Shakespeare’s Four-Hundredth in Bengal: Celebratory Volumes, 1964

“…How many years hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted over

In states unborn and accents yet unknown?”1

Cassius’ words could not be more relevant today, for Shakespeare has indeed become an indelible part of indigenous cultures worldwide. Indeed, the practice of studying Shakespeare came into being only in the English colonial framework, in countries such as India. The Education Act of 1835 made education of the natives in English prerogative: Shakespeare was included in the school curriculum and henceforth Shakespeare scholarship and criticism emerged in India. The year 1964 was doubtlessly an annus mirabilis for Shakespeare, as it was the four hundredth birth year of the Bard. It was a pivotal moment in the Shakespeare discourse in Bengal because the colonial struggles had subdued the tercentenary death commemorations of the Bard in 1916. The quatercentenary however was of immense significance, with the celebratory writings and the theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays reigning the minds of the Bengali intelligentsia. On the one hand were the Anglophonic eulogistic exegeses of Shakespeare, resulting in the exhibition of a once-colonised people’s ‘love’ for the Bard. On the other hand were local stage productions and appropriations in print - an articulation of the voice hitherto suppressed and increasingly assuming Herculean overtones. Both these contradictory, though necessary, impulses exercise a powerful influence on the student of literary criticism. Our observations in this regard have been entirely the same. Neither of these influences can be ignored. The views of Bengal’s academia (in the Burdwan University, Presidency University and Jadavpur University) are in the older Anglophonic tradition whereas Utpal Dutta and St. Xavier’s College are seen to have taken a contrasting stand. These multifarious influences have only enriched the literary scene, rendering it more appealing and inviting to the layman.

The University of Burdwan’s Shakespeare Memorial Volume, Essays on Shakespeare edited by Bhabatosh Chatterjee and published by the Orient Longmans Press in April 1965, is a collection of essays by University academicians commemorating the quatercentenary celebration of the birth of William Shakespeare. All the essays offer textual analyses of Shakespeare’s plays, and his sources. Written in simple, lucid language the reader is not burdened with theoretical jargon, making the collection a very enjoyable read. They are very student-friendly and though primarily designed for academic purposes, it can be safely said that this collection makes Shakespeare’s

1Julius Caesar, III.i.111-113.

works more easily accessible. It is indeed a very useful handbook for anyone aiming at a clearer idea of Shakespeare’s works. For instance, A.D.Mukherji and Nirmal Mustaphi have discussed the tragedies in great detail. Mustaphi’s essay is a piece of ardent scholarship, providing us with the knowhow of Elizabethan and medieval theological systems and stagecraft. His essay on evil takes a moralistic standpoint and shows how evil bring out irrevocable changes in the individual and the society. He delves deep into the workings of the human psyche and shows how any form of aberration in human nature can lead to a cataclysmic disruption in the microcosm. Mukherji’s essay tries to trace a unifying strand in all of Shakespeare’s tragedies through a careful study of the concluding sections in the plays. These final dialogues, Mukherji says, are a sign of the restoration of order and peace after chaos, taking a contrary viewpoint from Mustaphi’s essay. Mustaphi categorically opines that evil brings about irreversible change to the human polity and that the survivors inevitably adapt to it; there is no return to the pre-disruption scenario shown at the outset.

Amalendu Bose’s essay “A Preface to Shakespearean Comedy” provides us with extremely useful information on the printing of the play-texts of Shakespeare and presents painstaking research on Shakespeare as a person, the temperament of the English people in general and how Shakespeare’s comedies carve a niche of their own within the comic genre, defying the stipulations laid down by the classical comic playwrights. S.C.Sengupta’s essay on the sources of Shakespeare’s plays is the only essay which shows Longinus’ theory of the sublime to be inadequate and attempts to explain the tragic grandeur of the plays through the application of the Indian aesthetics of “laukika” (earthly) and “a-laukika” (transcendental). This Indianised attempt at appropriating the Bard’s works has, however, only been hinted at and not developed in greater detail.

