Shakespeare in the World: Cross-Cultural Adaptation in Europe and Colonial India, 1850–1900 9780367568863, 9781003099789

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Musical Examples
Acknowledgements
Preliminary Notes
Introduction
Shakespeare’s Reception in Non-Anglophone Cultures: Analytical Paradigms
Theorising Shakespeare Reception Relationally
Shakespeare and “Nationalist Cosmopolitanism”
Adaptation Theory and Cross-Cultural Receptions of Shakespeare
The Case Studies: Patterns and Interconnections
Part 1
1 Shakespeare Reception in France: Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet and Its Intertexts
Introduction
Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Texts and Performances up to the Nineteenth Century
Hamlet in France: From Ducis to Dumas and Meurice
Thomas’s Hamlet as Opéra Lyrique
The Operatic Ophélie
The Afterlife of Thomas’s Hamlet
2 Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning: Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello
Introduction
Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (i): Racial Discourses
Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (ii): Religious Discourses
Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (iii): The Pressures of Patriarchy
Verdi’s Musical Choices and the Subversion of Racial Stereotypes regarding Jealousy
Conclusion
Part 2
3 Challenging the Civilising Mission: Responses to The Tempest by Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore
Introduction
Bankim and Bengali Literature After 1857
Bankim’s Life and Literary Career
Kapālakunḍalā: Plot and Intertexts
The Tempest, Kapālakunḍalā, and Women in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (i): A Historical Perspective
The Tempest, Kapālakunḍalā, and Women in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (ii): A Symbolic Perspective
Bankim, Tagore, and the Reception History of The Tempest
4 Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation of Shakespeare From Nineteenth-Century Bengal: Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bhrāntivilās and Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth
Introduction
Part I: Vidyasagar’s Bhrāntivilās
Life and Times of Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar
Rereading The Comedy of Errors: Bhrāntivilās and Its Intertexts
Bhrāntivilās and Feminist Readings of Errors
Part II: Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth
The Life and Career of Girishchandra Ghosh
Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth: A Case of Colonial Mimicry?
Conclusion
Conclusion
Adaptation Studies: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches
Nationalist Cosmopolitanism and Post-Colonial Mimicry
Cross-Cultural Shakespeare and New Analytical Frameworks
Appendix 1 “Imitation”
Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona”
References
Index

Citation preview

“This comparative and interdisciplinary study of the historical spread of Shakespeare among non-Anglophone nations in Europe and India sheds important new light on individual novelistic, operatic, and dramatic adaptations, while at the same time both theorising a major revision to postcolonial thinking and offering a new vision for Shakespeare studies. Sen’s concept of ‘performative transculturation’ allows for a welcome and more encompassing vision of artistic innovation over time and across cultures. He complicates simple binaries, especially of European/Indian acceptance or rejection of Western culture/ Shakespeare, revealing instead the rich middle ground in between these extremes of reception. In the process, Sen’s innovative ‘relational’ approach to reading cross-cultural adaptations also makes a major contribution to adaptation theory.” Linda Hutcheon University Professor Emeritus, English and Comparative Literature University of Toronto

“Shakespeare in the World is a notable contribution to Shakespeare studies in general, and the study of Shakespeare in non-Anglophone, non-Western, post/ colonial locations in particular, because it traces the afterlife of Shakespeare’s plays in the genres of drama/theatre and opera in Indian as well as European languages. In his immersive use of adaptation studies for this purpose, Suddhaseel Sen effectively deconstructs the paradigms of ‘hegemony,’ ‘conquest,’ ‘subalternity,’ ‘subjection,’ ‘mimicry,’ and ‘vernacular’ cultural expression that have dominated the study of colonial power relations, the presence of English, and the dissemination of the English literary canon in India. He then offers counterconcepts such as ‘nationalist cosmopolitanisms,’ ‘performative transculturation,’ ‘artistic self-fashioning,’ and ‘epistemic decolonisation’ to construct and present an alternative narrative of cultural relations. These moves imply a refreshing restoration of agency to the colonial subject, and a recognition of multiple layers of complexity in the reception and absorption of a ‘universal’ figure such as Shakespeare.” Aparna Dharwadker Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies University of Wisconsin-Madison

Shakespeare in the World

Shakespeare in the World traces the reception histories and adaptations of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, when his works became well known to non-Anglophone communities in Europe and colonial India. Sen provides thorough and searching examinations of nineteenth-century theatrical, operatic, novelistic, and prose adaptations that are still read and performed, in order to argue that, crucial to the transmission and appeal of Shakespeare’s plays were the adaptations they generated in a wide range of media. These adaptations, in turn, made the absorption of the plays into different “national” cultural traditions possible, contributing to the development of “nationalist cosmopolitanisms” in the receiving cultures. Sen challenges the customary reading of Shakespeare reception in terms of “hegemony” and “mimicry,” showing instead important parallels in the practices of Shakespeare adaptation in Europe and colonial India. Shakespeare in the World strikes a fine balance between the Bard’s iconicity and his colonial and post-colonial afterlives, and is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies. Suddhaseel Sen is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay. He has a PhD in English (Collaborative Programme in South Asian Studies) from the University of Toronto, and a second PhD in Musicology from Stanford University. Sen has been a Research Fellow for the Balzan Research Project, Towards a Global History of Music, directed by Reinhard Strohm. His publications include essays on Shakespeare adaptations; cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and British musicians; Richard Wagner and German Orientalism; nineteenth-century Bengali literature and culture; and films by Satyajit Ray and Vishal Bhardwaj, among others.

Routledge Studies in Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Props Memory and Cognition Sophie Duncan Limited Shakespeare The Reason of Finitude Julián Jiménez Heffernan Spectrums of Shakespearean Crossdressing The Art of Performing Women Courtney Bailey Parker The Art of Picturing in Early Modern English Literature Edited by Camilla Caporicci and Armelle Sabatier Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies Ariane M. Balizet Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations Edited by Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590–1790 Faith D. Acker Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe Western Anti-Monarchism, The Earl of Essex Challenge, and Political Stagecraft Chris Fitter Shakespeare in the World Cross-Cultural Adaptation in Europe and Colonial India, 1850–1900 Suddhaseel Sen For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Shakespeare in the World Cross-Cultural Adaptation in Europe and Colonial India, 1850–1900 Suddhaseel Sen

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Suddhaseel Sen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections  77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-56886-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09978-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Musical Examples Acknowledgements Preliminary Notes Introduction Shakespeare’s Reception in Non-Anglophone Cultures: Analytical Paradigms 1 Theorising Shakespeare Reception Relationally 9 Shakespeare and “Nationalist Cosmopolitanism” 14 Adaptation Theory and Cross-Cultural Receptions of Shakespeare 17 The Case Studies: Patterns and Interconnections 20 PART 1

1

2

Shakespeare Reception in France: Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet and Its Intertexts Introduction 29 Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Texts and Performances up to the Nineteenth Century 32 Hamlet in France: From Ducis to Dumas and Meurice 35 Thomas’s Hamlet as Opéra Lyrique 41 The Operatic Ophélie 48 The Afterlife of Thomas’s Hamlet 52 Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning: Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello Introduction 59 Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (i): Racial Discourses 62

x xi xiv 1

27 29

59

viii  Contents Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (ii): Religious Discourses  69 Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (iii): The Pressures of Patriarchy  75 Verdi’s Musical Choices and the Subversion of Racial Stereotypes regarding Jealousy  81 Conclusion 98 PART 2

3 Challenging the Civilising Mission: Responses to The Tempest by Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore Introduction 111 Bankim and Bengali Literature After 1857  113 Bankim’s Life and Literary Career  117 Kapālakunḍalā: Plot and Intertexts  122 The Tempest, Kapālakunḍalā, and Women in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (i): A Historical Perspective 126 The Tempest, Kapālakunḍalā, and Women in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (ii): A Symbolic Perspective 131 Bankim, Tagore, and the Reception History of The Tempest 137 4 Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation of Shakespeare From Nineteenth-Century Bengal: Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bhrāntivilās and Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth Introduction 151 Part I: Vidyasagar’s Bhrāntivilās 152 Life and Times of Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar  152 Rereading The Comedy of Errors: Bhrāntivilās and Its Intertexts 156 Bhrāntivilās and Feminist Readings of Errors 162 Part II: Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth 169 The Life and Career of Girishchandra Ghosh  169 Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth: A Case of Colonial Mimicry? 172 Conclusion 177

109

111

151

Contents  ix Conclusion Adaptation Studies: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches 181 Nationalist Cosmopolitanism and Post-Colonial Mimicry 189 Cross-Cultural Shakespeare and New Analytical Frameworks 193

181

Appendix 1 “Imitation”198 Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona”205 References214 Index235

Musical Examples

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7

Verdi, Otello, Opening of Act 2 Verdi, Otello, Opening of Jago’s Credo Verdi, Otello, “Dio, mi potevi scagliar” Verdi, Otello, Act 4, Beginning of Desdemona’s Murder Scene Verdi, Otello, Cor Anglais Solo before Re-statement of “Bacio” Motif Verdi, Falstaff, Act 2, Ford’s Narration Verdi, Otello, Act 2, “Era la notte” (excerpt)

88 88 89 90 91 95 96

Acknowledgements

This book was made possible by the advice and encouragement I have received over a number of years from several people, and through the support of several institutions. I am grateful to the University of Toronto for the award of a Department of English Fellowship and Teaching Assistantship, a Massey College Junior Fellowship, Sir Val Duncan Award (awarded by the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto), a George C. Metcalf Research Grant (awarded by Victoria College of the University of Toronto), the School of Graduate Studies (SGS) Travel Grant, the University of Toronto Department of English Travel Grant, and a Massey College Travel Grant. I am also grateful to the Paul Foundation (India) for financial support in the form of a scholarship, to Presidency University (Kolkata) for their Faculty Research Programme Development Fund, and to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay for providing me research funds from their Cumulative Professional Development Allowance and Seed Grant. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to the staff of the libraries at the University of Toronto, especially those at Robarts, St. Michael’s College, Victoria College, and the department of music; the Toronto Public Library; the libraries of the University of British Columbia, Stanford University, Presidency University, and IIT Bombay; the British Library; the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, Parma; the library of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata; the School for Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, India; and the National Library of India, Kolkata. My biggest debts are to the people who shaped my research project in myriad ways. First and foremost among them are Linda Hutcheon and Jill Levenson. In addition to being an exemplary academic mentor, Linda has been a pillar of support and a role model, and I have benefitted as much from Jill’s probing questions as I  have from her unfailing kindness. My conversations with Alexander Rapoport helped me in developing the methodology of this book and of a subsequent project involving cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and Western musicians, while my teachers of Shakespeare in India—Sudeshna Chakraborty, Swapan

xii  Acknowledgements Chakravorty, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Supriya Chaudhuri, and Amlan Das Gupta—played an important role in my decision to take up Shakespeare as an area for long-term research. Some of them have also helped me with research leads, access to rare materials on Indian receptions of Shakespeare, and feedback on this book project in its initial stages. Aparna and Vinay Dharwadker’s scholarly work on Indian literature and theatre has deeply influenced my own thinking. I am also indebted in various ways to Jean Chothia, Caryl Clark, Michela Crovi, Daniel T. Fischlin, Giuseppe Flora, Abhijit Gupta, Thomas Grey, Ray Heigemeir, Heather Hadlock, Indrani Halder, Kathryn Hansen, Anita Hazra, Michael Hutcheon, Neil ten Kortenaar, Ernesto Livorni, Deidre Lynch, B. Venkat Mani, Abraham Mazumder, Jerry L. McBride, Sangeeta Mediratta, K. Narayanan, Kathleen O’Connell, Donna Orwin, Roger Parker, D. Parthasarathy, Ahonaa Roy, Malabika Sarkar, Anna Schultz, Tara Shankar Shaw, Sudha Shastri, Poonam Trivedi, and Pushpa Trivedi. Scholars and friends who are no more, but who helped me in myriad ways are Douglas Brooks, Kishore Chatterjee, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Joseph O’Connell, and Jiří Smrz— I miss them very much, and I hope to have repaid their untold kindnesses with something in this book. My work on the book was made possible by the strong support I  received from friends—Mahuya and Sangram Bagh; Prasad Bidaye and Sheila Batacharya; Jayashree G. Baruah and Subrata Charavarty; Soma Chatterjee and Prasanta Dhar; Rumina, Eric, and Arun Chatterjee; Gaurab Gupta; Anindo Hazra; Jaya and Shyamprasad Karagadde; Anjali Karve and Rajit Patankar; Sabitra Kundu; Srabani Maitra and Subhabrata Banerjee; Monali and Debesh Mukherjee; Nilanjan Ray; Purna and Subhro Sengupta; Sandip Kaledhonkar and Sunita Srivastava; and Pooja and Tarun Uppal. My colleagues at Presidency University and at IIT Bombay have been unfailingly supportive, as have been the administrative staff at these institutions. My Shakespeare students at IIT Bombay have reminded me that Shakespeare still speaks to modern readers powerfully; it has been a pleasure teaching them. I am indebted to Soumyarup Bhattacharjee and Pramantha Mohun Tagore for helping me out with research materials at short notice, during the finishing stages of this book. This book was completed as the COVID-19 pandemic raged across the globe, bringing life to a standstill everywhere. I am all the more grateful, therefore, to those who were especially supportive in the final dash. At the Routledge end, Michelle Salyga, Bryony Reece, and Ramachandran Vijayaragavan have been models of patience and understanding. I  warmly thank Nandita Mahajan for proofreading and formatting the book meticulously and accurately in an extremely short amount of time. My in-laws, Syamala Mohan and K. P. Mohandas, have been bulwarks of good cheer and encouragement. My mother, Indra Sen, has been my unacknowledged research assistant for a number of years, and obtained for me research materials when I had little hope of getting them.

