Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance

Vikram Chopra (31 July 1942 – 20 January 2023)

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Contributors

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Introduction: The Global Origins of Shakespeare Studies

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Book Reviews

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Theatre Reviews

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The Institutionalization of Shakespeare Studies in the United Kingdom

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This essay is devoted to Shakespearean criticism in the UK between 1920 and 1940. I begin by examining the origins of Shakespeare study at Oxford and Cambridge, by figures such as I. A. Richards (1929) and William Empson (1930). I follow this by looking at F. R. Leavis and his journal Scrutiny, but I also trace his influence on his fellow Cambridge colleagues highlighting instances where they collaborated, as did Caroline Spurgeon with Arthur Quiller-Couch (the latter two co-editors of the New Cambridge Shakespeare series, 1921-1966) on the famous 1921 study for the British Board of Education entitled “The Teaching of English in England”—also referred to as The Newbolt Report, after the chairman of the committee, Sir Henry Newbolt.

Shakespeare Comes to Bengal

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India has the longest engagement with Shakespeare of any non-Western country. In the eastern Indian region of Bengal, contact with Shakespeare began in the eighteenth century. His plays were read and acted in newly established English schools, and performed professionally in new English theatres. A paradigm shift came with the foundation of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817. Shakespeare featured largely in this new ‘English education’, taught first by Englishmen and, from the start of the twentieth century, by a distinguished line of Indian scholars. Simultaneously, the Shakespearean model melded with traditional Bengali popular drama to create a new professional urban Bengali theatre. The close interaction between page and stage also evinced a certain tension. The highly indigenized theatre assimilated Shakespeare in a varied synthesis, while academic interest focused increasingly on Shakespeare’s own text.

Beyond the theatre and the classroom, Shakespeare reached out to a wider public, largely as a read rather than performed text. He was widely read in translation, most often in prose versions and loose adaptations. His readership extended to women, and to people outside the city who could not visit the theatre. Thus Shakespeare became part of the shared heritage of the entire educated middle class. Bengali literature since the late nineteenth century testifies strongly to this trend, often inducing a comparison with the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa. Most importantly, Shakespeare became part of the common currency of cultural and intellectual exchange.

Publishing Shakespeare in India: Macmillan’s English Classics and the Aftereffects of a Colonial Education

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India’s rejection of Macmillan’s English Classics series constitutes an important counter-origin that exposes and dismantles underlying assumptions about how colonial Indian readers valued and consumed Shakespeare. In this paper, I examine the failure of Macmillan’s English Classics series to bring about Indian assimilation to British values. I specifically consider Kenneth Deighton’s Shakespeare editions in the series and argue that Deighton’s Shakespeare attempted to utilize its extensive explanatory notes as a primer on Englishness for Indians. The pedantic notes, as well as the manner in which the texts were appropriated into Indian educational systems, were determining factors in their ultimate failure to gain widespread popularity in the colony. The imperial agenda that insists upon one dominant, valid discourse led to Macmillan misreading the market and misreading an already viable field of Shakespeare studies in India. Reflecting on narratives and histories surrounding the origins of Shakespeare studies in India, as well as how Shakespeare’s works were produced for the colonies and the way in which they were duly rejected, reveals how exchanges of power and capital between metropole and colony shape Western systems just as heavily as they do others.

Shakespeare Studies in Iran: The British Knight for Persia

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Shakespeare’s travels into Persia started in the middle of the nineteenth century when modern socio-political forces and the need for a powerful army were fomenting important changes in the traditional structure of government, production, and culture alike. Shakespeare appeared in Persia at a time when the country was experiencing a fundamental transition from older traditions into a western-like government, infrastructure, education, and ideas. Shakespeare was important to this process in two ways. He was enlisted to enrich the cultural property of the country and therefore became ensconced in the educational system. Perhaps more importantly, his plays were used to critique the ruling political system and the prevailing habits of the people. Hamlet has always been a favorite play for the translators and the intellectuals because it starts with regicide and ends with murdering a monarch and replacing him with a just king. Othello, another favorite, was frequently retranslated partly because there were similar themes in Persian culture with which readers could easily connect. Thus, Shakespeare became a Persian Knight and moved from one historical era to another to function as a mirror to reflect the aspirations of the elite, if not those of the common folk. This paper traces Shakespeare’s steps in Persia chronologically, expounding the socio-political context in which Shakespeare and his plays operated not only within the context of academia, but also without in society amongst the people and the elites as political allegories to sidestep censorship and to attack the despotic monarchs and ruling power.

Turkish Shakespeare Studies: An Origins Story

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Shakespeare is among the most important non-Turkish authors in Turkey and has become an indispensable part of the theatre repertory and the educational curricula. Yet, the origins of Shakespeare studies have a complicated legacy dating back to the imperialistic motivations of foreign schools in Ottoman Turkey. However, starting with the republican period, Shakespeare productions and studies were utilised to spread the progressive reforms of the republic that were maintained through the theatres and the various universities primarily set in Istanbul and in Ankara. Accordingly, this article will explore the origins of the academic study of Shakespeare in Turkey.

“Shakespeare is a Finnish national poet:” Developing Finnish Shakespeare Scholarship from the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century

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In this article, I will take up the idea of “origins” as it pertains to Finnish Shakespeare during Finland’s time as an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia from 1809-1917. While not technically the beginning of Shakespearean performances, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the beginning of the rhetorical use of Shakespeare in public discourse used to establish cultural sovereignty distinct from Sweden and Russia. Beginning with a brief overview of Shakespearean mentions in the latter half of the eighteenth century, I will analyse the public discourse found in Finnish literary journals and newspaper articles in the 1810’s and 20’s. Following an analysis of J. F. Lagervall’s 1834 Ruunulinna, I will then briefly track how shifting attitudes towards translations such as those found in J. V. Snellman’s writings influenced the emerging Finnish literary and theatre tradition, most notably with Kaarlo Slöör and Paavo Cajendar’s Shakespeare translations and the establishment of the Finnish Theatre in 1871. Finally, an analysis of Juhani Aho’s untranslated essay in Gollancz’ 1916 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare will highlight the legacy of prior Finnish Shakespearean traditions, while also highlighting the limits of translation. Ultimately, I suggest that Shakespeare was appropriated early on as an accessible figure of resistance in the face of Swedish linguistic supremacy and the increasing threat of Russian assimilation and oppression.