Sisir Kumar Ghose and Mihir Kumar Sen through their Anglophonic perspectives, write about the legacy of Shakespeare – the former dealing with critical responses over the ages and the latter with application and appropriation by T. S. Eliot. Bhabatosh Chatterjee too follows Keats’ references to Shakespeare in his essay “Keats on Shakespeare”. He notices that Keats’ refers to Shakespeare with a dedicatory accent and feels that the playwright might have haunted him continually. These essays provide a large amount of detail on their respective subjects, helpful to a beginner in the study of Shakespeare and articulating the large impact the Bard has had on posterity. Jagannath Chakravorty takes it upon himself to interpret the most celebrated and thus over-analysed passage of Hamlet, in his essay “To be or Not to Be: An Interpretation”, where Hamlet is brooding over this very question. In the process of explaining the monologue, Chakravorty differs from the old-school interpretation—not believing that Hamlet is contemplating suicide, he instead thinks that Hamlet is deciding on the kind of life he should live; he is examining a personal difficulty, impersonally, by thinking about it in universal terms. The inaction that he ponders upon is actually a noble action which does not end in blood-revenge but instead settles with moral-revenge. It is a question about the dignity of reason; about life and not death.

In Kalidas Bose’s essay on the mysteries in the Shakespearean sonnets, “The New Problem of The Shakespeare Sonnets”, we come across a revival of dominant Western school of criticism. Bose’s essay probes the unanswered questions regarding the identities of the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet and Mr. W.H. The works of James Robertson and L.C. Knights are taken into consideration in this essay. Bose tries to use stylistic considerations to help date the sonnets and subsequently unravel the identities of the subjects. Following Bose’s critical stance, Jashodhara Bagchi in her essay “Hamlet and the Problem of Love” brings out the humanist in Shakespeare. She says that in the ‘Nunnery Scene,’ the playwright demonstrates the baseness of man and the inadequacy of human love. Hamlet sets about to destroy the only source of relief and love in his otherwise painful existence. Hamlet’s view is warped by the corrupt process by which the throne has been usurped. According to Bagchi, the works contemporaneous to Hamlet were also cynical of love and this suggests an autobiographic touch to the plays. In another part of the essay she agrees it could be a part of Shakespeare’s conception of tragedy.

S.N.Roy’s essay on “Shakespeare in Pre-Raphaelite Painting” traces the painters and their attitude towards Shakespeare. The Pre-Raphaelites admired Shakespeare and revered him only next to Jesus Christ. They were well-versed in the poet’s work and read him for both pleasure and inspiration. Roy gives examples of painters like Madox Brown and W.M. Rossetti and their sketches of different subjects of Shakespearean play. The costumes worn by the subjects were determined by the characters’ time-period and region. Roy concludes with Rossetti’s undying devotion to Shakespeare.

All these essays are proof of highly meticulous research and mostly contribute to the Anglophonic school of criticism. There is nearly no reference to any theatrical adaptation (abroad or at home) or engagement with the‘postcolonial’. Inclusion of these strands of thought perhaps would have made possible a far more enriched critique of the Bard and his works.

Presidency College and Shakespeare have had a long and deep history. The parent institution, Hindu College, founded on 20th January, 1817, was the first educational institution in India to introduce Shakespeare as part of a regular curriculum of studies. Among the illustrious figures that have taught Shakespeare in Presidency, two names stand out: two teachers of genius, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and David Lester Richardson. Derozio’s intense zeal for teaching and his interactions with students created a sensation at Hindu College. Richardson was a brilliant reader and Lord Macaulay, then the legal adviser to the Government of India and chairman of the Committee of Public Instruction, happened to hear Richardson read out Shakespeare and wrote to him: “I may forget everything about India, but your reading of Shakespeare, never.”2

To celebrate the Bard’s quatercentenary in 1964, Presidency College published a Shakespeare Commemoration Volume in 1966. The first essay is this book is called “The Sonnets of Shakespeare” by Srikumar Banerjee and is a penetrating reading of whether the sonnets reveal the obscure tenor of the Bard’s personal life, as was the primary interest, or was Shakespeare

2 Shakespeare Commemoration Volume, Presidency College, p vii.

deliberately being ambiguous about more complex ideals, throwing deeper shadows regarding matters of interpretation. Banerjee digresses from the usual Anglophonic school of thought by hinting that his sonnets reflect a unique experience, not completely in unison with the Renaissance traditions of sonnet writing. It was imperative to explore these arenas when trying to revive the genius of Shakespeare in a world that had drifted far away from the Shakespearean orbit.