Acknowledgements  xiii My father, Subhasis Sen, has been an invaluable reader of the manuscript, and his many suggestions have made this book a better one. My deepest thanks go to my wife and fellow academic, Anupama Mohan, who has lived with this project for almost as long as I have, and without whose scholarly insights and personal support over the years, this book could not have come into being. Needless to say, I take sole responsibility for any shortcomings, errors, or omissions in this book.

Preliminary Notes

1. The Shakespeare plays that have been discussed in detail in this book are The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, and The Tempest, and all references are to the Arden 3 editions of these texts. Since prefatory materials from these editions have been quoted, these editions have been listed in the bibliography under the names of the editors, rather than under the name of Shakespeare. 2. In the case of translations from languages other than Bengali, I have provided references to English translations in print, where available. In the case of translations from Bengali, all translations are my own, unless otherwise stated. 3. I  have retained the colonial names of Indian cities—Calcutta and Bombay instead of Kolkata and Mumbai—since those were the names of the cities in the period under consideration. In the references, however, I have retained the names of the cities as they appear in the bibliographic details of the items in question. 4. Only the names of the Sanskrit writers, and the names of titles, characters, and places in Indian-language works have been transliterated as per the conventions of the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration; otherwise, I have used conventional spellings for the names of people and places. 5. In general, Bengali writers are usually referred to by their first names (and, in certain cases, by abbreviations of their first names) in scholarly critical writings. An exception in this regard is Rabindranath Tagore, on whom there is a sizeable body of scholarship in English in which he is referred to by his last name. Bankimchandra Chatterjee is generally referred to as Bankim, both in Bengali and English, while the writer Michael Madhusudan Datta is usually referred to either as Michael or Madhusudan (I have referred to him here as Madhusudan). Ishwarchandra Sharma is almost always referred to by his honorific, Vidyasagar, while the playwright Girishchandra Ghosh is often referred to as Girishchandra. Names such as Bankimchandra are sometimes given as a single name (they are so written in Bengali),

Preliminary Notes  xv and sometimes as two (e.g., Bankim + Chandra). There is no real uniformity here; hence, after stating their names in full, I have used the abbreviated form that is generally used in scholarly works on these Bengali writers. They are, however, listed under their last names in the References list and the Index, with cross-references to their abbreviated names in the latter. 6. Where possible, I have omitted hyphens in words that are accepted in unhyphenated forms (e.g., “anticolonial” instead of “anti-colonial”). When I use the term “post-colonial” in the hyphenated form, I do so in order to indicate the time period when India ceased to remain a colony of Britain. 7. Othello refers to the play by Shakespeare, while Otello refers to the adaptation by Giuseppe Verdi; similarly, the two titles, when de-­italicised, refer to the characters. Changes in the spellings of the names of Shakespearean characters (e.g., Ophélie instead of Ophelia, or Jago instead of Iago) indicate the names of the characters as they appear in the adaptations. If a quote from a secondary scholarly work on any of the adaptations uses the original Shakespearean spellings in order to refer to the characters in the adaptation, I have retained the spelling as it appears in the text being cited; but the reader should have no problem in gleaning from the context whether the quote refers to the Shakespearean character or the one in the adaptation in question. 8. None of the scores of the operas cited provides bar numbers. For ease of reference, therefore, I have used the following convention: page no. / system no. in page / bar no. within the system. I have used the abbreviation OL to refer to the libretto of Otello by Arrigo Boito, translated by Avril Bardoni, and the term OFS to refer to the full score of Otello by Giuseppe Verdi. Full bibliographic details for both items are provided in the references as well as in the form of short in-text citations, when the libretto and the score are referred to for the first time.

Introduction

Shakespeare’s Reception in Non-Anglophone Cultures: Analytical Paradigms Although Shakespeare’s plays began to be translated and performed sporadically outside of England from as early as the seventeenth century, the reception of his works at a global level can be said to have truly begun in the nineteenth century, when his works came to be translated, adapted, performed, and analysed on a regular basis in non-Anglophone regions such as continental Europe and colonial India. It is true that translations of, and critical writings on his work started emerging from France and Germany in the eighteenth century and, irregularly, in other European regions such as Russia, with French adaptations often providing the basis for translations into other European languages.1 The panEuropean impact of these eighteenth-century developments in France and Germany, however, became evident only in the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare’s works provided the fulcrum for debates between the traditionalists and the Romantics regarding the value of neoclassical aesthetics, a debate I  discuss in chapter  1. In nineteenth-century Europe, Shakespeare’s works were increasingly translated from the original English, and even when adapters used translations as their primary source texts, they also often consulted English texts as and when they required, a procedure adopted by the poet and composer Arrigo Boito, for instance, when preparing his librettos for Giuseppe Verdi’s operas Otello and Falstaff. Shakespeare’s English identity, therefore, became more and more pronounced in the context of nineteenth-century receptions of Shakespeare in continental Europe. In the same period in colonial India, Shakespeare came to be translated, performed, and commented on regularly, especially in the two cosmopolitan centres of those times, Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay (now Mumbai). Colonial education ensured that the Bengali population that came to know Shakespeare’s works did so with a full awareness of his English identity. Not surprisingly, postcolonial critics have linked Shakespeare’s reception to the British civilising mission (Singh 1996, 120–52; Sengupta 2005, 217) and developments in

2  Introduction nineteenth-century Bengali theatre in Calcutta to the “colonial subject’s ‘desire’ for [sic] mimicry”2 (Sudipto Chatterjee 2007, 97). By the mid-nineteenth century, then, Shakespeare and his works were becoming central to the formation of a specifically British cultural identity, even as different art forms elsewhere in Europe and in India were also taking an increasingly nationalist turn. How and why, then, did Shakespeare’s reputation become consolidated in the course of the nineteenth century in non-Anglophone cultures, whether it was France, Britain’s principal rival among European colonising nations, or a region of colonial India such as Bengal, which was the hotbed of anticolonial activities from the latter decades of the nineteenth century? Moreover, why was Shakespeare’s long-term popularity greater than that of any other English-language author, Byron and Sir Walter Scott notwithstanding? Why do we need to pursue these questions, and where can we find answers? These questions are central to this book because they hold the key to our understanding of how Shakespeare was received in various nonAnglophone cultures, and how adaptations of his works need to be analysed. The old-school scholarship on Shakespeare’s global spread tended to focus on what Edward Pechter terms “the consistency of the response record” to Shakespeare (1999, 8; emphasis in the original), while pioneering scholars from an earlier generation such as Ruby Cohn (1976) adopted a fidelity-based discourse for the study of Shakespearean adaptations. Used judiciously, such an approach can throw light on those elements of any given Shakespeare play that have been popular enough to retain their appeal over time and across cultures, but it also has the drawback of detracting our attention from those elements that do undergo changes in the process of adaptation, changes that may be occasioned by factors ranging from intermedial transfer (say, from theatre to opera, film, or prose) to more overtly ideational considerations. The older approach also tended to reinforce an uncritical reverence for Shakespeare among many Anglophone scholars who, “rather than seeing the use of Shakespeare’s texts in foreign languages as a phenomenon separate from their use in English . . . have normally chosen to see it as further vindication of the importance of their subject, and, by implication, of the superiority of English as the medium for Shakespearean cognition” (Kennedy 1993, 2).3 With the rise of cultural studies, Marxist criticism, and postcolonial theory, this view of Shakespeare as an author of universal appeal was waiting to be contested, and rightly so. For instance, in his 1988 essay “Production,” Graham Holderness stated that “it has now become possible, with the advance of progressive critical methodologies, to . . . detach from the writing and the reputation a history of cultural reconstruction, in the active process of which we can observe ‘Shakespeare’ being appropriated in the service of various ideologies and political interests” (2001, 4).

Introduction  3 Such revisionist criticism undoubtedly needed to be political in its aims, and its emancipatory goals were laudable, but it is unclear why it was necessary to move away from textual scholarship involving Shakespeare and his adapters in the project of reconstructing the “image” of Shakespeare and the political ends to which such reconstructions were used. This is because it is not Shakespeare’s global repute that needed to be interrogated but an unexamined acceptance of it as the consequence solely of his immanent genius; studies of the role played by commentators, translators, performers, and adapters in different parts of the world in enabling Shakespeare’s global spread required close textual study in addition to the examination of the ways in which his name and increasing cultural capital were used for ideological and political ends by different groups. After all, as Gary Taylor has observed, “Shakespeare provides the best specimen in English, one of the best specimens in any language, for investigating the mechanisms of cultural renown” (1989, 5). Indeed, the field of Shakespeare adaptations has much to offer in terms of illustrations of Bertolt Brecht’s insight that “the reason why classic plays should have survived is that people have been exploiting them or even abusing them. . . . The exploitation of it has secured classic drama a foothold, as only what stimulates people may endure” (1967, 15:335–36; translated by, and quoted in Lin 2006, 18). Shakespeare’s plays inspired adapters from across the globe to receive, imbibe, borrow from, and challenge his work far more freely than has been the case with another “English book”—the Bible—that, since Homi Bhabha, has been regarded as being just as crucial to the cultural dimension of the colonial encounter as have been Shakespeare’s plays (see Bhabha 1994, 102).4 Decentring the Anglophone focus in favour of a more wide-ranging and culturally inclusive methodology for the study of Shakespeare’s global spread, therefore, could not have even begun properly unless scholars made historically and culturally informed close readings of adaptations in various languages and media (situating these adaptations among examinations of the criticisms Shakespeare and his works generated in various cultures), and examined the mechanisms of transmission of his works among nonAnglophone audiences and readerships. Holderness’s celebration of the separation of textual responses from the history of cultural reconstruction of Shakespeare’s image was somewhat premature, since this separation, while enabling scholars to examine the political dimension of the histories of reception of Shakespeare, created a methodological problem that would eventually affect the field adversely. The problem with this kind of culturalist turn was that postcolonial theorists writing in the wake of Edward Said’s epoch-making book Orientalism (1978) sought to focus on how Shakespeare came to be used as a tool in the British civilising mission in a region like colonial Bengal and its principal city, Calcutta, the capital of British India till 1905, without taking into account indigenous responses (translations, adaptations,

