No fear Shakespeare

Folks at my college (IIT Kharagpur), in the time-honoured tradition of engineering schools everywhere in India, love performers. Which is to say, they particularly love to jeer them off the stage with insults of variable creativity. Ayushmann Khurana, who has since added an ‘n’ to his name and become marginally funnier, was flat-out driven away after he made a lame, onomatopoeic joke about Kharag Singh and Kharagpur. Vishal Dadlani, playing a remarkably anodyne set with Pentagram, took off his shirt before realising that being topless was entirely unrelated to his indignity. It was brutal. Bemused indie rockers were being flipped off by bona fide nerds and paternity doubts were being vocalised in Calculus (it’s an ancient G(r)eek language, don’t you know?)

And then one day in 2009, three young men from a theatre troupe in Bengaluru (or was it Chennai?) performed The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) , a play created by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, an American trio. The production spoofed every major Shakespeare play while somehow also performing its essential scenes: Hamlet , Othello , Romeo and Juliet , The Tempest , even Titus Andronicus ; all in 43 frenetic minutes. The audience loved it: Hamlet’s famous enquiry was answered by a choreographed cheer that was, quite literally, crowdsourced: “May-be (left half), may-be-not (right half), may-be, may-be-not (all together)!” An acerbic Ophelia snapped at her paramour: “The biological clock is ticking, Hamlet. I want a baby now!” Two years and two weeks ago, a group of Kharagpur students performed the play in the same auditorium, which had witnessed a full house in 2009.

You can’t make this stuff up. Almost 400 years after his death, Shakespeare had galvanised a hostile crowd comprised entirely of sullen youngsters, almost none of whom had read a word of his works outside of school. Through innovation, word-perfect satire and some uproarious performances, what had seemed a distant, distinctly highbrow pursuit had been transformed into a crowd-pleaser, a surprisingly accessible piece of art.

A friend and I were among those chanting “May-be, may-be-not!” in unison that day. Years later, when she was part of the Young India Fellowship (now a programme offered by Ashoka University), she told me about a uniquely instructive Shakespeare lecture delivered by one of her professors, Jonathan Gil Harris.

Asked what it takes to teach plays like Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to first-timers, Harris said: “I teach a course called Literature and the World to undergraduates in which Shakespeare features quite a bit. Many of them suffer from what I call ‘Shakesfear’. They have only encountered Shakespeare, if at all, in the Indian high school classroom, where he tends to be taught incredibly badly, according to a centralised curriculum, by teachers who have little interest in him. And if they are interested in him, they feel restricted by the demands of the curriculum.”

How, then, are these marooned greenhorns helped to overcome ‘Shakesfear’?

“The first thing I tell them is that if you’re going to appreciate Shakespeare, you have to recognise that his plays were written to be heard, not read. The language has an acoustic dimension that actually conveys much more meaning than you’d think. Invariably, the students I teach find, much to their surprise, that when they get together in groups and read out loud, they understand 50 to 75 per cent more than when they were simply sitting and reading quietly.”

Harris (who also serves as President of the Shakespeare Society of India) also noted several striking similarities between Shakespeare and Bollywood, especially the money-spinning masala movie, a genre that, at its best, marries the strengths of commercial and high art. “The second thing I do may sound gimmicky, but trust me, it’s not. I insist that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written for Bollywood. He did not think of his plays as high art: he lived off them, and he was part of an entertainment industry that was regarded as fairly B-grade by many.”

Now, one can crib a lot about Bollywood, its paucity of creative intent and the shocking cynicism of some of its leading stars, but even its worst critics will agree that in India, there are few greater levellers. When a major Bollywood film gets it right in a big way, its one-liners and songs are on everybody’s lips, rich and poor. This was, Harris argued, also the lot of Shakespeare.

“Shakespeare’s playhouse was in the red light district in the south bank of London. One paid only one penny to get in, which is why there were many working-class people as part of the audience. But there were also a lot of rich people in the balcony seats. So Shakespeare wrote entertainment for a very mixed audience, some of whom were illiterate and some of whom were very literate. And that is not unlike what the masala Bollywood film is trying to do. Masala means not just spicy but also a mixture: a little bit of comedy, a little bit of tragedy, a little bit of Mumbai basti and then a little bit of Switzerland.”