The next essay “Shakespeare the Man,” written by Subodh Chandra Sengupta is a heavily researched essay on the private life of Shakespeare. However, it is not just a commentary on the Bard’s personal life but includes a lot of interesting trivia regarding events and names that Shakespeare chose to project in his plays, as well as an overview of what different critics have noted and failed to note about Shakespeare through his extensive collection of works. Attempts are constantly being made to discover Shakespeare’s personality through allusions to men and things of his own time, but, at a juncture when Shakespeare did not belong only to Britain, Sengupta questions if these conjectures are indeed the correct means of judging the man.

Next one is on Shakespeare’s great tragedy Macbeth written by Amal Bhattacharji. For him, Macbeth explores the meaning of human life in those terms which art uses in order to project the deepest thoughts and feelings in broad, popular religious symbols and myths, whose meaning is as profound as it is easily recognized. According to Bhattacharji, the apocalyptic passages in the play link up the play’s theme with the moral history of the man and the universe in the Christian vision. Macbeth remains special as it is poetry of inexhaustible depth and richness which just at the age when allegory was declining, invests it with a new purpose and justification.

This Anglophonic trend finds continuation in Priyotosh Bagchi’s “A Note on The Tempest”, a short piece that attempts to shed light on the debate of earlier versions of The Tempest than the existing First Folio version. Kajal Basu too, in her essay “Julius Caesar and Henry V” engages in comparative studies of the plays’ semiotics, character-plot outlines, and narrative styles in four parts. Part I deals with the style and verse construction of Julius Caesar, Henry V and Hamlet and attempts to authenticate the timelines of the plays. Attention is given to Shakespeare’s use of distinct forms of verse endings in the three plays, usage of imagery, personification, epigrammatic phrases, euphemisms, puns and mixed similes. Basu posits Julius Caesar and Henry V at closer time frames than Hamlet by judging the similarities in the verse structure of the first two plays. Part II speaks on the construction of the figure of the king/leader in the person of Henry V and Julius Caesar and charts a comparison of the two, keeping in mind the traits displayed by Brutus in Julius Caesar, who is argued to be a better leader. The essay contemplates the basic differences in the moral leadership qualities of Brutus and Henry V and negotiates their position as suitable leaders. Part III is a discussion on the nature of disorder put across in Shakespeare’s treatment of England as a kingdom against Rome as a kingdom. It highlights the difficulties of the conception of the Roman kingdom which is fraught with discord under various rulers, while the English court has a firm ruler and a better chance at stability. Part IV deals with the character of Mark Antony by reading the two concerned plays and borrowing

from Antony and Cleopatra. This section highlights the lineage of Henry V in the person of Antony which forms a foil against that of Henry V.

In Arun Kumar Dasgupta’s “The Phantom of Melancholy: An Essay on Hamlet”, the issue of ‘melancholy’ has been connected to the concept of ‘revenge tragedies’, and in order to allow the central character space for self-evaluation, Shakespeare posits Hamlet in a state of confusion between self-slaughter and introspection. This endowed in the play a larger cause, one that exceeded the limits of a revenge tragedy yet gave scope for a tragic hero fraught in the state of physical and psychological disgust. Contemporaneous to the cult of the “revenge plays”, was the extremely popular satire tradition of the Elizabethan period, which is examined by Sujata Chaudhuri in her “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Satire Tradition”. She explores the advent of the satire tradition in its Latin and Greek origins and traces its continuation through the Middle Age and into the court practices of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare’s adoption of this age old tradition by incorporating the figures of the court jester is elaborated on with references to the characters of Jaques, Touchstone, Biron and other Fools. The Celtic roots of the satirical comments made by these characters are investigated, apart from other books from antiquity and the Middle Ages. Apart from the general character of the jester, attention is given to the peculiar sense of morbid humour in the malcontent man too. The essay investigates how Shakespeare not just borrowed from the tradition of satire from antiquity but also developed on the contemporary satire traditions (including books like The Scrouge of Villanie by John Marston, Micro-cynicon by T. M. Gent and so on).

