Just as Karl Marx's political philosophy has been adapted by diverse nations across the world, and Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice has been translated into innumerable languages (including Oriya, a language spoken in the East Coast of India), so there is hardly a language into which Shakespeare's plays hasn't been wrought.
Shakespeare has been embraced by Americans, not simply because America was a British colony once upon a time, but also because the plays of Shakespeare lends themselves to adaptation as there is an unsurpassable universality in their kernel. A Shakespearean contemporary had said that Shakespeare is "nature itself."
James Shapiro has edited an anthology of essays on Shakespeare by famous Americans from all fields, including politics and sports, and Shakespeare in America is said to be a terrific read.
I was struck by Bill Clinton's name as the provider of the volume's foreword. Maybe he consorted with the Merry Wives of Windsor!
Bengali movie-makers, who make the occasional film in English, have a penchant for ending on the note of a famous Shakespearean soliloquy: "Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." The lines are spoken by King Lear in Act 4, Scene 7 of the tragedy of King Lear.
When he says thus, Lear is no longer a king; he has been stripped of his regality and power and is a mere old man, manipulated into penury by evil children.
In 36 Chowrungee Lane (1981), an old school teacher of Anglo-Indian origin, mutters these lines, when she realizes that she has been used selfishly by a ruthless young Bengali couple. The movie was directed by Aparna Sen. In The Last Lear (2007), an ageing thespian, who is a retired Shakespearean actor, repeats the same lines, this time in the booming voice (whose effects are severely undercut by a terrible accent and enunciation) of Indian superstar Amitabh Bacchan. The actor is on his deathbed, having sacrificed himself at the altar of idealism.
The film is directed by the now-departed Rituporno Ghosh.
The actor, Harish Misra, retires, one presumes, out of disgust for the commercialization of culture and the decline of theatre in the face of the rising popularity of cinema. These are echos of the theme of Merchant-Ivory's beautiful Shakespeare Wallah.
When the retired thespian is lured out of his seclusion into playing the role of a clown in a movie made by a successful young filmmaker, he unravels psychologically and insists on enacting his own death scene--a crucial part of the movie's climax--instead of allowing a stuntman to do it. His insistence, combined with the young director's constant wheedling of the old actor's ego, results in the tragic death of the actor.
The Last Lear is a movie about the fall of a purist in a crassly commercial culture where he is an obvious misfit.
I am a huge fan of Shakespeare and King Lear is something I could live on were I to be marooned on an island. I resent this haphazard use of this magnificent play in Indian movies. Aparna Sen merely included a few lines at the end, and in Jennifer Kendall's enunciation the Shakespearean lines sounded Shakespearean and right. But Amitabh Bacchan's incorrigible bluster, which is a perfect vehicle for the ejection of Bollywood lines, massacres the tragic sublimity of King Lear's voice.
There is a scene in which Bacchan plays Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan in Shakespeare's The Tempest. He is awful, and I couldn't catch a single thing he said. There are other shabby attempts to solidify Shakespeare into a subtext. The retired actor is married to a young Bengali woman who compares their mating to that of Othello and Desdemona.
The Last Lear could have been about any artist who has old world ideals of what's real art and what's sham, because the stories attraction lies, not in the life of the actor, but of the lives of three women who are brought together by their personal affections for the actor. The exchanges between the three women constitute the backbone of the movie, with or without the lousy Shakespearean subtext.
Incidentally, there is one moment that stands out in my memory as more ear-catching than all of the lines added up together in the movie. A journalist is interviewing Harish Misra about another stage artist who is no more. His name is Neeraj Patel. When the journalist requests Harish to say something about "him," the thespian rudely interjects, "him" or "her?" Neeraj, Harish says with marked aversion in his voice, was a "bloody homosexual," who "talked like a woman, walked like a woman, and even slept like a woman." The word "gay" isn't used, but a deep-seated homophobia is revealed. It's ironic that a Shakespearean actor who is enlightened in a way only a Bengali bhadrolok, a quintessence of biblio culture and biblio courtesy, can, is also repulsed by homosexuality. After all, Shakespeare like no other artist, teaches us that men could be like women, and women like men, in the wink of a Prospero's wand.
This is how it was meant to be, at least in Shakespeare's time: Male actors played female characters, and female characters weren't particularly celebrated for their uber-femininity, but for their "characters," i.e. virtues or vices or an admixture of both.
Take for instance, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth's wife and chief-plotter of the plan for Macbeth to commit regicide and become the king of Scotland.
In the play Macbeth, Lady Macbeth does the masculine act of goading her husband to do the evil but necessary thing to fulfill his ambition of power. Macbeth initially shirks from the sacrilege of regicide as well as a violation of the code of hospitality, for the reigning king of Scotland, Duncan, happens to be a guest at Macbeth's castle the night he is murdered by his host.
Lady Macbeth calls her husband a "lily liv'rd man," as it was popularly believed in the Middle Ages that the seat of a man's courage is the liver.
