in some of the arguments advanced by him here and there but his views are worth considering and carry conviction and weight. The comparison of Nannaya and Tikkana and the chapter on Nannechoda are simply superb, though one wishes? he had devoted some more space to clarify with illustrations some points on Nannaya’s poetry like Prasanna Katka Kalitardhayukti etc. In short, every chapter is almost an illuminating treatise on Telugu poets and their works and nothing important and desirable is left out. The value of the work is enhanced by the addition of six appendices dealing with works on Sastras, Prosody and Poetics, Satakas, lost works, and Samskrit works written by Andhras of this particular period and a bibliography at the end. It is highly commendable that a project which naturally falls among the objectives of the Andhra University, specially intended for promoting the study of Telugu culture and literature, has been taken up by the Madras University.

We have no hesitation whatsoever in commending this work to both students and teachers of Telugu literature and we eagerly await the publication of the other volumes also at an early date.
–B. KUTUMBA RAO