4  Introduction commentaries, and criticisms) and their impact within the receiving cultures. The paradigmatic book in this regard is Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest (1989; twenty-fifth anniversary edition issued in 2014), which sought to examine the impact of British colonial education on Indians, focusing especially on British educational policies in colonial Calcutta, but imposed on such a project a startling conceptual delimitation by choosing to proceed “quite independently of an account of how Indians actually received, reacted to, imbibed, manipulated, reinterpreted, or resisted the ideological content of British literary education” (1989, 11). Viswanathan acknowledged an important omission when she stated that “how the native actually responds . . . can, and perhaps must, be told separately for its immensely rich and complex quality to be fully revealed” (1989, 12; emphasis in the original). Indeed, had the focus on British colonial educational policies been complemented by an attention to questions such as what percentage of the native Bengali population could afford an English education, or what the responses of English-­ educated Bengalis were like, the picture would have appeared far more complicated. Since English-language education was available to only a very small segment of the population in nineteenth-century India and, in general, literacy levels were very low, the teaching of Shakespeare in colonial classrooms was not the principal channel through which the majority of Indians received Shakespeare and adapted his works. Rather, it was the local-language theatres that provided the primary site for cross-cultural exchanges since, in cities like Calcutta and Bombay, where the British cultural influence was most pronounced, theatrical managers were keen to adapt Shakespeare’s plays, along with Hindu, Arabic, and Persian stories, for local audiences. Furthermore, there was a substantial part of the population that read only Bengali, and whose knowledge of the English language did not extend to appreciation of English literature. Through my examination of the writings of the English-educated Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee in chapter 3, I bring the responses to Shakespeare by one of the most influential Shakespeare-admiring, Englisheducated Bengali intellectuals to the centre stage. The relegation, in Viswanathan’s book, of the voices of the colonised to the margins could not but proceed methodologically from the Foucauldian orientation of Said’s Orientalism. Said distanced himself from such an orientation when he said that he “found very little in [Foucault’s] work, especially after the second half of Discipline and Punish, to help in resisting the kind of administrative and disciplinary pressures that he described so well in the first part” (“Orientalism and After”; quoted in Lazarus 2011b, 194). Additionally, Said stated disapprovingly that Foucault always wrote “from the point of view of power” (Said 2001b, 268). But a one-sided focus on the operations of power that neglects to pay an equal attention to the mechanisms of resistance has often characterised postcolonial theory (R. Chaudhuri 2002, 8), and Said’s approach

Introduction  5 in Orientalism proved to be more influential than his other works or, for that matter, his own caveats about Foucault. In the late 1980s, when Viswanathan’s book had not yet acquired its canonical status, Indian scholars focused on the impact of English education on the urban Indian middle class and, in the process, departed from some of her views. For instance, Svati Joshi argued that the trajectory of English education was “inextricably linked to the cultural self-identity of this class both against colonialism and within the indigenous society,” and that “in the Indian histories of colonialism and nationalism, particularly in the project of cultural nationalism, English becomes a highly contradictory, yet unifying agency” (1991a, 5). With regard to Viswanathan’s book, Jasodhara Bagchi observed pointedly that “even recent critiques of the institution of English literary studies in colonial India have been deficient because of the exclusive attention being given to the explicit design of the colonial masters” (1991, 147). Instead, these scholars drew attention to the imbrications of English studies with the Indian nationalist movement and with urban middle-class hegemony, a point reinforced by Ranajit Guha (1997), the noted historian of the Subaltern Studies school. In contrast, Jyotsna Singh (1996, 2019) and Sudipto Chatterjee (2007) analysed Shakespeare’s reception in Bengal along lines that were consonant with mainstream Western postcolonial theory, with Singh co-opting Bagchi’s work in ways that appear problematic when scrutinised critically. For instance, Singh stated that admirers of Shakespeare were “specifically shaped by the assumptions of the ‘civilizing mission’ ” (1996, 132), when, in fact, Bagchi described the same historical moment as one in which the Bengali elite was “beginning to question colonial domination and working out the parameters of its own hegemonic possibilities” (1991, 146). The paradox at the heart of Shakespeare’s ­reception—that he came to be respected and admired across the globe at a time when many of his admirers, both European and non-European, were developing specifically “national” cultures across the world—remains unexplained by mainstream postcolonial theorists. Although Poonam Trivedi, one of the leading specialists among scholars of Shakespeare’s reception and adaptation in various Indian languages, has provided compelling evidence from colonial to post-independence India to make the point that “Indians did not receive English literature quite as passively as it is commonly believed, and that a political critique of the colonial hegemony of English literature is not a prerogative of the postcolonial movement” (2005, 20), the focus on the operations of colonial hegemony and of the role played by Shakespeare’s “image,” to the exclusion, from the purview of scholarship, of the mechanisms of any two-way engagement, can now be said to have persisted as stubbornly as the older and equally one-sided view of Shakespeare as the “universal” bard.

6  Introduction The unconcern in Western English academia regarding the neglect of responses, by the colonised, to colonial cultural influence is particularly noticeable in the book Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, which has acquired the status of a classic of the field. Although Viswanathan points out that her book does not provide an account of Indian responses to British colonial education, she is the only postcolonial theorist cited in the entry on “hegemony” in Key Concepts, which states that “hegemony is important because the capacity to influence the thought of the colonized is by far the most sustained and potent operation of imperial power in colonized regions. Indeed, an ‘empire’ is distinct from a collection of subject states forcibly controlled by a central power by virtue of the effectiveness of its cultural hegemony” (Ashcroft 2001, 116–17; emphasis mine). In other words, how colonial hegemony has the “capacity to influence the thought of the colonised” is discussed with citations exclusively from a text on postcolonial theory that deliberately keeps out of its purview accounts of Indian responses to British colonial education. Such an act of “critical misreading” (Viswanathan’s caveat notwithstanding) is at the basis of a whole tradition of marginalising nineteenth-century Indian literary and cultural texts written in the wake of the colonial encounter by assuming, ab initio, that the colonised could not but have been “hegemonised.” Such a totalising view of hegemony goes against the insights provided by both historians such as Guha, who argued that, in the colonial state, “persuasion was outweighed by coercion in its structure of dominance” as far as the relationship between the coloniser and colonised was concerned (1997, xii), as well as against the insights provided by Joshi and Bagchi, their emphasis being more strictly Gramscian than Saidian-Foucauldian. And if such a view of hegemony does not hold, then the argument that Shakespeare was a tool in the British project of establishing cultural hegemony in colonial India also comes under question. The invisibilisation of Indian-language responses that goes into the theorising of colonial hegemony is also noticeable in the way the concept of colonial mimicry has been understood, as can be seen in a canonical essay like Homi Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man” (1994, 85–92). Mimicry’s subversive power, one is told, lies in the failure of the colonised subject’s attempt to mimic fully the culture of the coloniser, a failure that purportedly also holds the potential for subversive parody or critique. In that case, any critique by a colonial Indian writer becomes a matter of accident and is not driven by a sense of agency, purpose, or understanding, and the subversive potential of such mimicry lies ultimately “in the argument of the postcolonial intellectual” (R. Chaudhuri 2002, 13). The textual evidence shows that, contrary to common belief, there were colonial-era Indian-language writers who grappled with the question of colonial mimicry, such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee in his essay “Imitation” (Anukaraṇ; see appendix 1), and the impact of cross-cultural

Introduction  7 encounters is one of the principal themes of his novel Kapālakunḍalā, studied at length in chapter  3. The Bengali intelligentsia was deeply concerned about the uncritical mimicry of British culture, and Partha Chatterjee (1993, 68–72) and others have written at length about the self-loathing of the urban middle class, the mimic men who appear as characters in the writings of Rudyard Kipling and others whom Bhabha cites, but who were actually also critiqued from within by a self-reflexive community of writers and intellectuals. These latter writings never make their appearance in Bhabha: instead, an Indian response to the ideological content of colonial education that is given the impression of being paradigmatic of the whole gamut of Indian responses is represented in Bhabha’s essay by a group of peasants who purportedly resist attempts at conversion to Christianity (Bhabha 1994, 102ff.), through questions that show them making category mistakes and misunderstandings (Bart Moore-Gilbert, cited in R. Chaudhuri 2002, 10). Although Bhabha has presented postcolonial studies with an array of terms (such as hybridity, sly civility, ambivalence, etc.), his thesis in “Signs Taken for Wonders,” from where originates the very idea of subversive hybridity, has itself been trenchantly challenged and criticised. In his 2014 essay “Signs Taken for Wonders: An Anecdote from History,” Bill Bell provides a point-by-point critique of Bhabha’s thesis surrounding the catechist Anund Messeh’s failure to convert some five hundred Hindu peasants to Christianity using the “English book”—the Bible. As Bell shows, Bhabha’s project of revealing the subversive hybridity and sly civility of the Indian peasants is undone when one adequately investigates and historicises the trajectories of translation and adaptation of the Bible in early nineteenth-century India. Bell concludes his re-examination powerfully and in a way fully relevant to the work I am doing with regard to Shakespeare adaptations in nineteenth-century India: “Translated by native pundits, printed by a colonial exile, distributed by a political incendiary, the ‘English book’ was no stranger to complex cultural encounter, and not really English at all. The Serampore Testaments were hybrid when they arrived” (2012, 314). Bell’s sociohistorical study of Anund Messeh provides evidence of Bhabha’s tendency to slide from the particular to the general in very selective and narrow ways. Indeed, “the sheer accidentality and fortuitousness of [peasant] subversion undermines the claim to its paradigmaticity,” argues Anupama Mohan, who points out that “such a claim [to paradigmaticity] is critical to Bhabha’s project of shoe-horning a ‘third space,’ a move that has spawned much postcolonial criticism to step in with alacrity to reveal the hidden behind the manifest, the sly behind the abject . . . But the array of self-reflexive critical responses and creative adaptations (mostly in modern regional Indian languages) that, in fact, represents robust responses by Indian writers, playwrights, performers, and artists to the cultural dimension of the colonial encounter in the age of Empire—never makes it to the register of valorous resistance kept by

8  Introduction Bhabha and other postcolonialists with a similar methodological orientation.”5 As my study will show, among Indian colonial-era responses to Shakespeare are reworkings of The Tempest and of The Comedy of Errors along anticolonial and anti-misogynist lines that were pioneering in their scope by global standards. Chapter  4 also examines a unique example of a Shakespeare production of Macbeth in the Bengali vernacular that self-consciously sought to mimic the performance conventions of the English stage of the late nineteenth century, and this production offers an opportunity for testing the validity of Bhabha’s valorisation of the subversive potential of colonial mimicry through the responses it generated among contemporary critics and audiences. We see, then, that the focus on the power of the coloniser alone and the systematic neglect of responses by the colonised has resulted in a one-sided view of the image of Shakespeare as a tool of cultural hegemony in the colonial world, and the complexity of his plays and of the responses they generated get short shrift. This observation holds true in the context of non-European reception histories of Shakespeare from places other than India as well, and I discuss its implications more fully in the conclusion. As with the study of Shakespeare’s global reception, in general, one notices in the case of scholarly studies of operas based on Shakespeare a move from a fidelity-based approach (e.g., Dean 1964), through those that partially take into consideration contextual factors (e.g., Schmidgall 1990), to “new musicological” approaches (e.g., André 2012). There is also a body of interdisciplinary work connecting music and literature (e.g., Albright 2001, 2007, 2012; Sanders 2007), while musicological studies of notable Shakespeare adapters among composers, such as Verdi, by James Hepokoski (1983, 1987), Frits Noske (1977), and others provide a remarkably wide array of scholarship that can be used to situate operatic adaptations and their reception histories in larger cultural contexts. Of this body of scholarship, “new musicology,” while salutary in bringing to musicological scholarship a political turn, shares with postmodern approaches in other humanities disciplines the tendency to “emphasise the constructedness, both linguistic and ideological, of all human identities and institutions” (Kramer 1992, 5). The ideational roots of “new musicology” lie, therefore, in the linguistic turn in literary theory, and its development along analogous lines at a time when Bhabha and other critics in the field of postcolonial studies were also moving in such a direction has led to interpretations of musical texts that, at their best, show scholarly ingenuity, but lack the analytical rigour arising from the combination of formalist approaches with scholarly insights from other disciplines.6 Hence, neither cultural studies, nor postcolonial theory, nor “new musicology” as analytical methodologies can adequately account for Shakespeare’s global spread at a time when nationalism was on the rise in different cultures across the globe.