Ashok Kumar Mukherjee’s “Shakespeare’s Temptation Scenes” focuses on the various scenes of deception involving temptation across several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, and Julius Caesar. While the larger section of the essay develops on the choice of speech and specific modes of articulation involved in the scenes involving Iago-Othello, Iago-Rodrigo, King John-Hurbert, Claudius-Leartes, a considerable portion is devoted to the development of the Angelo-Isabella scene from Measure for Measure. The essay elaborates on how Isabella’s victimisation differs from the rest of Shakespeare’s characters as all the others may be counted as an involuntary participant in their fall to temptation. Special attention is also given to the exchange between Menas and Pompey from Antony and Cleopatra, where the victim is said to be a solicitor of the devil and not quite a victim. The essay ends on the note that Shakespeare always allowed his victims of temptation to attain a certain height before their fall to lend a touch of credibility.

Narayan Saha’s essay “Tolstoy and Shakespeare” reviews Tolstoy’s ‘attack’ on Shakespeare and assess its implications on the Shakespeare readers. The essay does not attempt to defend Tolstoy’s searing criticism of Shakespeare (which got unpopular reception). However the essay analyses the possible factors that may have influenced Tolstoy’s criticism and also looks at the influence his writing has on the general population.

The quatercentenary Shakespeare Commemoration Volume by Presidency College concludes

with the academic writings of Jyotsna Bhattacharjee, Gayatri Chakravorty (Spivak) and Taraknath Sen, who all have later gone on to become illustrious members of the literary fraternity. Their essays cover diverse aspects of Shakespearean research which until then had not found significant mention in academic writings. Jyotsna Bhattacharjee’s essay titled “Oscar Wilde as a Shakespearean Critic” emphasises on how claims laid by the likes of Lord Lytton that Shakespearean plays are archeologically inaccurate are grossly inaccurate themselves as is evident from Wilde, the majorly underrated literary scholar’s essay “The Truth of Masks”. Wilde illustrates on the previously under-explored subject of nineteenth century Shakespearean stage productions and the significance of costumes in each of them which deftly prove the masterful skills of Shakespeare which were not only wrought with literary genius, but historical precision too. Bhattacharjee’s critique of Wilde’s “The Truth of Masks” which first appeared in The Nineteenth Century (May, 1885) brings into focus a different class of Shakespearean critics in the category of Wilde who had never been seriously considered as academicians, conventionally qualifying only as a successful and witty wordsmith. Bhattacharjee gives due credit to Wilde for his comprehensive insight into the Shakespearean stage and costumes of the nineteenth century through his shockingly seldom cited essay and simultaneously explores the fascinating world of the various cultures Shakespeare had dabbled into in his plays like Othello, King Lear, Merchant of Venice, to name a few, essentially through the costumes which were strictly adhering to the dressing norms of the cultures and societies of his times.

Gayatri Chakravorty’s “Shakespeare in Yeats’s Last Poems”, as Chakravorty herself mentions, celebrates the Bard through the scope of Yeatsian genius which modified “the traditional statement of heroic truths set down in Shakespearean tragedy.” Chakravorty meticulously tries to approach Shakespeare’s plays like Timon of Athens, Hamlet, King Lear, and their understanding through the lenses and frames set by Yeats’s Last Poems. Unlike what one perhaps conventionally surmises from the title of the essay, it is kept from being a rather commonplace analysis of how Yeats may have loaned Shakespeare and converted him into a mere literary trope for his poetry. It is a rather interesting perspective which reveals the congenial, almost symbiotic natures of the relationship between the two writers and their works, where one contextualizes the other’s writing, thereby putting his own writing into a more concrete literary premise.

