Biographical Criticism of Shakespeare in Bengal: A Close Study of S.C. Sengupta’s “Shakespeare the Man”

Abstract

The paper attempts to read S.C.Sengupta's essay Shakespeare the Man closely and critically and find out what ideological motivations have contributed to the construction of a biographical criticism of Shakespeare in Bengal. It has ventured to examine the connections that such Biographical literary criticism has with the Romantic idea of authorship and the aesthetic autonomy that the Romantics so passionately foregrounded. Alluding to Tagore’s thesis that the poet in his day-to-day life is much like an ordinary man, while he lives a larger and more intense life which is reflected in his poetry S.C. Sengupta has pleaded for the reconstruction of the inner life of a poet from his works. What this paper has aspired to excavate from Sengupta’s essay is an alternative idea of subjectivity that transcends the personality of the poet. Though this notion seems to foreground the Modernist creed of objectivity and impersonality, the paper has tried to show that it can be traced back to the aesthetic ideology of Romanticism which emphasized the inability and ineffectuality of the poet to understand the roots of his creation.

Keywords

• biography
• aesthetic autonomy
• transcendental subjectivity