In the scene above, alan Cummings does a swell job of recreating the moment when Lady Macbeth, asks the heavens to fill her with the steely resolve to go through with the task of pushing Macbeth to murder the king.
I got introduced to Richard III (till date that remains my sole interface with the medieval English king, descending from the house of the Plantaganets), through Shakespeare's Richard III.
I loved the play, though, the king himself was portrayed as evil incarnate. I had the rare experience of reading a Shakespearian play where the protagonist is also the antagonist.
But, in a way, I kind of liked Richard III as well as prayed for his demise. He sounded heroically humble when in that fatal battle of Bosworth, having tumbled off his horse, he had shrieked out the famous lines: "A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse." This willingness to barter on such humble terms, indicated a flexibility of spirit that the king, when he was alive and ruling, never showed.
Throughout the play, Richard was inveterate in his evilness where getting and keeping the "kingdom" was concerned.
So, I liked Richard at the moment of his death, is what I mean to say. I'm thus delighted to know that his skeleton (the skeleton of the real king, that is) has been found under a parking lot in Leicestershire. The ignominy of a legendary king's remains being found under a 21st century parking lot is great, but the discovery of the remains, in and of itself, is testament to the fact that these figures had once lived.
Personally, for me, the bones humanize a fictional hunchbacked king who menaced subjects, enemies and women in Shakespeare's play.
A bit of a biographical detail is in order: Richard wasn't all that evil at all. In fact, the historical Richard was the victim of decades of systematic denigration by his Tudor successors on the throne. He was a reformist king, who introduced kinder laws for the poor and the incarcerated, and most importantly, he eased bans on printing and selling of books. In short, he was a progressive king of his time. My guess is that Shakespeare couldn't have shown the real Richard the way he was because his play was produced during the time of the Tudors.
When I read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens for the first time, I thought it was too loud to be Shakespearean.
The play could have come out of a Bollywood studio, so shallow it's storyline was and so bombastic were its dialogues.
Theatre critic John Lahr points out the un Shakespearean traits of Timon well:
The play in which the well-heeled Timon gives away so much money to his so-called friends that he ruins himself, can't decide if it's a comedy or a tragedy; its characters have humors but lack depth; the plot is thin, with few dramatic reversals, and Timon's trajectory from philanthropy to misanthropy is a precipitous straight line.
There is a saying that Shakespeare was a bit embarrassed about staging Timon. It was thus never staged during his lifetime.
Perhaps it was the subject matter that made the play ahead of its time. As Lahr praises a recent revival of the play by London's National Theatre, he makes it look like Timon was written for a time of global economic meltdown.
The play opens with an onstage replica of the tents of the Occupy London protesters, and ends with a view of the logo of HSBC, the bank that was caught laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists.
According to Lahr:
In its gaudy shadows, Timon's tale of collapse catches not only the fragility of the British economy but the unnerving immanence of the collapse of its ruling elite.
Shakespeare must have written a recession play in an era when economic systems were in a very nascent stage.
There is a strong Shakespearean subtext to the London Olympics opening ceremony.
The ceremonies are on for tonight, Friday, July 27. Famed British film director, Danny Boyle, has "directed" the ceremonies, and it's thus no wonder that the title of the show is "The Isles of Wonder."
I mean, Boyle is known for championing the underdog in his movies; remember Slumdog Millionaire? "The Isles of Wonder" is inspired, as Boyle has said, by a speech made by Britain's very own Shakespearean slumdog, Caliban.
In one of Shakespeare's later plays, The Tempest, Caliban, is a "savage". But he is also the rightful heir to the island, which, has been occupied by Prospero, an outsider from "civilized" Europe.
Prospero has cast Caliban into servitude, and it is in one of his slavish moments of reflection that Caliban says the following about the "Isles":
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears;
and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again;
and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me,
that when I waked I cried to dream again.
Caliban here refers to magic that Prospero uses to keep the island in his control. Caliban is a recalcitrant fellow who won't be subdued through civilization, so Prospero keeps him spell-bound.
Prospero rules through the spectacle of magic. As Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, an English Professor at Kenyon College, notes, British monarchs, whether fictional or real, have traditionally used the power of spectacle to establish hegemony over the isles especially during times of tension and trouble.
The opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics promises to be an extravagant spectacle with a budget surpassing a billion or so pounds. And Britain is currently in social and economic trouble with extreme budget cuts in essential services, unemployment and tears in the social fabric of the nation. So a spectacle might serve the purpose of projecting unity. Lobanov-Rostovsky notes:
The British can no longer conquer the world with yeomen’s cries of “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” but the world still tunes in to watch their spectacles with fascination. And more important, so do the British. These spectacles allow them to regain their composure after a season of bad news, but also to compose themselves as the Great Britain we know so well, turning the well-worn face of majesty to the world once more.