The concluding essay of this volume is by Taraknath Sen titled “Shakespeare’s Short Verse” where he revisits the early printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays which are rich in short verses. These verses fall short of the blank-verse norm of ten syllables or five feet and Sen heavily criticizes the emendations made to them by later editors, thereby insensitively stripping them of their beauty. Sen goes on to argue that Shakespeare’s short verses reflected a certain maturity and command over his art and this rather comprehensive essay carefully goes through the Bard’s entire repertoire of work, establishing his statement beyond a scope of doubt.

This journal published by Presidency College is unique because of the way it analyses Shakespeare. The master dramatist is seen in a new light—up, close and personal. The essays open up interesting areas of research, even though they tend to be based on Anglophonic

criticism. The writers do not seek to unnecessarily flatter, but there is fairly enough admiration for the works of the Bard. However, the authors have failed to take into account the impact of the Shakespeare discourse in the subcontinent post-Independence.

In Shakespeare: A Book of Homage, published by Jadavpur University in February, 1965, there is a report of how Jadavpur University had tried to participate in its own modest way in the worldwide celebrations being held in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. The first thing in the University’s programme was Macbeth in Camera, a dramatized lecture on the production of the Shakespearean play, written and directed by Harold Lang. This was held in collaboration with British Council, who rightly claimed that this would produce a most stimulating appetiser to the quatercentenary celebrations. The very interesting performance of the Harold Lang group, consisting of Nicholas Amer, Greville Hallam and Ralph Gruskin, besides Harold Lang, vividly presented the old, but by no means worn out controversy: wherein lies the essence of Shakespearean drama—in the poetry of its words or in the dramatic action? Harold Lang would never claim that his demonstration draws the curtain over the controversy but from reports, it could be drawn that it was undoubtedly a wonderful curtain raiser.

The next production was The Tempest presented in the Vivekananda Hall. The play was produced by H.M. Williams and D. Mukherjee, both members of the Department of English and directed by the latter. It was presented to the students of the University on 7th March, 1964 and on the following night, to invited guests. The producers left out the Masque, but there was no other major excision and the famous “our revels are now ended” speech was transferred to the end—a refreshing alteration. The performance was an excellent piece of histrionic craftsmanship, and in the applause which greeted the players there was not a murmur of dissent.

The year 1964, also marked the death anniversary of Michelangelo, the birth of Galileo Galilei, Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare. As far as St. Xavier’s is concerned, Professor S.K. Das in his contribution to the magazine of the college wrote, “the first half of the year 1964- quatercentenary of both Marlowe and Shakespeare—has only seen an unprecedented ‘bardolatory.’ Marlowe seems to have been forgotten. We hear for instance that this bardolatory has even spread to the restaurants… The Shakespeare exhibition organized at a cost of £250,000 was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh on April 23.3” This is evident in P. Lal’s contribution to the magazine of St. Xavier’s in 1964, which lists several remarkable books that “rolled off the presses in this gracious year of the bard.”4 Of this, he believes, Professor Ludowyck’s is the most eminent. It deals with Shakespeare’s life and times, the theatre and dramatic traditions and convention, the Elizabethan audience, its world picture and its attitude to language. He also enlists other books like A Shakespeare Companion (1564-1964) by F.E. Halliday, Shakespeare Tragedies edited by Lawrence Lerner, Essays and Studies 1964: Shakespeare Quatercentury Edition edited by William A. Armstrong and Nothing like the Sun by Anthony Burgess.

3 Xaverian, p 13.4 ibid p 3.

Narrowing down to Bengal, he mentions with preening contentment, “over a thousand Indian babies (of both sexes) born in April 1964 have been named Shakespeare. Local magazines and papers are still busily involved with different aspects of the Shakespeare tamasha, and at least one Calcutta co-educational college had its lady staffs sing, in chorus, songs from Shakespeare plays translated into Bengali. The first year students of another elegant girls’ college put on, and almost over, the Trial scene from The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare shraddha is in air; even rightist, centrist and leftists agree on that.”5 By seasoning his argument with political references, Lal states that even opposing political parties unite under one umbrella to accolade Shakespeare. Such is his universality that he cannot be called England’s Shakespeare anymore; he is free. He is everybody’s Shakespeare and one could say therefore, that the process of his official decolonisation in India began in 1964.