Introduction  9

Theorising Shakespeare Reception Relationally One might ask what is to be gained by placing side by side Indian and European adaptations of Shakespeare from the second half of the nineteenth century, when it requires tomes to discuss adaptations in each major language, or overviews of Shakespeare reception and adaptation from each of these regions alone, in any detail. And how does such a move help us understand Shakespeare’s role in the development of various kinds of nationalist cosmopolitanisms? It should be clear that, with four full-length case studies and two shorter ones of texts in three different languages, this book does not even attempt to be comprehensive or suggest that the ones presented are fully representative of the range and variety of the responses Shakespeare’s works generated in the period, in the given cultures; rather, the intention here is to use the case studies to make a methodological intervention in the ways in which Shakespeare reception and adaptation have been theorised, the implications of which go beyond the two regions covered in this book. At the heart of the culturalist turn in the study of Shakespeare reception is a Manichaean tendency among many scholars to use binaries such as coloniser/colonised and West/non-West as the principal frames of reference for the study of postcolonial Shakespeares, the singular often used in such cases (such as “the European coloniser”) providing a telltale sign of the essentialising tendency of such an approach. As Saurabh Dube has observed, “A pernicious commonplace among historians and theorists of colonial discourse holds that the construction of powerful images of the non-Western [O]ther was carried out by a unified conquering colonial elite with a uniform Western mentality” (1999, 36). Departing from such an approach in favour of a “relational” one (Born 2010; Shih 2016) opens up many other avenues of inquiry which, in turn, provide fresh perspectives. There were forms of internal Othering within Europe in the nineteenth century, a point I discuss in chapter 2 in the context of Verdi’s opera Otello: to understand that opera solely in terms of Italy’s contemporaneous colonising efforts in Africa is to miss the significance of the racism of which Italians were also victims, and to ignore the anticolonial sentiments that also existed among Italians, which, I argue, provide an important interpretive axis. Similarly, responses to colonial culture took up myriad forms even within one linguistic community within India (Bengal), as we shall see in chapter  3 in the context of Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā, and to slot them into mutually exclusive categories of colonial hegemony and (ultra-)nationalist resistance is to miss  out on significant nuances and overlaps.7 Furthermore, from the early nineteenth century onwards, some Europeans and Indians did join hands for the cause of social reforms in England, the US, and India,8 a fact that needs to be kept in mind when analysing a work like Bhrāntivilās, an adaptation of The Comedy of Errors by the leading social reformer of

10  Introduction mid-nineteenth-century Bengal, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, that reverses much of that play’s misogyny (see chapter  4). And the statement that Shakespeare was thoroughly transculturated9 in the process of adaptation is just as true of Europe as it is of colonial India, and the adaptation/ appropriation distinction that is sometimes unconvincingly mapped on to the Western/non-Western divide (e.g., by Singh 2019, 4) also does not hold true, as illustrated by the study of European Hamlets, especially Ambroise Thomas’s opera, in chapter  1. Thomas’s Hamlet and Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth, the latter discussed in chapter 4, show that a host of institutional forces ranging from the traditions and conventions governing performances in theatres, on the one hand, to censorship laws, on the other, placed constraints on the agency of the adapters. Such factors also need to be kept in mind when one analyses the conditions in which Shakespeare reception took place in any region, and no methodology dislocates the spatio-temporal and material contexts of Shakespeare reception more than those that give primacy to discourses in isolation from the contexts of their formations. Michael Madhusudan Datta, the first writer from nineteenth-century Bengal in whose work the influence of the European colonial encounter can be perceived, left behind an adaptation of the Indian epic poem, the Rāmāyaṇa, which he wanted to write “as a Greek would have done” (Riddiford 2013, 95). In expressing such a wish, Madhusudan was engaging with non-autochthonous literature in an unusual way. Friedrich Schleiermacher had famously observed in a lecture given in 1813 that, when dealing with foreign literature, “either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him” (2012, 49). Translation theorists like Lawrence Venuti have called the first the “foreignizing” approach, and the second the “domesticating” one (Venuti 1995, 20). Indian adapters pondered over whether Shakespeare needed to be transculturated or embraced in all his foreignness. The “domesticating” approach was qualifiedly espoused in 1895 by Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, a Bengali translator of Shakespeare, who argued convincingly that only after “domesticating”/transculturated adaptations create a demand for “foreignising”/“authentic” ones can the latter have their impact in the receiving culture (see Das 2005, 58). But there was another way of engaging with Shakespeare that coexisted with the foreignising/ domesticating approach, one that we could call the “defamiliarising” approach, since what Schleiermacher did not discuss, and what Madhusudan, in wishing to write like a Greek poet sought to do, was to engage with the foreign sensibility of non-indigenous writers in order to revisit one’s own traditional literary inheritance in a self-reflexive spirit. It is tempting to regard Madhusudan’s statement as the hegemonic outcome of the colonial cultural encounter, but, as I have shown elsewhere,

Introduction  11 Madhusudan’s epic is, in fact, marked by an emergent anticolonial sentiment (S. Sen 2020, 1968–72). What Greek literature did to Madhusudan’s sensibility, Shakespeare did to some of the other major writers from colonial India and Europe. In early nineteenth-century Europe, for example, the debate between the neoclassicists and the Romantics was precisely over whether traditional genres had to be valued for their own sake, or whether the mixing of genres, found in the plays of the “foreign” writer Shakespeare, was justified on the grounds of aesthetics and verisimilitude. Similarly, in early twentieth-century China, the fall of the imperial dynasty in 1911 led to young intellectuals responding “to the new ideas of humanity, equality, and freedom espoused in Western, and particularly Shakespeare’s, plays” (Weijie 1990, 161). Indeed, at a more political level, Shakespeare’s plays offered opportunities for readers and audiences to examine the ills in their own societies and engage with the complexity of Shakespeare’s marginalised protagonists. Hence, we find sensitive portrayals of both Othello and Shylock by the African American actor Ira Aldridge, and an unusually sympathetic interpretation of Othello by Verdi, which departed from the race-based interpretations of his sexual jealousy that held sway among European critics of the time. But this was not just one-way traffic in which Shakespeare always had the upper hand: Bankim’s decision to fuse the Caliban and Miranda figures of The Tempest into a single figure in Kapālakunḍalā and Vidyasagar’s decision to turn on its head the misogynist dialogue of The Comedy of Errors in his prose retelling show how adaptations provided the opportunity for adapters to not just have Shakespearean influences transform their own cultural values but also to transform Shakespeare’s texts when they deemed fit. One could write back to Shakespeare, as it were, and still consider him to be a writer of towering significance. A relational approach emphasises the synchronic dimensions of the process of adaptation, and the relationship between the synchronic and diachronic aspects of the process of adaptation is well worth considering. In the context of Dutch receptions of Shakespeare, Dirk Delabastita has observed that a synchronic approach offers a greater degree of contextualisation and, indeed, provides the basis for an understanding of the diachronic development of Shakespeare reception (1993, 220); his insight can, in fact, be extended to other cultural contexts as well. This book adopts a similar approach, locating each adaptation synchronically within its culture, and then situating it diachronically in the author’s oeuvre and in the history of reception and adaptation of the Shakespearean “source” text. Among the adaptations studied here, Verdi’s Otello and Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā are paralleled in one important respect by a non-Shakespearean work like Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (first published serially in 1866). The conflict between tradition and modernity was a concern central to colonial Bengal after the

12  Introduction Revolt of 1857, Italy after unification in 1861, and Russia after the Emancipation Reform, also in 1861. Each of these works reflects this fact by having a protagonist caught between conflicting influences. Without a relational approach, this connection between the three texts would go unnoticed. But the diachronic angle is also significant, especially in cases where the adapter, like the “traditional” poet envisaged by T. S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), is particularly conscious of the shaping (or inhibiting) force of the tradition of reception and adaptation of any Shakespeare play, or when the adapter is aware of the significance of Shakespeare’s own sources. An instance of the latter can be found in Boito’s libretto for Verdi’s opera Falstaff, in which Boito alluded to some of Shakespeare’s sources for The Merry Wives of Windsor and to medieval Italian techniques of poetic composition, and made use of unusual archaisms of Latin origin. By such means, Boito sought to highlight Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Italian sources, and also, following a call by Friedrich Nietzsche, to “Mediterraneanise” music and provide a counterbalance to the influence of Verdi’s principal rival, Richard Wagner. A relational approach, as defined here, therefore takes up Shu-mei Shih’s call for thinking “about theory in terms of world history,” using the method of “relational comparison,” since, as Shih notes, it is “only through worldliness conceived as interconnectedness—the situatedness of a given location, country, big or small, in a web of relations in the world—that we can finally come to grips with the question of theory in more egalitarian terms” (2016, 723). Indeed, this egalitarianism is part and parcel of the call for epistemic decolonisation, and the relational approach opens up new vistas for the study of Shakespeare adaptations. While the first generation of adaptation scholars sought to draw comparisons diachronically between a Shakespearean source text and its adaptation, usually from a fidelity-based approach, second-generation adaptation scholars decentred the Shakespearean source by drawing attention to Shakespeare’s own work as an adapter and by highlighting the significance of later adaptations that had cultural capital of their own and, thus, made the field productively intertextual in scope. A relational approach goes further in an intertextual direction, though in a synchronic way, by enabling us to trace the impact of those transnational and transcultural forces that operate at any given moment across different communities and leave their mark on Shakespeare adaptations in different media, as well as on texts that are not based on his works. The operations of such forces usually tend to get ignored when the focus is narrowly confined to a Shakespearean text and its adaptations, or when adaptations are analysed in terms of a Manichean divide between European and non-European Shakespeares. It is with regard to this relational approach, one in which adaptations of Shakespeare from culturally distinct non-Anglophone regions are studied through a shared methodological lens, that this book differs

Introduction  13 from the vast scholarly body of work that set the tone for the reception histories of non-Anglophone Shakespeares. Because of the rich performance history of Shakespeare’s reception in England itself, many studies of Shakespeare adaptations have focused on England or America, either chronologically (e.g., Taylor 1989; Bristol 1990; Jackson and Bate 1996), or on a particular period of critical significance (e.g., Marsden 1995), or by focussing on the way Shakespeare has been appropriated into AngloAmerican mass culture, (e.g., Hodgdon 1998; Holderness 2001; Burt 2007). On the other hand, some of the first collections of essays that placed Shakespeare’s reception in an international context focused either on Europe (e.g., Delabastita and D’Hulst 1993; Stříbrný 2000; Pujante and Hoenselaars 2003; Lambert and Engler 2004), or a specific country within Europe (e.g., Bailey 1964; Carlson 1985; S. Williams 1990; Bassi 1999, 2016; Locatelli 1999; Pemble 2005; Farrell and Puppa 2006), or, when the focus was ostensibly wider, betrayed a Euro-Anglocentrism that limited the scope of the books (e.g., Kennedy 1993; Desmet and Sawyer 1999; Kujawinska-Courtney and Mercer 2003). Notable exceptions in this regard are the books by John Russell Brown (1999) and Chaudhuri and Lim (2006), both of which have an Asian focus. On the other hand, Loomba and Orkin (1998) started moving away from the East/ West binary that had for so long characterised much of the literature in this field, but still made a distinction between postcolonial and other Shakespeares when, in fact, my approach reveals important connections. All these studies, as well as others such as the one edited by Kishi, Pringle, and Wells (1994) are collections of individual essays. While these essays reflect the academic expertise of the contributors in these areas, the lack of an overarching methodological approach for the whole makes relational readings impossible. Not surprisingly, in-depth studies of Shakespeare’s reception in a single non-European and non-Anglophone country (e.g., Trivedi and Bartholomeusz 2005; Lal 2004; Bhatia 2004; Kishi and Bradshaw 2005) or Shakespeare adaptations in a particular genre (opera, film, or novel, for instance) have provided fresh insights into the mechanisms of crosscultural and intermedial adaptation—see Gooch and Thatcher (1991), Citron (2000), Corse (2000), Arblaster (2002), Albright (2007), Jackson (2000), Stam and Raengo (2005), Melchiori (2006), Sanders (2007), and others. There is also a substantial body of scholarship on cross-cultural theatrical and cinematic Shakespeare (e.g., Scolnicov and Holland 1989; Fischer-Lichte et  al. 1990; Hodgdon 1998; Sousa 1999; Cartelli 1999; Tatlow 2001; Massai 2005; Cartelli and Rowe 2007; Burnett 2007; Fotheringham, Jansohn, and White 2008). The scholarly insights provided in these works are complemented by the developing field of adaptation studies, in which the contributions of Fischlin and Fortier (2000), Hutcheon (2006, revised 2014), Sanders (2006), and Leitch (2017a) have made it possible for scholars to analyse cross-cultural engagements with

14  Introduction Shakespeare, and the theoretical questions they raise, by using the methodological tools of adaptation studies.

