In a Bengali film, a young playwright shows an ageing aficionado of the theatre the script of his new play and asks him what he thinks about it.
"It is good," the geriatric critic replies, "but I see that you have written a tragedy. I would have preferred a comedy. In old age, people long for happy endings." The pun on "endings", in life as in art, is inescapable.
In tragedy, old age ends in one of two ways. The lucky meet a Shakespearean end. When loyal Gloucester wants to kiss old Lear's hand, he replies: "Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality." How material.
Yet, the play ends on a triumphantly metaphysical note: "Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all."
Both birth and death are afflictions: All that matters is to make the most of the transition between them by crossing the casual path of time in the defiant steps of self-knowledge.
The other tragic ending offers no such hope. Edward Said speaks of "lateness" as a condition in which age and ill health produce not serenity, but rupture with a human's knowledge of himself.
A man quits the earth not in contented self-awareness, but in involuntary exile that leaves both the world and him incomplete. Ripeness is not all: Lateness devours all.
The tragedy of old age leads to either Shakespearean fulfilment or Saidean attrition.
The greying man in the film straddles the two worlds. He is a gregarious barrister whose forensic intelligence and social amiability are admired by his profession and his community alike, but his wife has been using a wheelchair since a car accident. He cannot endure going hence in ripened contentment while leaving her behind in paralysed lateness.
He cannot inhabit the tragic world of either Shakespeare or Said exclusively.
Hence his elegiac request for comedy, the contrived art of arriving at happy endings.
Comedy does not deny the agency of death. However, it invites mortals to spend their time on earth in companionable friendship or satiric laughter, innocent folly and glad missteps that light gregarious life's way to jealous death.
Of course, tragedy is not the exclusive preserve of old age. Hamlet treats Ophelia with the existential cruelty that he himself endures as the son of a murdered king, but she does not want his kingdom without him.
Desdemona loves Othello even as he strangles her. Cleopatra dies clutching an asp to her breast, mothering death itself in celebration of the incomparable Antony who has partnered her eternal womanhood. None of them died tragically old.
However, when tragedy claims the old, it casts a long shadow on the young. The ageing hero in the Bengali film thinks not of himself, but of the aspiring playwright, who, he thinks, should write a comedy.
The barrister's young daughter will not be around to watch it: She died in the car crash that maimed her mother and shattered her father's life. But other people deserve to be happy. In their happiness will lie his escape from his wrecked self.
Someone must create new forms of happiness. The playwright is young enough to do so.
In the process, he might follow Shakespeare's maturing craft. Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest are not histories, tragedies or comedies. They negate boundaries of genre to point to newly discovered lands of the lived imagination. Their characters are magical in their redemptive promise.
Cymbeline is about reconciliation notwithstanding the elegiac undertones of its celebrated lines: "Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust."
In The Winter's Tale, the statue of "dead" Hermione, whom her husband suspected of infidelity, returns to trusted life in an overwhelming moment of matrimonial and theatrical reconciliation. Her fidelity turns the winter of life into the summer of art. Shakespeare smiles on.
Today's coronavirus pandemic is an epidemiological indictment of longevity. By attacking the old mostly, it spares the young. But what does it give them time to do? Just grow old? Or do something with their lives while they still are young?
For an answer, the global youth of the coronaviral age might wish to adopt and adapt a line or two from As You Like It.
The pastoral comedy has survived Elizabethan, industrial and postmodern time by positing the seven ages of man as theatrical passages through a staged world where "all the men and women (are) merely players/They have their exits and their entrances/ And one man in his time plays many parts/ His acts being seven ages".
What matters is not the age of the stage nor the precise numbers of actors whose passing weight it can bear. What matters is that the young should imagine a Shakespearean world existing beyond their expiring youth.
The barrister in the Bengali film would have approved of the triumph of comedy over tragedy in the Shakespearean world that continues through coronaviral time.
The coronavirus cannot be allowed to overturn the timeless relationship between the ages.
Yes, the old must go first. However, the young must learn how to use the time that remains for them in the new world around the corner.
There always is time for happy endings.
• Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times.