However, the tribute offered by the Xaverian magazine is surprisingly not an instance of mere bardolatry6. The contributors to this magazine had taken the pains to assess the contribution of Shakespeare studies to the college curriculum, and in turn to the intelligentsia of Bengal. The Bengali essay, for instance, titled “Amaader Ghorer Shakespeare” (Our Own Shakespeare), talks extensively on the appropriation of Shakespeare in Bengal. The author, Smarajit Seth, a first year student of English in St. Xavier’s, is keen to celebrate not merely the Bard, but also those litterateurs and theatre personalities who have had worked ceaselessly to make Shakespeare more available to the literary and cultural discourse of Bengal. In fact, the focal point of the essay is, as is evident from the title itself, the inclusion of Shakespeare as a canon in the Bengali educational and entertainment circuits. The emphasis on Calcutta as the centre for the quarter-centenary celebrations is replete with the pride not only of being a Bengali, but also of being the forerunners of Shakespeareanism in the country: “Ebong taader ei … smaranotshab paaloner utsho kendra ei Kolkata. British information service er shongbaad prokaash, Shakespeare er nijer jonmobhumi chhara prithibir aar kothao Shakespeare jayanti paalon er eto outshaaho-uddeepon alokkhito hoy ni, jemon ti hoyeche Job Charnock er ei praacheen nogorite.7” (And the centre for celebrating and remembering Shakespeare is our Kolkata. British information service says that apart from Shakespeare’s own motherland, no other place has witnessed such glorious celebrations on his birthday, except for this old city founded by Job Charnock.) The association with the British legacy that Seth invokes is clearly strengthened by promoting Shakespeare as the linking factor between the two cultures. Shakespeare, to the educated Bengali like him, is not merely a literary icon who figures as one of the remnants of colonialism, but also an emerging brand, which is to be Bengalicised and appropriated to further the culture of Bengal itself. This is why Seth indulges in an extensive critique of the local adaptations and translations of Shakespeare, pointing out that most of them cannot match up to the literary merit of the original text. In 1964, while honouring the Bard on his quartercentenary and standing at the edge of a new era of Shakespeare studies, he is hopeful that Shakespearean ideology will be more explored

5 Xaverian, p 9.6 ibid, p 13.7 Xaverian, p 3.

and examined in the coming years. Only will a careful consideration of the ideology of the great Bard succeed in making him nearer and dearer to the Bengali audience and readers.

As far as Bengali translations are concerned, another student, Aniruddha Sen, exhibits his knack for Shakespearean verses through the translations of two poems: “Sonnet 18” and “The Passionate Pilgrim XIII”. The idea of celebrating Shakespeare with a reiteration of his own lines is a conventional one, but Sen injects uniqueness into his homage by attempting a Bengali translation of these two, very difficult verses. Nonetheless, the very desire to inculcate the Shakespearean tradition and own him as it were renders the Bard an object not only of worship, but also of inspiration. Especially the last two lines of the translated “Sonnet 18” are clear instances of the author pledging to keep the flame of exultation and inspiration alive:

“Joto din aamaader du-chokh her deedhiti omlaan,

Tomaar chaitrer aayu totodin, - tomaar shommaan.”8

(“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”)9

If Sen is paying tribute to the Bard by appropriating his own verses, then Kiran Ganguli, a second year pupil at the institution, engages in a celebration of Shakespearean humour vis-à-vis that of William Goldsmith and Bernard Shaw. His essay “Three English Humorists” upholds Shakespeare as the occasion for the celebration of these other playwrights as well. Therefore, the icon ‘Shakespeare’ invariably becomes the linkage between the erstwhile coloniser and the Empire; a veritable gateway through which the rest of British literature and culture becomes available to the people outside the English territory. Also, the essay presents Shakespeare as a humourist, which is quite unusual, for the Bard is generally celebrated for his tragedies. The diversification within the Shakespeare discourse, which all these articles herald in, not only opens new avenues for study, but also reinforces the very need to study and appropriate Shakespeare. In this regard then, Xaverian stands out as a pioneer of localizing Shakespeare, and breaking the chain of Anglophonic discourse to represent him as a colonial legacy, who is to be refashioned and incorporated into our very own culture.