Shakespeare and “Nationalist Cosmopolitanism” Since “nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism” have, by and large, been understood to be in an oppositional relationship, an explanation is required as to why I  have brought those two terms together, and why I have used the word “nationalism” to qualify the term “cosmopolitanism,” instead of using the term “cosmopolitan nationalism,” for example, a term that has been used to describe the thought of Rabindranath Tagore (L. B. Williams 2007, 73), whose views on cosmopolitanism and reading of The Tempest are discussed in chapter 3. Among modern philosophical proponents of nationalism, Alasdair MacIntyre ([1984] 2003) and Roger Scruton (1990) have been among the most influential, while Martha Nussbaum, initially arguing in favour of world citizenry and cosmopolitan education ([1996] 2002), has since then sought to reconcile cosmopolitanism with a “globally sensitive” patriotism (2008). Trenchant critiques of nationalism emerged from the late nineteenth century onwards, for example, from the novelist Leo Tolstoy (as in his essay “Patriotism or Peace” of 1896) to Tagore (1918), among others.10 Such debates have revolved “around contending arguments as to whether it should be the embedded self or the autonomous self that prevails over the human consciousness” (Bowden 2003, 237), and scholars have explored ways in which the concepts of nationalism and cosmopolitanism could be brought together philosophically, or have been brought together in historical or literary contexts.11 These new theories of cosmopolitanism, with the concept qualified by terms such as “local,” “rooted,” “realistic,” “provincial,” and so on, have sought to question both those forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalisms that were based on “unitary” cultures and the dominant eighteenth-century trend of measuring different cultures according to a “universal” scale calibrated by Europeans. As Louise Blakeney Williams has observed, rooted cosmopolitans “respect varieties of traditions and nationalities, but also believe in universal values that all people in all countries should accept” (2007, 70). If Williams analyses what such versions of cosmopolitanism generate in philosophical terms, Lazarus explains their implications for literature when he states that such writers “show us what it feels like to live on a given ground . . . in ways that are not merely plausible but, more importantly, [are] intelligible and transmissible” (2011a, 133; emphases in the original). Although Shakespeare is not known to have ever visited Venice, Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”; 3.1.51– 57), in which he claims dignity for himself and for fellow Jews as human beings, a speech which is not based on any of the sources Shakespeare

Introduction  15 drew upon when writing that play, led an Indian nationalist, Lala Hardayal Singh Mathur, to write in his book, Hints for Self-Culture (1934), with regard to the context of racism in South Africa and in the US: “If you are ever tempted to scorn or wrong a brother man of another race or creed, remember the pathetic plaint of Shylock the Jew” (quoted in Loomba 1991, 179). His comment provides an example of how Shakespeare could make his readers and audiences relate to marginalised figures in his plays but, more importantly, also sympathise with such figures beyond the immediate contexts of the plays. Mathur’s is among a whole world of responses from colonial India that reveal how Indians appropriated Shakespeare’s works with a greater degree of self-­reflexivity and intellectual independence than what terms like “colonial hegemony” and “colonial mimicry” lead us to expect. And as long as such traditions of engagement with Shakespeare in other non-Anglophone/ non-European cultures are not recuperated, the essentialisms and distortions created by postcolonial theorising will remain in place. Mathur’s response shows that Shakespeare’s plays could be used for realising the political aims of the colonised not only through the process of writing “back” to him, as postcolonial theorists are wont to emphasise, but also through the incorporation of the politically radical elements of Shakespeare’s works by adapters from colonised countries for their own ends. Adapters from colonial India and Europe appropriated Shakespeare, keeping in mind the needs of their respective “national” cultures, where the alignment of the word “national” is less with the political (such as in the term the “nation state”) and more with the cultural. Verdi and Thomas do not show any strong regional identity within their own nation’s cultures. In contrast, Bankim, Vidyasagar, and Girish Ghosh wrote in Bengali, the second most commonly spoken language in the Indian subcontinent. In that sense, they belonged to an interpretive community that cannot be called pan-Indian—indeed, no single community can claim to “represent” India. These Bengali writers came from different class and educational backgrounds, but were all upper-caste Hindus, which also puts limits on the extent to which their “nationalism” could be called pan-Indian. (In fact, the mature Bankim would espouse a Hindu identity for India, giving rise to a highly divisive politics in the long run, but his novel Kapālakunḍalā was written at a time when his nationalism was coloured far more strongly by his cosmopolitan tendencies.) Nevertheless, these Bengali adapters of Shakespeare were deeply aware of the interconnections between culture and politics, and of the fact that Bengal was, like the rest of British India, under political subjugation. Their literary work is, therefore, informed by the desire to contribute to the regeneration of their community through cultural means. Hence, what connects all these adapters of Shakespeare, both European and Indian, is their desire to engage with non-autochthonous influences, and to accept, modify, or resist them as and when they felt

16  Introduction necessary, keeping in mind their commitment to modernise their respective “national” cultures. One could reverse the terms and describe these adapters as “cosmopolitan nationalists,” a term Louise Blakeney Williams uses to describe Tagore and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who was, for a significant time, an ardent supporter and champion of Tagore. To do so would be to focus more on whether the term “cosmopolitan” adequately characterises the nationalist thought of the adapters. This book, however, is concerned with the kind of cosmopolitanism within which Shakespeare’s reception in Europe and colonial India in the period roughly between 1850 and 1900 may be situated, and one of the principal arguments developed here is that, at a time when nationalist movements were on the rise, and the imbrications between culture and (political) nationalism were becoming stronger, adapters strategically appropriated or challenged the aesthetic or ideational content of Shakespeare’s plays for their own ends. Terms like colonial hegemony and colonial mimicry render invisible the agency that colonial-era adapters of Shakespeare demonstrated time and again. Indeed, mimicry in Bhabha’s sense is notable on a pervasive scale only in post-independence India for reasons that I discuss in the conclusion. Since the choice of case studies in this book has been guided not as much by the desire for area- or language-wise comprehensiveness as by the theoretical insights each case study provides, my selection has been determined to a considerable extent by the availability of extant adaptations and relevant paratextual materials, materials that throw light on the synchronic influences behind the creation of adaptations as well as on the diachronic impact of the adaptations themselves. The reader may ask: why Bengal? For one, such records are most extensively available, in the Indian context, from colonial Bengal, and the methodology adopted in this book will indicate why such records are particularly necessary for my case studies. My choice will, undoubtedly, raise hackles, especially because there was an important nineteenth-century tradition of adapting Shakespeare in Bombay by the Parsi theatres, and because Shakespeare has been translated into several other Indian languages. An increasing body of scholarship has been devoted to Parsi–theatre adaptations and their subsequent influence on the Bollywood film industry (see Kapur 2004; Gupt 2005; Trivedi and Bartholomeusz 2005; Dionne and Kapadia 2014), and these adaptations, often seen to be “closer” to “Indian” traditions, have been contrasted implicitly or explicitly with those from colonial Bengal, where the effects of colonial hegemony were, we are told, more strongly felt. But a second reason for my choice is the fact that it is almost exclusively nineteenth-century Bengal that has been the site of theorising by both Viswanathan (1989) and Singh (1996, 2019), whose critical readings of colonial education in Bengal and of Bengali responses to Shakespeare were formulated without any attention to the response record by colonial-era Bengali writers that would normally be considered

Introduction  17 indispensable. Furthermore, Bengali adaptations from this period are more widely available than those in any other Indian language, and they connect “relationally” with European texts from the same period to reveal the drawbacks of the current postcolonial paradigms of cultural hegemony and colonial mimicry. Among adapters of Shakespeare in other Indian languages, the pioneering Hindi writer Bharatendu Harishchandra has been discussed insightfully in the English-language scholarship (e.g., Bhatia 2004, 62–66; Orsini 2020), while Agha Hashr Kashmiri, the Urdu-language dramatist for the Parsi theatre, whose Shakespeare adaptations are accessible in modern editions and whose work has generated a considerable body of scholarship, mostly in Urdu (e.g., Nairang 1978; Malik 1986; Azmi 2011), began producing his adaptations from the early twentieth century and, therefore, lies out of the purview of this book. For these reasons, it is Shakespeare adaptations from colonial Bengal that I have critically re-examined, side by side with European ones, using a model of adaptation described below.

Adaptation Theory and Cross-Cultural Receptions of Shakespeare One of the principal aims of this book is to situate adaptations of and works inspired by Shakespeare in the historical, cultural, and social contexts in which they were created. Only by doing so can one assess how these adaptations were shaped by “local” traditions and how, in turn, these adaptations may have modified these traditions. A  second aim of the book is to demonstrate how these adaptations made significant interventions in the history of (re)interpretations of the Shakespearean “source” texts in question.12 Yet another reason for analysing the chosen adaptations is the questions they raise about certain theoretical assumptions when an empirical, bottom-up approach focused on textual study is taken instead of a categorical, theoretically driven top-down approach: indeed, my attempt here is not to integrate the two approaches, which Thomas Leitch has rightly pointed out is a challenge to adaptation theory (2017a, 9), but to interrogate the top-down theoretical assumptions themselves. It can, in fact, be argued that the use of an empirically driven approach to question canonical theoretical formulations is one of the strengths of adaptation studies. And as the previous sections make clear, these assumptions pertain mostly to postcolonial theory and cultural studies, and justify the use of a case-based approach that can otherwise easily devolve into a mere compare-and-contrast exercise (Leitch 2017a, 8). Since this book is about Shakespeare adaptations from the nineteenth century, it does not feature case studies involving film, a medium that has been, and remains, at the heart of Anglophone adaptation studies, even as European scholars have extended their reach to multiple media;

18  Introduction Anglophone scholarship on adaptations has also tended to be AngloAmerican rather than international in scope (Leitch 2017a, 2–3, 6). By focusing on Indian and European adaptations of Shakespeare that are not in English, by making this study international in scope, and by eschewing any important case study involving cinema, this book hopes to show how a more egalitarian approach in terms of media and languages in Anglophone adaptation studies can throw light on some of the key theoretical assumptions regarding cross-cultural exchanges. Since adaptation itself is a process that shows remarkable variations across time, space, cultures, media, and so on,13 no single model of adaptation can be given universal validity; one must choose one’s theoretical model depending upon the kind of texts being studied and the kind of insights sought. One could examine adaptations at the level of the printed text, as does Jean Marsden (1995), or one could go to the other end—more productively in my opinion—and argue that the notion of the dramatic “work” is “continually produced among communities of users through assertion and dissension, not legislated once and for all through an appeal to an objective external authority” (Kidnie 2009, 31). Indeed, some of the adaptations studied in this book, not to speak of Shakespeare’s own texts, have important textual variants and bear out Kidnie’s point. Such variants are discussed in the relevant chapters, but I have heuristically assumed the notion of “stable” texts with regard to either printed books, theatrical productions, or operas, since audiences generally are less concerned with textual variants when experiencing an adaptation as an adaptation, comparing the text they encounter with the one(s) they have in their minds (Hutcheon 2006, 6). (Needless to add, adaptations now take place in new media such as videogames, for which the theoretical model has to be very different indeed from the ones used for studying nineteenth-century Shakespeare adaptations.) Linda Hutcheon’s influential theoretical model of adaptations involving relatively stable texts in the forms of print media, and audio and video recordings (2006) is best suited for the study of the adaptations analysed in this book because of the advantages offered by her twopronged approach. Strictly speaking, the part of her model that is specific to the study of adaptations is the one that treats adaptation as process, product, and mode of reception. To understand adaptation as a process is to study both the synchronic dimension behind the creation of adaptations at any given moment, and the diachronic dimension of the history of reception of Shakespeare in the milieu in which his work is adapted. On the other hand, to study an adaptation as a product is to situate it within the culture in which it has been produced in terms both aesthetic (such as its use, or subversion, of literary, theatrical, or performance-­oriented conventions pertaining to the receiving culture) and political (such as its subversion of either the ideological content of the Shakespearean “source” play, or of the dominant ideology of its own culture in light

Introduction  19 of Shakespeare’s work, or both). The case studies here will show that the key to any “political” reading of an adaptation lies in the examination of the aesthetic choices undertaken. Finally, to examine adaptation as a mode of reception is to examine how the adaptation’s recipients have responded to the adaptation (i.e., the product) as an adaptation (of Shakespeare and of any other pre- or post-Shakespearean intertexts that could be of relevance to the “interpretive community” for whom the adaptation was initially created).14 Here, the focus becomes diachronic, and the two points in time when Shakespeare’s text and the adaptation were created become two significant nodes on a timeline continuum that could go back in time past Shakespeare to the times of his sources, or cover texts from the period between Shakespeare and the adaptation in question, or even go into the future beyond the time of the adaptation’s creation if and when the adaptation’s own afterlife becomes a topic for consideration. It is also with regard to adaptation as reception that variations in the strategies for signalling the relationship between a “source” text and the adaptation (the product) may be located. In the case of some Russian operatic adaptations of literary or dramatic classics, for example, “the opera is no more responsible for telling the whole story than are illustrations to a novel meant to be read separate from the verbal text,” as Caryl Emerson puts it (1984, 146), since the audience is already expected to know the plot: in such cases, what Hutcheon calls a “palimpsestic” experience on the part of the audience is assumed at the planning stage of adaptation (2006, 8–9). On the other hand, Hutcheon’s set of six questions, “What? Who? Why? How? Where? When?” (2006, 1) enables us to situate adaptations, as well as works that are not adaptations, in their fullest sociocultural and historical contexts. With its extensive allusions to four intertexts, Bankim’s novel Kapālakunḍalā is not an adaptation of a single Shakespearean play, and yet answers to these questions help us situate that work as a response to its four intertexts, of which The Tempest is arguably the most significant. Moreover, with its open-endedness—there is nothing given in advance to be demonstrated—Hutcheon’s model provides the best set of tools for analysing adaptations in their “thick” cultural context, to adapt a phrase from Clifford Geertz,15 without any “theory”-driven compulsion on the part of the analyst to be selective with the data. Finally, the model’s openness to the incorporation of intertexts from various languages and media, and the scope it provides for analysing issues of intermedial transfer beyond the ubiquitous medium of film, makes it particularly suitable for the study of adaptations from periods before the twentieth century, and does not require analysts to confine themselves to a single language (usually English) and/or a pair of media (usually novel or play to film). As a result, as long as an adaptation as a relatively stable text is available along with the relevant paratextual data that answers Hutcheon’s six questions, we are in a position to use her

20  Introduction model to reconstruct a thick cultural context and, consequently, develop a bottom-up, textual-empirical approach that can then be used to test the validity of any pre-existing paradigm.