Competing for Supremacy: The Origins of Shakespeare Studies in Japan

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This paper reveals that Shakespeare studies in Japan originated through competing notions of literary studies. Traditional Japanese ideas about literature differed markedly from Anglophone ones, which focused on grammatical and literary-historical facts based on the notion of Shakespeare’s universal appeal. Their principles were contested by Sôseki Natsume, who questioned Shakespeare’s vaunted universality between the 1900s and the 1910s. Although specialist scholars began forming Shakespeare as an object of disinterested study in the 1920s, it was contested again by some reflective scholars who wished to employ Shakespeare as a means of liberal education. These contests for supremacy spawned divergent origins of Shakespeare studies in Japan.

Activist Discourse and the Origins of Feminist Shakespeare Studies

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This essay reconsiders interpretations of Shakespeare by Irish writer Anna Murphy Jameson and the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Developing an informal method in which the voice of the female critic rallies in defence of Shakespeare’s heroines, they intervene in a male-dominated intellectual sphere to model alternative forms of women’s learning that take root outside of formalized institutional channels. Jameson, in Shakespeare’s Heroines, invokes the language of authentic Romantic selfhood and artistic freedom, recovering Shakespeare’s female characters from earlier critical aspersion as figures of exceptional female eloquence and resilience; she adopts a conversational critical voice to involve her female readers in the interpretative process itself. Fuller, in Woman in Nineteenth Century, speaks authoritatively as a kind of female prophet to argue that women’s creative reinterpretations of Shakespeare point the way to a revitalization of a sterile literary critical field. Both writers call for the reform of women’s education through revisionist interpretations of history attuned to the representation of female exceptionalism. In embryonic form, these nineteenth century feminist writings formulate a persistent strain of socially engaged, activist feminist criticism of Shakespeare.

“Not For An Age, But For All Time:” Autobiography and a Re-origin of Shakespeare Studies in Canada

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Despite independence as a country, Canada belongs to the Commonwealth and has deep colonial roots and the British educational system was key in creating Canadian curricula. Given the centrality of Shakespeare’s work in the British literary canon, it follows that it would also figure heavily in the academic requirements for Canadian students. At the dawn of the Confederation (1867), the high school curriculum used Shakespeare to emphasize a “humanist” approach to English literature using the traditional teaching methods of reading, rhetoric, and recitation. Presently, Shakespeare continues to be the only author in the high school curriculum to whom an independent area of study is dedicated. The origin of Shakespeare in Canada through curriculum and instruction is, thus, a result from the canonic tradition imported from Britain.

This traditional model no longer fits the imperative of multiculturalism, as reflected in the Canadian Constitution Act (1982). Yet, with the appropriate methodology Shakespeare’s texts can be a vehicle for multiculturalism, social justice, and inclusivity. In light of recent disillusionments concerning the relevance of Shakespearean texts in high school curricula, this paper proposes an alternative pedagogical approach that envisages changing this paradigm and fostering a re-origin of Shakespeare studies in Canada through an intentional pedagogical process grounded in individual experience.

Scholarship has highlighted the importance of autobiographies in the learning process and curriculum theorists William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet designed a framework that prioritizes individual experience. Our approach to teaching Shakespeare’s works aligns with the four steps of their currere method, presented as: (1) contemplative, (2) translational, (3) experiential, and (4) reconceptual, fostering an opportunity for self-transformation through trans-historical social themes present in the text.

The central argument is that Shakespeare’s text can undergo a re-origin when lived, given its initial conception as embodied, enacted narrative in the early modern period. In this method, students immerse themselves in Shakespeare’s text through films and stage productions and then manifest their interpretations by embodying the literature based on their autobiographical narratives. To undergo a re-origin in the Canadian secondary curriculum, current pedagogical approaches to teaching Shakespeare require a paradigm shift.

From Metaphor to Metonym: Shakespearean Recognition in the United States University

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This essay historicizes the Shakespeare curriculum at UC Berkeley’s English department over the last one hundred years. An elite research university in the United States, UC Berkeley’s extensive course offerings have expanded due to changes in undergraduate education and external cultural shifts. With a growing number of courses on sexuality, race, gender, etc., that became part of the purview of an English department, the teaching of Shakespeare expanded as well. I demonstrate how the emphasis on Shakespeare in the U.S. undergraduate curriculum shifts over time from one form of recognition—an acknowledgement of his value or worth—to a recognition of identifying with his work based on prior experience. Distinguishing between courses that combine “Shakespeare and” and those that combine “Literature and,” I expose the consequences each has for the canonicity of both Shakespeare and subject fields with which his works are placed in conversation, explicitly and implicitly. I argue that the expansion of Shakespeare in the American undergraduate curriculum coincides with and depends on the compression of key aspects of interpretation that pose challenges for the new knowledges it seeks to create. I illuminate how an expanded Shakespeare curriculum saw a compression of Shakespeare into metonymic mythic status, which has implications for the teaching of literature from various identity and cultural groups. I demonstrate how the origins of an expansive undergraduate Shakespeare curriculum in the United States positions Shakespeare as the interlocutor for a wide range of topics.