Illuminationist features of Shakespearean Drama
Illuminationist features of Shakespearean Drama

Summary/Abstract: Shakespearean drama is the vast remification of organic interconnections, it deals with the ‘wholeness of life’. The soul of this drama is intellection not principles of ‘formulations’ as Shakespeare aims at manifesting the ‘beatific vision’ on stage rather than structural designs. The principle of diversity instead of the Aristotelian concept of conflict, as a result, becomes the essence of the kind of drama he was offering to his audiences. To display this diversity, Shakespeare centred his interest in the position and disposition of Nature. Out of necessity, Shakespeare presents us with a form of drama which is of ‘no genre’ as western tradition of drama offers nothing similar to it. It is, however, not too improbable to place Shakespearean drama in the category of what might be called ‘Illuminationist drama’. Discursive reasoning and intellectual intuition along with recurring images of nakuja abed (place of nowhere), diverse nature of characters in terms of their degree of illumination, concept of the head of the state resembling that of an imam, womanhood as the locus of Divine manifestation and the image of the concealed rescuer, all connect Shakespearean drama to Shahab ud-Din Suhrawerdi’s Illuminationist ideal. The present article, elaborates the nature of Shakespearean Illumination, the part II of this series shall deal with the themes of womanhood, royalty and concealed hero in more details.

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