The Case Studies: Patterns and Interconnections Operas still occupy only a marginal position both in Shakespearean scholarship and in adaptation studies. The reasons are not hard to discern. As an art form, opera requires specialist knowledge for interpretation, commentary, and appreciation; most of the major operatic adaptations of Shakespeare are not in English; and it is a medium in which the primary means of expression is not words, but word-music interactions (and often music alone), although scholars are increasingly—and rightly—­ according the mise en scène in any production greater importance. And yet opera, the “collaborative medium par excellence” (Halliwell; quoted in Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2017, 305), provides some of the most important insights regarding the mechanisms of Shakespeare’s spread into non-Anglophone cultures. Operas are intimately tied in with the history of theatrical adaptations and performances of Shakespeare. They are shaped by different strands of criticism, mostly of continental European origin, that show how operatic adaptations are produced usually in conjunction with, and sometimes in reaction to, received interpretive traditions. They also reveal how material conditions of performance, ranging from the availability of actors to performance-related regulations, shape the form and content of the adaptations, and how generic conventions are adhered to or subverted in any operatic adaptation. When subversions take place in the realm of the aesthetic, they often hold clues to the political dimension of adaptation (an observation that is especially true of Verdi’s Otello). Moreover, the affective dimension of an opera’s music reveals how a character, a situation, or a mood was “read” by the composer-adapter, with the operatic singer-actor generally having far less freedom to modify this affective dimension than does his counterpart in the spoken theatre, because the mood in an opera is set not only by the singing voice but also by means such as harmony, orchestration, tempo, and tropes (or, to use the musicological term, “topics”) with extra-­ musical connotations, such as marches, dances, and so on. Since operas are less amenable to adaptation than plays for the spoken theatre, what we get in the case of nineteenth-century operas based on Shakespeare are, in effect, the only surviving examples of a tradition of Shakespeare adaptations from that period, replete with an affective dimension that is unavailable in the case of spoken theatre except through secondary sources such as reviews of performances. Moreover, the operas that form my case studies are regularly performed, unlike any of their spoken theatrical counterparts. For these reasons, and because of the marginal position occupied by opera in adaptation studies in general, I  have chosen

Introduction  21 for my European case studies two operas, Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet and Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello. I also examine the latter’s connections with Verdi’s Falstaff, the opera that followed Otello. Part 1 of the book consists of two chapters. Chapter  1 examines Ambroise Thomas’s opera Hamlet (1868), the only operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that is still performed, and which has increasingly become the subject of scholarly attention. I situate the opera in the larger context of the transmission of Hamlet into French and other European languages through an eighteenth-century adaptation for the French stage by Jean-François Ducis, and a nineteenth-century stage adaptation by Alexandre Dumas père and Paul Meurice. By comparing adaptations for the stage with those in print, I show how conventions of representation play a vital role in shaping the adaptations meant for performance, one that I call “performative transculturation.” (I use the word “performative” in a sense different from the one in which it is used by J. L. Austin and subsequently popularised by Judith Butler and others.) In particular, I focus on Ophélie’s mad scene from the opera for its gendering of madness, and use my analysis of that scene to argue that Thomas’s Hamlet is an important landmark in the history of her representation. Finally, I use my analysis of the French theatrical adaptations of Hamlet and Thomas’s opera to problematise the distinction that is often made between adaptation and appropriation (e.g., Sanders 2006). Chapter 2, on Verdi’s Otello (1887), analyses the theme of sexual jealousy and vengeance as it occurs in the play and in the opera. In Shakespeare’s times, Southern Europeans and Africans (especially from the Muslim-dominated parts) were associated with sexual jealousy, associations which continued diachronically into the nineteenth century, as a result of which Italian actors were considered to be better at playing the role of Othello the Moor than a role like Hamlet. I  demonstrate how Verdi trenchantly rebutted this discursive Othering of Italians and Africans through some unusual stylistic choices at a musical level regarding the depiction of jealousy. After discussing how Falstaff (1893) also furthers this subversion in the context of comedy, I  conclude by drawing connections between Verdi’s anticolonial political views and the aesthetic choices he took in the score of Otello, thereby showing that the key to understanding Verdi’s politics lies in the aesthetic choices he took (and the options he resolutely avoided). This chapter also draws attention to the problems involved in analysing adaptations such as Verdi’s opera only in terms of the European/non-European, coloniser/colonised divide, since such an approach ignores the ways in which processes of internal Othering also operated in Europe and led some Europeans, aware of their marginal status, to sympathise with peoples across the coloniser/colonised divide. Part 2 of the book consists of two chapters, both pertaining to Indian adaptations of Shakespeare, and I  have already explained the reasons

22  Introduction behind my choice of Bengali adaptations of, or works inspired by, Shakespeare. In chapter 3, I examine responses to The Tempest in the form of the novel Kapālakunḍalā (1866) and the essay “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona” (1875) by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, one of the first and most influential among writers from colonial India to cultivate the novel as a genre. I also examine how Bankim thematises the civilising mission by creating the eponymous heroine of his novel as a combination of the figures of Caliban and Miranda. An essay that discusses the related theme of colonial mimicry is Bankim’s “Imitation” (1874), and full translations of both essays by Bankim are included in appendices 1 and 2. Bankim’s essays, in turn, elicited, in 1902, a startlingly prescient anticolonial reading of The Tempest from Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. I argue that Bankim’s and Tagore’s readings were trenchantly anticolonial and, in Bankim’s case, protofeminist as well, and that their responses anticipate, in many respects, the political readings of The Tempest from the 1960s and after. For these reasons, I argue that Bankim’s and Tagore’s critiques ought to occupy a far more central place in the scholarship on non-Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare and in the scholarly work on the reception histories of The Tempest. Furthermore, such responses, as well as Bankim’s explicit rejection of English neoclassical critical responses to Shakespeare, reveal the untenability of the concept of colonial hegemony in his historically significant case. Chapter  4 is based on two case studies, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s prose adaptation of The Comedy of Errors (henceforth Errors), Bhrāntivilās (1869), and Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth (1893). The first adaptation, written by a Sanskrit scholar and champion of women’s rights, reveals that Vidyasagar was not only not imitating English models, but was, in fact, rewriting even Shakespeare along anti-misogynistic lines more than fifty years before the first feminist critics of Errors started emerging from the UK or the US. In contrast, Girish Ghosh’s Macbeth was a production of Ghosh’s own Bengali translation that sought to stay as close to Shakespeare as possible, to the extent that none of Shakespeare’s original names were altered. The performance conditions in the theatre were also in keeping with contemporary British traditions. Ghosh’s production of Macbeth, therefore, provides one of the rare Shakespeare-related examples that come close to “colonial mimicry” in Bhabha’s sense, and therefore provides an important case study for testing the validity of the purportedly subversive potential of colonial mimicry. On the basis of the case studies of this book, a number of features connecting European and Indian adaptations can be suggested. Firstly, Shakespeare’s plays became part of the traditions of the receiving cultures only when they were thoroughly transculturated. These processes of transculturation are more marked in cases where media involving

Introduction  23 performance are involved as opposed to, say, printed translations. This is because, in the cases of media involving performance, a number of semiotic codes are simultaneously in operation, such as in theatrical, cinematic, or musico-dramatic performances, where verbal, visual, and musical codes come together. Since each semiotic code brings its own culture-specific conventions of representation and interpretation, an adapter can more easily take the risk of adopting a “foreignising” approach, i.e., one that defamiliarises audiences from the representational conventions they are at home with, when there are fewer semiotic codes and production costs are lower. Hence, a theatrical, cinematic, or operatic adaptation of Shakespeare is likely to show a greater degree of adherence to the cultural codes informing the receiving culture than, say, a printed translation, because of the presence of more semiotic codes in the former compared to the latter. And indeed, institutions like the Paris Opéra ensured that the performance traditions were strictly adhered to, as we shall see in the case of Thomas’s Hamlet. This kind of transculturation through performance, one that I  have termed “performative transculturation,” is a good indicator of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays inevitably change as they travel across different cultures into different performance modes. And even when the target medium of adaptation does not involve performance, transculturation is still a sine qua non for an adaptation to find its place in the receiving culture. Secondly, the processes of transculturation prevalent in both ­nineteenth-century India and Europe ensured that Shakespeare became part of different cultural traditions in terms of the coordinates set by adapters in the receiving cultures. Shakespeare’s plays thus formed the site of two-way traffic. The “foreign” sensibility of the plays led to changes in the receiving cultures; at the same time, adapters from the receiving cultures also altered the aesthetic and political content of Shakespeare’s plays as they saw fit. This is one of the reasons why the concept of colonial mimicry is unsuited for the analysis of colonial-era adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Instead, as nationalist movements gained ground in the course of the nineteenth century, and culture and nationalism became increasingly imbricated in each other, Shakespeare’s plays gave rise to what I have termed here “nationalist cosmopolitanisms.” Thirdly, it is because of the rise of such cosmopolitanisms that some key adaptations of Shakespeare from this period, whether European or Indian, foregrounded the conflict between tradition and modernity. One observes this phenomenon both in Verdi’s Otello, for instance, and Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā; and indeed, other, non-Shakespearean works such as Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment also feature a central protagonist caught between equal and opposite cultural forces. Such connections cannot be drawn as long as one proceeds from the assumption that European and non-European adaptations of Shakespeare are fundamentally different in some crucial respects and that they need different

24  Introduction top-down analytical approaches. Nor can such connections be made if we confine our focus on Shakespeare adaptations to those in one language, one medium (usually film), or one region. The approach used in this book requires that whatever shared patterns connect Shakespeare receptions in different parts of the world ought to be traced through close textual case studies that are situated in their “thick” cultural contexts. Such an approach provides a corrective to the problems involved when texts and contexts are read selectively in order to fit the Procrustean bed of a top-down, predetermined theoretical paradigm. A broadening of focus is vitally necessary if a “relational” approach to adaptation studies is to yield the radically new insights it can offer to the interested reader or scholar. Shakespeare is not the transcendental signified whose auratic iconicity manifests, as it were, in the various reworkings of his plays and poetry over time and space. Nor can his body of writings be considered a mere tool in the colonising mission of “Euromodernity” (Gordon 2018, 335). Instead, as my book shows, it is the remarkably imaginative effort of numerous adapters, performers, playwrights, translators, readers, composers, painters, and critics that has gone into the formation of the canonicity of this unique sixteenth-century writer from a small island, whose works have, at the same time, spoken to so many. To foreground the mediating role of adapters and the processes of adaptation is to take what Pascah Mungwini has poignantly termed the path to resisting “epistemicide” (Creller et  al. 2019, 71), an enterprise that requires that the varied responses by Thomas, Verdi, Bankim, Tagore, Girish Ghosh, and Vidyasagar, among many others, receive the critical place they deserve in the global afterlife of Shakespeare. Given Shakespeare’s global spread and the remarkable body of commentaries, adaptations, and performances that his plays have engendered in different languages and media over time and across cultures, adaptationstudies-based approaches provide the opportunity for the recuperation of response records that can in turn contribute to what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has called “epistemic decolonisation” (1986, 87), a project to which this book hopes to contribute in its own small way.16