The discussion of celebratory volumes is not complete without an examination of Utpal Dutta’s yearly publication of Epic Theatre, a journal that stood foremost in the appraisal of local stage productions and was consequently an advocate of post-Independence remodeling of Shakespeare. In his article “Shakespeare and Harold Lang”, in the 1965 publication of the journal, Utpal Dutta raises an oft-debated issue as to whether Shakespeare is best experienced through performance, or whether in fact performance renders his otherwise thought-provoking verses, absolutely ineffective. The conflict between Shakespeare the playwright and Shakespeare

8 Xaverian, p 16.9 Sonnet 18.

the philosopher-bard is an old one; Dutta questions the validity of this debate by presenting Harold Lang’s revolutionary approach towards Shakespeare performance on stage. In the presentation of Macbeth in Camera – a Dramatized Lecture, Lang encouraged his actors to feel the gravity of Shakespeare’s verses, directing them to emote the characters of the play in colloquial speech at first. This allowed the performers to understand Shakespeare before enacting his vision, and Lang emerged victorious in his belief that Shakespeare has to be experienced by the artiste, before he can be appropriately presented on stage. Dutta seems to side with Lang’s decisiveness; as an actor himself, he realizes the importance of love for the author’s ideals, over mere appraisal, for as Lang rightly points out, “Respect is the end of affection.”10 This passionate entanglement with the playwright and his characters, Dutta points out, not only helps to bring out the best in the performers, but also makes the Shakespearean discourse comprehensible to the lay audience – “…aamaader dhoraa-chhowaar modhye, chenaa shonaar chouhoddyite…”(…within our reach, our understanding…)11

Dutta goes on to demonstrate how Shakespearean characters can be explored and examined, and for this, he presents Lang’s own views about Macbeth. Lang believes that Macbeth is a classic instance of a split-personality, and his soliloquys are dialogues between the two selves. This duality becomes the central focus of Macbeth’s character, and the play transcends the boundaries of a plain tragedy to that of a well-structured psychoanalytic case history. Macbeth ceases to be a mere perpetrator of regicide, as traditional Anglophonic commentators would believe, to become a complex, idealistic figure; a veritable poet himself, who articulates the painful, universal human tussle between temptation and duty. Yet, despite the inspection of Macbeth’s character, Lang overlooks the social context of the play, which is the chief foundation for the sequence of events, as well as the progress of the character itself. Dutta emphasizes on tragedy as first and foremost, a social situation, “shaamaajik potobhumikaa”12 as he calls it, of which characters like Macbeth and Hamlet become unavoidable, inevitable consequences. As a performer, he cannot forego the importance of the social context in the presentation of any character. By emphasizing on the need to link the psyche to the external ambience, Dutta endeavours to make Shakespeare more lucid to the audience. The general trajectory of his argument therefore aims at a liberalisation of the Shakespeare discourse, especially as far as his India is concerned; he praises Lang for his efforts, but also suggests that a one-dimensional, character-centric approach to the plays is no longer enough. A thorough consideration of the socio-political substratum of the Bard’s works becomes essential, for Shakespeare is universal, and the ‘past’ must be assimilated, to enable performances in the ‘present’.