One can only imagine the reactions of students looking at Shakespeare through the familiar, blinding strobe lights of Bollywood item numbers (yet another Shakespeare parallel, as Harris mentioned — the musical interlude). But Bollywood is hardly the only lens that Harris employs to make Shakespeare come alive for his class: on the bookshelf in his office, one could spot Dream Country , the third volume of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series of comicbooks. Harris confirmed that this was indeed one of the Shakespeare texts he discusses with his students.

One of the stories in Dream Country is called ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and it sees Lord Shaper aka Morpheus aka Dream of the Endless (an anthropomorphic representation of the metaphysical concept ‘dream’) commissioning William Shakespeare to write a play about the faerie world. It is revealed that Morpheus granted Shakespeare a boon: that his plays would be remembered until the end of time. In return, the latter would pen two plays for Morpheus.

Gaiman peppers the story with little meta-jokes about the present-day perception of Shakespeare vis-à-vis what he used to be seen as. In one panel, his lead actor Richard Burbage mocks A Midsummer Night’s Dream thus: “This barbarous farrago of fairytale hodgepotch is a mere crowd-pleaser at best.”

Indeed, Gaiman showed us that comics can be a powerful way to introduce Shakespeare, although the Sandman series isn’t intended for children, strictly speaking. In 2007, Self-Made Hero published a series called Manga Shakespeare . It featured graphic adaptations of plays like Hamlet , Romeo and Juliet and others, all drawn in the distinctive manga style, Japan’s gift to the comics world.

As in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean trilogy, this meant cultural transposition: Romeo and Juliet , for instance, was set against the backdrop of warring yakuza (Japanese mafia) clans. However, British comics artist Emma Vieceli’s Hamlet was the high point of the series. Vieceli sets the story in 2107, in a world ravaged by climate change catastrophes. The characters wear ‘smart’ clothes, compatible with all manner of futuristic tech, including wireless communication gear and weaponry. And they somehow still conform to the classical Hamlet costume mould, complete with elaborate robes and billowing sleeves. During the course of a telephonic interview, Vieceli described the process of creating a cyberpunk Hamlet: “I had studied Shakespeare at university and Hamlet was one of my favourite plays. I realised that there are an awful lot of moments in Shakespeare where a character appears onstage, says just one or two lines, and leaves. This is not very convenient for comics, where you need time to introduce the character, time for him to speak his lines, time for him to leave the action. Hence, I decided to set the story in the future, so that people can ‘appear’ through some sort of high-tech device, speak and go away.”

She further explained: “What makes this interesting is that way before I drew Hamlet , my dissertation was on Hamlet and education. I was trying to suggest ways in which we can make Shakespeare accessible to young readers. As a comics fan, not once did it occur to me to use comics! Young people respond to visuals. Shakespeare was never meant to be words on a page, he was supposed to be EastEnders ... you went down the street and threw tomatoes at performers doing Shakespeare.”

Writers and educators like Harris and Vieceli know that Shakespeare has to be rescued from the tyranny of the canon: a phenomenon familiar to most students of literature everywhere. The moment a text gets stuck in the league of Most Grievously Important Books, both students and teachers are caught in a quagmire of mechanical classroom discussions about symbolism and historical significance and other respectable pursuits that ignore present-day relevance altogether, while boring the pants off you, one might add. Luckily for us, there is still room for a Bollywood Romeo or a Hamlet who says “To be or not to be” even as a retractable blade slips out of his sleeve, foreshadowing the bloodshed in his near-future. Vieceli sums it up nicely:

“When I was being taught, the focus was all on the language. And while that’s important and I’m not trying to take anything away from that, Shakespeare’s plays were all about the people, and the raw emotions that they expressed: emotions like anger and jealousy aren’t going anywhere and that’s the reason why Shakespeare has lasted so long.”

Amen.

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