Notes 1. The non-Anglophone European translations based on French sources were, therefore, translations of adaptations of Shakespeare, a point I discuss more fully using the example of Hamlet in chapter 1. On eighteenth-century French receptions of Shakespeare, see Monaco (1974); on German receptions, see S. Williams (1990). 2. Chatterjee cites Bhabha; however, the latter’s phrase is actually “the ‘desire’ of mimicry” (1994, 89), and the sense in which the phrase is used in Bhabha is, therefore, quite different from that in Chatterjee. 3. Kennedy admits that his edited volume runs the risk of “merely substituting” European approaches for Anglocentric ones, but then goes on to make

Introduction  25 the unfortunate assertion that such a selection was inevitable since “most Shakespeare productions outside of English still occur in Europe, and European theatres have led the way in redefining performance models” (1993, xvii–xviii). 4. Among other problems in Bhabha’s argument, some of which are discussed later, is what Robin Gill terms his “unquestioned assumption” that the “Bible is a Western book.” Gill argues further that “the book is entirely at home in the homes of inclusivist Hindus who are establishing the interstitial third space in full view of the domestic, foreign, and religious attempts to discipline and patrol the boundaries of their identity formation,” and that the Bible was acceptable to inclusivist Hindus as “a result of a theological worldview arising in the Indian poly/theistic cultural context” (2014, 127). Gill’s point underlines the problematic a priori of Bhabha’s theorising upon which notions of hegemony, hybridity, and subversion are unidimensionally built. 5. Emphases in the original; I thank Anupama Mohan for allowing me to use her words from an unpublished paper. 6. On the problematic relationship between sociohistorical details and the poststructuralist approach of Bhabha, see Loomba (1991) and Parry (2002); for methodological critiques of “new musicology,” see Agawu (1997) and Hooper (2006). 7. Some of the panegyrics to the British Empire by Bengali writers were commissioned, while others were not. Some authors wrote works praising the British Empire for special occasions, and in their other works completely subverted the ideological content of their own tributes to the British. The actor and playwright Girishchandra Ghosh wrote a few allegorical theatrical pieces in praise of British rule and several full-length plays taking a hostile view of British colonisation, the latter of which were promptly banned. To select one group of works and ignore the other is to present a one-sided picture. 8. For an analysis of the international impact and influence of Bengal’s first reformer, Raja Rammohun Roy, as a result of such coordinated activities on the part of Indians, Western activists, and intellectuals in Britain and North America, see Zastoupil (2010). 9. Hutcheon uses the term “indigenization” along with the term “transculturation” in her book (2006, xvi) to refer to the processes by which a nonautochthonous text is made to fit in with the coordinates of the receiving culture. I have exclusively used the latter term, first coined by Fernando Ortiz in 1940, in this book. 10. On Tolstoy and nationalism, see Orwin (1996); on Tagore’s views on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, see L. B. Williams (2007), Collins (2012), and chapter 3 of this book. 11. See, in particular, Beitz (1983), Tamir (1993), Ackerman (1994), Hollinger (2002), Bowden (2003), Appiah (2006), Williams (2007), Lazarus (2011a), Collins (2012), and Saikat Majumdar (2015). 12. I use the term “source” text for two reasons. On the one hand, Shakespeare’s plays, or translations of them, provided the starting point for the genesis of the majority of the adaptations studied here. Moreover, Shakespeare’s cultural capital also had an important role behind the genesis of some of the adaptations, such as in the case of Thomas’s Hamlet; hence, the word “source” is indeed relevant. That said, the adapters studied here also drew upon adaptations/translations that came between the Shakespearean text and their own (as did Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, the librettists of Thomas’s Hamlet, Boito, and Vidyasagar), while Bankim, in his novel that is not, strictly speaking, an adaptation, made sustained allusions to two Shakespearean and

26  Introduction two Sanskrit intertexts. The word “source,” therefore, needs to be qualified, hence the quotation marks around it. 13. For an overview of theories of adaptation, see Leitch (2007a, 1–22). 14. The term “interpretive community” is taken, of course, from Stanley Fish: since the adapter and his/her intended recipients are both members of the same “interpretive community,” the adapter can create his/her adaptation based on “a projection on the part of a speaker or author,” which the adapter is, “of the moves he would make if confronted by the sounds or marks he is uttering or setting down” as an adapter (1976, 485). 15. The phrase I  have in mind is “thick description” (Geertz 1974), a kind of description that provides the cultural context necessary for any particular human behaviour to be comprehensible to an outsider. 16. On the necessity of epistemic decolonisation, see Creller et al. (2019).

Part 1

1 Shakespeare Reception in France Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet and Its Intertexts1

Introduction The reception of Shakespeare in Europe is intimately tied up with translations, adaptations, and criticism of his play Hamlet, whose protagonist, by the mid-nineteenth century, “had begun his ascent to the pantheon of cultural icons . . . like Don Quixote and Faust” (Hapgood 1999, 22). What were the channels through which Shakespeare’s play reached other countries in Europe, and in what forms did it reach these countries? How did his play alter, or how was it altered by, theatrical traditions in European countries in which it was performed for the first time? What adaptations of Hamlet were created as a consequence, and what was their long-term impact? While German commentators produced a valuable body of translations of and criticism on Shakespeare, in general, and Hamlet, in particular, it was a French version that provided the basis for subsequent first translations of Hamlet into European languages such as Italian (1774) by Franceso Gritti (Fresco 1993, 111), Spanish (1772) by Ramón de la Cruz (Zaro 1998, 125), and Dutch (1777) by M. G. Cambon van der Werken (Delabastita 2004, 107). This was the Hamlet (first performed on 30 September  1769, and published the following year) by JeanFrançois Ducis (1733–1816). The word “version” needs to be used with caution here, for Ducis, in an attempt to make Hamlet performable at the Comédie-Française, made radical changes to Shakespeare’s plot and language so that his text conformed to the strict neoclassical rules of the Académie Française. Ducis’s Hamlet was last performed in 1851 at the Comédie-Française, and although it is not performed any more, it generated a number of other French translations (some of them much closer to Shakespeare) as well as adaptations. Of particular importance is the Hamlet (1847) by Alexandre Dumas père (1802–70) and Paul Meurice (1818–1905), which, like the version by Ducis, also underwent continual revision, and was last performed in 1932 (Heylen 1993, 60). Both the Ducis and (especially) the Dumas-Meurice versions went into the making of the operatic Hamlet (first performed on 9 March 1868 at the Paris

30  Part 1 Opéra) by the composer Ambroise Thomas (1811–96) and his librettists Jules Barbier (1825–1901) and Michel Carré (1822–72).2 One of the very few nineteenth-century adaptations of Hamlet in any form that is still performed, Thomas’s opera maintains a foothold in the operatic repertoire, its history of performance and reception having had its own ups and downs. The various interpretive communities that translated, adapted, and produced critical commentaries on Shakespeare in Europe from the second half of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the nineteenth can be broadly divided into two schools. Those belonging to the first school attempted to adapt Shakespeare so as to ensure that his works conformed to French neoclassical aesthetics, while those belonging to the other—the Romantics—used Shakespeare as a means to move away from neoclassicism. Among the neoclassicists were not only Frenchmen like Ducis but also eighteenth-century Russian adapters like Alexander Sumarokov, whose Gamlet (first published in 1748), the first Russian adaptation of Hamlet, had a happy ending, as did Ducis’s (Levitt 1994, 319–22). Among the Romantics, too, we find commentators and adapters of different nationalities; for example, there are composers like Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi, and writers like Victor Hugo and Alessandro Manzoni. The Romantics were more influential in the long run, but in their day, they defined the exception rather than the norm when it came to Shakespeare: their readiness to celebrate Shakespeare’s mixing of different generic elements was by no means shared by all adapters in nineteenth-century Europe. Understandably, critical attention has generally focused on the Romantics, but it was the neoclassicists who defined the norm for Shakespeare adaptation in the initial stages. Thomas’s Hamlet is one of those Shakespeare adaptations that attempted to combine the neoclassical tenets popular in France with a more Romantic conception of the play, and its significance for the purposes of this study arises from the fact that the opera reflects the tendency of the composer and his librettists to work with/in the limits imposed by contemporary generic, aesthetic, and critical paradigms. In this regard, Thomas’s Hamlet is closer to Rossini’s Otello (1816) than to, say, Verdi’s extraordinarily inventive Otello, Rossini’s Otello being another work based on a Ducis version of Shakespeare. Stylistically, however, Thomas’s work belongs firmly to the mid-nineteenth, rather than the early nineteenth, century. Works like Thomas’s Hamlet, therefore, define the norm against which we can measure exceptional adaptations like the ones by Verdi, discussed in the following chapter. That said, the operas of Thomas and Rossini have their own strengths, too, as the successful revival of these works in recent years indicates. Thomas’s opera has had a mixed critical reception: praised by some but panned by others adhering to a discourse of fidelity that informed and still informs much adaptation criticism,3 the opera was popular till

Shakespeare Reception in France  31 the end of World War I, after which it almost disappeared from the operatic stage.4 However, from the 1980s onwards, it has come to be performed and recorded with increasing frequency in various opera houses in Europe, North America, and Australia. The reasons behind the opera’s mixed reception history shed light on the ways in which music criticism and changing attitudes towards adaptations, especially those of a canonical author such as Shakespeare, directly affect the performance histories of operas based on Shakespeare plays. Verdi’s operas are central to the operatic repertoire, and Otello and Falstaff are among the greatest works belonging to his oeuvre. As a result of the cultural capital of Verdi’s oeuvre as a whole, his operatic Macbeth, a comparatively conventional work, gets regularly performed. In contrast, Thomas left only one other work that is performed with any regularity, the opera Mignon (1866), based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795). The survival of Thomas’s operas in the repertoire has, therefore, been more directly affected than Verdi’s by changes in operatic fashions and critical opinion. An examination of the texts and intertexts of Thomas’s Hamlet, the cultural context of its genesis, the differences between its various versions, and its reception history provides insights into the mechanisms of Shakespeare’s spread into continental Europe in the nineteenth century. It also demonstrates that the processes and products of Shakespeare reception—adaptations of his works—have striking similarities both in Europe and in India. Firstly, it can be observed that in both regions, adaptations moved gradually over time from being thorough transculturations to ones that came gradually closer to Shakespeare. Consequently, it becomes necessary for the analyst to situate any adaptation not just diachronically but also synchronically in the immediate cultural context in which the adaptation is created. Secondly, the phenomenon of performative transculturation—the changes to the plot brought about by changes in medium (and language)—can be seen in the greater degree of alteration of Shakespeare on stage than on the page in any given period. Thirdly, we see a creative reimagining of the Shakespearean heroine—in the case of Thomas’s Hamlet, as I will show, this occurs by his inventive use of operatic conventions for adaptive ends. In the case of Indian adaptations, we shall see that such foregrounding had feminist and nationalist overtones, while in Verdi’s Otello, this impetus is related to both intermedial change (from spoken play to opera) as well as to considerations of cultural self-assertion. Fourthly, we shall see that the discourse of fidelity, which held sway both in Europe and in India in the nineteenth century, increasingly led critics to treat departures from Shakespeare in negative terms even when it was precisely such departures that ensured the popularity of the adaptations with the general public. Fifthly, we shall see that Thomas provides textual variants related to the intended locations of their performances, revealing the deep imbrications between adaptations and the cultural contexts in which they need to be situated; such connections

