The Effects of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors on Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute
Sacide AkcanAhmet Hamdi Tanpınar described William Shakespeare as the greatest poet of all time and encouraged Turkish writers and poets to be nourished by his artistic genius and the multicultural structure of his works. Tanpınar himself also benefited from Shakespeare’s fictions and from the characters in his works. The Time Regulation Institute has a special place among Tanpınar’s works in that it contains social satire and is a novel about cultural crisis. In this novel, Tanpınar benefited from both the general atmosphere as well as certain fictional features of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Just as the romantics in France had found Shakespeare and his works to be suitable for their own purposes and benefited from them, the pioneering intellectuals of Turkish literature such as Nâmık Kemâl and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar also paid special attention to Shakespeare’s works during the change Turkish society underwent in order to spread the theater genre and get to know Western culture more closely. Tanpınar made references to Shakespeare’s works and characters in his poems, stories, and novels. Despite not directly mentioning Shakespeare or his works in The Time Regulation Institute, the novel is reminiscent of The Comedy of Errors in terms of its general atmosphere. In addition, many common features are found between the two works, such as lost jewelry, accusations of theft and insanity, a mental and spiritual doctor, and complicated and ridiculous events that occurred due to similar names. The first part of this study examines the effects Shakespeare has had on Turkish literature and Tanpınar, while the second part first introduces The Time Regulation Institute and The Comedy of Errors before going on to compare the common aspects of the two works and attempting to clarify Shakespeare’s influence on Tanpınar’s artistic personality.
Tanpınar’ın Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü’nde Shakespeare’in Yanlışlıklar Komedyası’nın Etkileri
Sacide AkcanWilliam Shakespeare’i gelmiş geçmiş şairlerin en büyüğü olarak nitelendiren Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Türk yazar ve şairlerini onun sanat dehasından ve eserlerinin çokkültürlü yapısından beslenmeleri konusunda teşvik etmiş, kendisi de eserlerinde Shakespeare’in kurgularından ve karakterlerinden yararlanmıştır. Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, Tanpınar’ın eserleri arasında toplumsal yergi içerikli olması ve bir kültürel kriz romanı olması bakımından özel bir yere sahiptir. Tanpınar bu romanında Shakespeare’in Yanlışlıklar Komedyası’nın hem genel atmosferinden hem de bazı kurgusal özelliklerinden yararlanmıştır. Fransa’da romantiklerin Shakespeare’i kendi amaçlarına uygun bulup Shakespeare’in eserlerinden yararlanmaları gibi Nâmık Kemâl ve Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar gibi Türk edebiyatının öncü entelektüelleri de Türk toplumunun değişim sürecinde hem tiyatro türünün yaygınlaşmasını sağlamak hem Batı kültürünün daha yakından tanınması ve benimsenmesi maksadıyla Shakespeare’in eserlerine özel bir ilgi göstermişlerdir. Tanpınar gerek şiirlerinde gerek hikâye ve romanlarında Shakespeare’in eserlerine veya yarattığı karakterlere göndermelerde bulunmuştur. Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü’nde Shakespeare’den veya eserlerinden direkt olarak söz etmemiş olsa da roman genel atmosferiyle baştan sona “Yanlışlıklar Komedisi”ni andırır. Bunun yanında iki eser arasında kayıp mücevher, hırsızlık ve delilik suçlaması, akıl ve ruh doktoru, isim benzerliği yüzünden meydana gelen karışık ve gülünç olaylar gibi ortak kurgusal özellikler bulunmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın birinci bölümünde Shakespeare’in Türk edebiyatına ve Tanpınar’a etkileri incelenmiş, ikinci bölümünde ise Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü ve Yanlışlıklar Komedyası tanıtıldıktan sonra iki eserin ortak yönleri karşılaştırılarak Tanpınar’ın sanat kişiliği üzerindeki Shakespeare etkisi aydınlatılmaya çalışılmıştır.
The name of the great English poet of the 16th century, William Shakespeare became known in Germany in the 19th century through the efforts and direction of the German poet Goethe. German society values theater very much and welcomed Shakespeare’s plays with enthusiasm, with German theater being built upon the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s works were met with similar interest in Italy and France as in Germany. In France, the romantics in particular benefited from Shakespeare’s works and fame, as they found it suitable to their own art and worldview. François Victor Hugo translated Shakespeare’s plays into French in 18 volumes, aestheticizing the poems and plays and eliminating the obvious flaws. Despite being harshly criticized by some writers, interest in Shakespeare continued to increase in French society. The political and cultural contacts Turkish society had with the West were realized through France. Almost all of the 94 theatrical translations published in Turkish at the end of the 19th century are from French literature. Having received great interest and acceptance in French culture and literature, Shakespeare also attracted the attention of the Turkish intellectuals who closely followed French literature. Shakespeare’s works were first staged by Armenian and Greek actors in their own languages in Istanbul in the 1840s. All eight theater plays that had been translated from English literature into Turkish were Shakespearian works, with The Comedy of Errors being one of the first Shakespearian plays to be translated into Turkish. It was translated into Turkish by Hasan Sırrı in 1887 with the title Sahv-i Mudhik [The Sobriety of the Jester]. The influence of Shakespeare, which first started to make itself felt in Turkish literature through Ebuzziya Tevfik’s play Ecel-i Kaza [The Accident of Fate] (1872), later appeared prominently in the works of writers such as Namık Kemal, Abdulhak Hamit, and Sami Paşazade Sezayi. Tanpınar, who had fed mostly from Western culture as both an artistic and intellectual person, approached the works of poets and writers belonging to Western culture and literature with a deep interest. Many of his works refer to Shakespeare as well as his works and characters. The Time Regulation Institute is a novel about cultural crisis that among Tanpınar’s works most strongly reflects the search for a new identity. Enginün has studied the effects of Shakespeare in Turkish literature and according to him, although Shakespeare is not directly mentioned in The Time Regulation Institute, the whole work is a comedy of errors. Tanpınar was inspired by this Shakespearian comedy while creating the fiction for his novel. Of course, great differences exist between the narrative possibilities of a novel and a short theatrical work written for the stage. Moreover, the audience these works address, the culture they belong to, and the era in which they were written are also very different. In addition to all these differences, Tanpınar’s view of Shakespeare’s artistic personality and works as a rich source, his frequent references to Shakespearian characters in his works, and his critical approach toward the poets and writers before him who had not been nurtured by Shakespearian works in any real sense show how much Tanpınar cared about Shakespeare in his artistic life. The general atmosphere of The Comedy of Errors as a work full of mistakes and absurd events is reflected in The Time Regulation Institute. Comic and tragic elements are intertwined in the absurd series of events that take place in both works. In The Time Regulation Institute, Tanpınar expands upon the events and situations that were inspired by Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, which was one of his shortest plays in terms of the possibilities of a novel, and greatly intensified the humor and tragedy. Tanpınar viewed borrowing from the absurd and tragic atmosphere and events of this play, which Shakespeare had written with inspiration from Ancient Roman literature, not as an imitation or analogy but as something that brings the cultures and their literary works closer together. One of the pillars of Tanpınar’s artistic personality involved being enriched from different cultures and literatures by feeding on each other. The first part of this study examines the effects and reflections The Comedy of Errors had on the novel The Time Regulation Institute and discusses the effects Shakespeare had on Tanpınar over various aspects. The second part of the study comparatively analyzes the aspects that Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, which had been inspired by the comedies Menaechmi and Amphitryon from the ancient Roman playwright Plautus, had in common with Tanpınar’s social satirical novel The Time Regulation Institute.