Utpal Dutta staged four plays, namely—Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chaitali Raater Swopno) and Othello with his Little Theatre Group, to pay his tribute to the Bard. Except Othello, all the other three were Bengali productions, all of which were reviewed by several English and Bengali newspapers. Statesman, dated December 9, 1964 titled 10“Shakespeare and Harold Lang”, Epic Theatre.11 ibid.12 ibid.

their article on the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as “Utpal Dutta’s Dream Goes Wrong.” This article considered translation to be stuck between “gross prose and limp poetry,” and there was nothing that was left to the imagination. The Indian Express thought that it was a clumsy ‘dream’ that was redeemed only by the fine acting of Dutta as Bottom. They reviewed the translation to be quite good and considered the garish costumes, lack of rehearsals and gaudily flashing lights as a major let-down. Times of India almost agrees with The Indian Express, lauding Sova Sen for her role as Titania and Dutta as Bottom which was, unfortunately, unsupported by the polythene forests sets and unimaginative costumes, taking away much from the visual delight of the original.

However, when it came to his Othello production, there were no mixed reviews. It was unanimously considered to be one of Dutta’s best productions; Hindustan Times, dated May 17, 1964 quoted a theatre-goer who called Dutta as “almost a built-in Othello.” His scintillating performance was very much appreciated and so was Dean Gasper’s, who played Iago, and the audience could be seen wholly participating in the play. Amritabazar Patrika felt that even the “stagecraft was competent, lighting good and taped excerpts from Handel, Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn, mostly in between scenes suited the excitement of the drama and its pathos and poignance.”

In general, Utpal Dutta’s productions created a new benchmark for Shakespeare productions in India, even though they were not without their flaws. The Little Theatre Group was taking steps in a new direction, and the newspaper reviews too felt that it was only through such translations, adaptations and retellings that the Bard would live for posterity, especially in the English-speaking and knowing Commonwealth.

In conclusion, the essays discussed above reflect the mores of scholarship that were dedicated towards the appreciation of the Shakespearean tradition. The discussions on the Elizabethan stage, Shakespeare’s versification, elaborations on Shakespearean characters, with respect to traditional Renaissance studies show the specific institutions and authors’ inclination towards the more Euro-centric evaluations of Shakespeare.

The commemorative volumes by Presidency College, Burdwan University continue the Anglophonic readings and investigations of the plays and verses of the Bard. Most of the essays attempt at the evaluation and criticism of Shakespeare in the context of a Renaissance court playwright, with emphasis on character-centric criticism, appreciation of verse construction, location of Shakespeare’s plays in the Elizabethan stage and so on.

A more nascent stream of critical appreciation, one that attempts at an inclusive and contextualised reading of Shakespeare (with regards to the history of India’s colonisation) is also evident from a few of these commemorative volumes. St Xavier’s exercise in adapting and translating Shakespeare in poetry marks a negotiation of Bengal as a space for traditional Shakespearean scholarship, as well as one that attempts to situate Shakespeare within the

colonial identity.

After a review of all works in 1964-65, one understands that the traditional Anglophone criticism was still a part of the Shakespearean identity, but one realises that a constant appreciation of Shakespeare with regards to the colonial identity was also going on. Attempt to adapt or translate Shakespeare for non-English audience or simply to incorporate colonial, post-colonial ideas into them, speaks of how there was an attempt to assimilate Shakespeare amongst the general viewers. Utpal Dutta is the most glorious example of that. Through his plays and writings, a certain connection to Shakespeare is created which makes the Bard seem very own, very personal. The Indianisation of Shakespeare, productions of his plays in the native Bengali language goes further on to prove the universality of the master dramatist.

These volumes not only help to create a broader spectrum for Shakespeare scholarship, but also remain a testimony to Shakespeare’s reception in Bengal so many years after independence, and the attempts at the assimilation of Shakespeare into the general identity.

Bibliography

Primary texts

Chatterjee, Bhabatosh, ed. Essays on Shakespeare. Calcutta: University of Burdwan: Orient Longmans, 1965.

Dutta, Utpal. Epic Theatre. Calcutta: Peoples Little Theatre Mukhopatra, 1998.

Gomes, FR. P, ed. Xaverian, Vol. 13, No. 4. Calcutta: St. Xavier’s College, 1964.

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Sahitya Akademi. Indian Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1964. Accessed September 11, 2014.URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23329673