“After the Bible, the Bard is the most translated,” says Andrew Dickson, noted Shakespeare scholar, critic and writer. “So, in that sense, Shakespeare’s popularity is next only to God.” More seriously, he said that in Britain, as elsewhere, the Bard is someone intimidating, “a subject to be revered and taken seriously. When we think Shakespeare, we think exams.”
Mr. Dickson, in the city courtesy the British Council, spent four years criss-crossing countries and continents to map the Bard’s influence for his book, Worlds Elsewhere: travels around Shakespeare’s Globe . He spoke to a packed audience at the St. Mira’s College for Girls, a lecture that was a curtain raiser to a two-day international conference, Global Shakespeare, to be held at the college later this month.
The portrait of Shakespeare on UK passports, he said, projects the Bard as integral to the national consciousness: “In order to demonstrate British identity and affinity with Shakespeare, all one has to do is to brandish one’s passport.” But, he observed, Shakespeare was popular in so many different parts of the world, being adapted in myriad languages. “In Hong Kong, I learnt that bookshops had shelves of Shakespeare in the Japanese Manga comic form. Incredible to behold King Lear in such a format.” In China, he said, 14 million people each year were getting introduced to Shakespeare in Mandarin.
After the English-speaking countries, Mr. Dickson said, India had a longer association with Shakespeare than any other nation in the world. “Shakespeare, along with the Bible, was the cornerstone of the grand scheme of what the British Raj was trying to do in India: a colonial invasion of the mind by which they hoped to create an English-speaking Indian elite to fulfil their objectives. But what they didn’t realise is that Shakespeare became more Indian in the process.”
Citing early Indian cinematic examples Khoon ka Khoon , a 1935 Hindi-Urdu adaptation of Hamlet starring Sohrab Modi, and the Nagris-Sapru starrer Romeo and Juliet (made during the tumultuous period between Independence and Partition in 1947), Mr. Dickson said, “There is a reason why A Comedy of Errors has never been successfully filmed in the West, where its plot line appears preposterous and completely unfunny. But in India, the story of mistaken identities and shenanigans was masterfully filmed as Angoor by Gulzar.” Mr. Dickson said that filmmakers like Vishal Bhardwaj, with his Maqbool , Omkara and Haider trilogy, were the direct inheritors of that Shakespearean tradition.
Speaking to The Hindu after the lecture, Mr. Dickson said that adaptations often brought far greater nuance and accessibility to the plays, and pointed to Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) as the best adaptation of Macbeth in any language. “While [Shakespeare’s] language is undeniably important, one must remember that he’s also a great dramatist.” He noted that his plays aren’t very ‘English’, with exotic characters and settings. “Shakespeare’s own world is one of imaginative geography. You could set The Tempest in any part of the world,” he said, pointing to Forbidden Planet (1956), an adaptation set in outer space. Performances of Shakes- peare’s plays adapted to audiences even during his lifetime, he said. “A very early German version of Hamlet, sometime in the 1620s, played out like a comedy for most of its performance time. People in Germany speak of their trinity of most important writers as Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare, so much has the Bard been performed there.”
Language has changed over the centuries, and even a lot of British people find it hard to cope with Shakespeare’s Elizabethan diction, he says. “We don’t really own Shakespeare any more. You can do what you want with Shakespeare, no one will sue you.”