32  Part 1 can be traced in traditions of adaptation outside of Europe as well, and not just with regard to Shakespeare. When taken together, these points all suggest that a sharp distinction between faithful adaptations, assumed to be produced mostly in Europe and to be closer to Shakespeare, on the one hand, and freer appropriations, assumed to be produced mostly in “postcolonial” cultures in a post-colonial phase of development, on the other, does not hold:5 the coinciding of Shakespeare’s global spread with the development of national traditions in different cultures in the nineteenth century obfuscates such a neat distinction. I begin this chapter by tracing the critical and performance traditions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in France, which took to further lengths a tendency present in eighteenth-century England to adapt Shakespeare for performance, focusing on the adaptations by Ducis and the team of Alexandre Dumas père and Paul Meurice. These adaptations left their mark on Thomas’s Hamlet, as a result of which some of the strategies of adaptation taken up in the opera can be understood only in relation to developments in French drama and their impact on Shakespeare adaptations in the French theatre. Next, I will examine how performative transculturation occurs at the intermedial level by analysing how the process of adaptation from spoken drama to sung drama affects the structure and content of Thomas’s Hamlet. In particular, I shall focus on Ophélie’s mad scene from the opera for its gendering of madness, a subject that Elaine Showalter discusses in her study of representations of Ophelia (2005), and I argue that the medium of opera “envoices”6 Ophélie in a way that makes Thomas’s Hamlet an important landmark in what Showalter calls Ophelia’s own history, the history of her representation (2005, 79).7 Finally, I shall account for the opera’s revival by studying how, in the late 1980s, changing critical approaches towards adaptations, coupled with a spate of adaptations of Shakespeare on film, as well as an increasing number of performances and recordings of operas outside the traditional canon, paved the way for the revival of Thomas’s Hamlet.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Texts and Performances up to the Nineteenth Century8 “Since adaptations engage the discursive energies of their time, they become a barometer of the ideological trends circulating during the moment of production,” writes Robert Stam with respect to film adaptations (2005, 45), but the comment holds true for adaptations more generally, including those by Shakespeare himself. Adaptations in media involving performance are also profoundly shaped by the strengths of the performers whom the adapter has in mind, and this observation is valid for both Shakespeare’s play and Thomas’s opera. Shakespeare took up the genre of revenge tragedy, which had been in vogue for some time before the composition of Hamlet, most notably in Thomas Kyd’s A Spanish

Shakespeare Reception in France  33 Tragedy (1587–89), and profoundly enriched it, capitalising on the skill of his leading actor, Richard Burbage, in “transforming himself into his part” (Hapgood 1999, 9), just as Thomas’s Hamlet would be shaped three hundred years later by the strengths of Jean-Baptiste Faure and Christine Nilsson, the singers of the leading roles of Hamlet and Ophelié. Yet another important factor behind the shaping of adaptations is the role played by institutions ranging from the management of theatres and opera houses, to governmental organisations responsible for effecting censorship laws. In some ways, this is perhaps the most important factor, since it sets the ideational and material parameters within which the adaptation has to be realised. The significance of all these factors will be evident when we consider the genesis of Thomas’s Hamlet. The story of Hamlet itself changed as it passed through several hands, from the Historiae Danicae of Saxo Grammaticus through François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (first published in 1570) and the anonymous Ur-Hamlet to Shakespeare.9 In the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the textual differences between the First and Second Quartos (1603 and 1604–5 respectively) and the First Folio (1623) have further problematised the notion of a stable source text. Consequently, performances of the play have been based on, broadly speaking, two textual approaches. The first, in which an abridged text was performed with individual variations, was popular practice in the theatre from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century. In the second approach, prevalent in modern productions, a conflated text has either been performed in full or has been trimmed to the desired running time and the director’s interpretive emphases (Hapgood 1999, 7–8). Although Hamlet, when performed on British stages, did not undergo much textual alteration from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century, it nevertheless underwent considerable textual abridgement. Many scenes and characters were regularly omitted. For example, in the nineteenth century, Fortinbras was almost always left out altogether, and when Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson reinstated Shakespeare’s original ending at the urging of Bernard Shaw, it became a major innovation in the play’s performance history. Several speeches, some of them belonging to Hamlet, were also regularly omitted. Some of the alterations can be linked to changing performing practices: for example, the Restoration saw the introduction of women actors and, concomitantly, of the bowdlerisation of parts of Hamlet, especially those pertaining to Gertrude and Ophelia. More importantly, as women rather than boys started performing Shakespeare’s female roles, they “created new meanings and subversive tensions in these roles . . . perhaps most importantly with Ophelia” (Showalter 2005, 79). Changes in performance conditions were crucial in shaping critical responses. The apron stage of the Elizabethans was replaced in the Restoration and the eighteenth century by the proscenium arch;

34  Part 1 consequently, scene changes interrupted the flow of the action, and individual speeches and scenes became more prominent, leading Restoration and eighteenth-century commentators to be “primarily concerned with how the leading actor rendered particular speeches and scenes rather than with his overarching interpretive approach” (Hapgood 1999, 18). The Shakespearean text itself encouraged a different kind of engagement with the play, where a character’s consistency of behaviour in the course of the entire play was of crucial importance, and in the latter part of the eighteenth century, literary critics would engage increasingly in “character analysis,” the emphasis being on the “careful differentiation of what is individual about Shakespeare’s characters and appraising the consistency with which this individuality is rendered” (Hapgood 1999, 18–19). The proscenium stage was, therefore, instrumental in effecting a growing gap between a text-based analysis of Shakespeare, on the one hand, and a performance-based approach, on the other—a divergence that led Goethe in his article “Shakespeare und kein Ende” (Shakespeare and No End; 1815) to declare that Shakespeare “belongs by necessity in the annals of poetry” and that “in the annals of the theatre he appears only by accident” (quoted in Bate 1992, 76). With respect to English critics, Jonathan Bate neatly sums up the situation thus: “When Coleridge said that watching Edmund Kean act was ‘like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning,’ he meant that Kean could only illuminate certain striking moments in a play—an understanding of the overall idea of it was dependent on the insights of the critic in his study or lecture room” (Jackson and Bate 1996, 93; emphasis in the original). The statements of Goethe and Coleridge explain in part why principles of textual criticism often informed reviews of performances of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. Consequently, reservations about the modifications to English-language theatrical performances of Shakespeare got magnified in the case of foreignlanguage operatic adaptations, in which simplified and abridged texts in translation were used as the basis of a highly artificial mode of performance, with its own conventions of representation; this fact has affected the Anglophone reception of Thomas’s Hamlet, an operatic adaptation of a play of exceptional verbal complexity even by Shakespearean standards. However, the importance of live performance media, such as drama and opera, in popularising Shakespeare can hardly be ignored, especially when their reach and nature of influence were so very different from that of Shakespeare in print.10 Indeed, although opera and theatre have different dramaturgies, there are also convergences that enable creators of operatic adaptations to draw upon contemporary theatrical performance traditions when making their own operas. Thomas’s Hamlet is a case in point. To examine how Thomas, Barbier, and Carré came to make their own adaptation of Hamlet, we need to consider the reception history of

Shakespeare Reception in France  35 Shakespeare in France, through translations, performances, and the critical responses to his plays.

Hamlet in France: From Ducis to Dumas and Meurice Situating any translation or adaptation synchronically in the context of Shakespeare’s reception in any given culture, and tracing the changes by comparing different translations and/or adaptations from the same milieu diachronically help us determine the shifts in patterns of transculturation. Such an approach shows that non-Anglophone translations and adaptations tend to be of the “domesticating” variety in the earlier stages of a culture’s encounter with Shakespeare, and tend slowly over time to become increasingly “foreignising” in spirit. Translation is a teleological activity (Heylen 1993, 24); so is adaption, since adapters—translators of Shakespeare at both verbal and non-verbal levels—have to keep in mind audience expectations as well as the representational conventions of the medium in which the adaptation is to take place (Hutcheon 2006, 142). Consequently, Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay’s observations regarding the necessity of shifting gradually from “domesticating” to “foreignising” adaptations (translated by, and quoted in Das 2005, 58), mentioned in the introduction, can be seen to be valid in the case of French adaptations of Shakespeare as well, for only when the interpretive barrier posed by a “foreign” work of art is broken down incrementally are individuals from the receiving culture sufficiently motivated to try and encounter the “original” on its own terms. In the case of French translations and adaptations of Hamlet, a play whose mixing of the comic and the tragic, the natural and the supernatural, high poetry and bawdy humour, onstage violence, and a wide time span of the action represented onstage makes it particularly “faulty” by neoclassical standards,11 one notices a perceptible move, over time, from the neoclassical orientation of the earliest adaptations to those that incorporated more elements from Shakespeare’s own play. There was little knowledge of Shakespeare in France before the eighteenth century.12 From the 1720s onwards, writers like Destouches (Philippe Néricault), abbé Le Blanc, and, above all, Voltaire, began to popularise Shakespeare through translations of excerpts of some of his plays. In the first four volumes of his Le théâtre anglois (1745–46), Pierre-Antoine de La Place published translations of ten plays by Shakespeare and summaries of several others. La Place translated striking passages from the plays (replacing Shakespearean blank verse with Racinian alexandrines) and connected them by means of plot synopses. Since these translations were not meant to be enacted, La Place could include bloodshed (sword fight, murder), as well as, in the case of Hamlet, the supernatural element of the Ghost that, as per neoclassical conventions, could not be represented on the contemporary French stage. However, a

36  Part 1 consequence of La Place’s efforts, the subsequent translations by Pierre Le Tourneur (1776–83), and the English actor David Garrick’s visits to Paris (1751, 1763, and 1765),13 was that Shakespeare began to be adapted for the stage, a development in which Ducis’s adaptations played a leading role. Ducis knew no English and depended on French translations for producing his adaptations, the first of which was his Hamlet. Furthermore, the changes Ducis made were so radical that he admitted in his letter of 14 April 1769 to Garrick that, in adapting Hamlet, he was “forced to write a new play” (Albert 1879, 8). How accepted and normal Ducis’s approach was for the times becomes evident when we examine the cultural milieu synchronically. In his Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe (1761), Voltaire, writing under a pseudonym, observed: “And let there be no doubt about it: there is beauty in Shakespeare’s plays. M. de Voltaire was the first to make them known in France . . . but were the translations he made of certain passages of these writers faithful? He himself has warned us that they were not; he told us that he was more given to imitating than translating” (1964, 8). Even earlier, in around 1750, Sumarokov, an admirer of Voltaire himself, clarified to one of his critics that his Russian Gamlet, “apart from the Monologue at the end of the third act and Claudius’ falling down on his knees hardly resembles Shakespeare’s tragedy whatsoever” (Levitt 1994, 320, 322). Not only was being faithful to Shakespeare not the concern of these early adapters, they were in fact proud of departing from him as they saw fit. This attitude should not be considered to be anomalous since, as D. M. Lang observed in his defence of Sumarokov, “no-one nowadays reproaches Racine for diverging from Euripides in his Iphigénie” (1948, 69), and Sumarokov, Ducis, and, later, Thomas wrote for specific audiences and readers, as indeed did Shakespeare himself. The critical insistence on fidelity, therefore, needs to be placed against the need felt by many others—including critics and adapters in Shakespeare’s own country—to adapt his plays in order to make them relevant for their own audiences and readers. Mary B. Vanderhoof has stated that, in the case of his adaptation of Hamlet, Ducis “wrote a new play with old names” (1953, 89), while, writing on Sumarokov’s Gamlet, Levitt has stated that “were it not for the characters’ names, and the two plays’ basic point of departure, one might hardly connect them” (1994, 320– 21). On the other hand, since Ducis’s and Sumarokov’s Hamlet adaptations were both created under the influence of neoclassical conventions that shaped the tastes of eighteenth-century French theatregoers and Russian imperial courtiers (Lang 1948, 69), they are closer to each other than they are to Shakespeare. Hence, in terms of the conventional but methodologically problematic distinction often made between adaptation and appropriation, each of these works could be called an appropriation. We see, therefore, that the latter term is as applicable to European reworkings of Shakespeare as it is to non-European ones, if we take the degree

Shakespeare Reception in France  37 of transformation of Shakespeare as the basis for making the distinction between the two terms. This point becomes clear when we consider the plot of Ducis’s adaptation. In the first published version of his Hamlet, Hamlet is the designated king of Denmark, although he has not yet been crowned. Claudius is not Hamlet’s uncle but a nobleman in love with Gertrude, who tells her maid Elvire that she killed Hamlet’s father by means of a poisoned drink, an act for which she is strongly remorseful. Ophélie becomes Claudius’s daughter, and Polonius merely a conspirator with Claudius; Ophélie confides in Gertrude that she and Hamlet are secretly in love, despite his father’s forbidding. Norceste replaces Horatio, and Ducis omits Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Fortinbras, and a host of other characters of lesser importance. The ending of Ducis’s play changes across the three major versions. In the manuscript version of 1769, Gertrude kills herself with the same dagger with which Claudius killed himself; in the 1770 published version, she gets killed by Claudius; and in the 1809 revision, she kills herself out of remorse.14 In the 1769 version, Hamlet and Ophélie receive the dying Gertrude’s blessings for a married life, while, in the 1809 version, Ophélie lives, but there is no indication of an impending marriage with Hamlet, since, with a heavy heart, she sides with her father, Claudius, over her lover. In his Russian adaptation of Hamlet, shaped by neoclassical aesthetics and predating Ducis’s adaptation, Sumarokov, too, omits Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras, and gives the play a happy ending (Levitt 1994, 321). Seen from this perspective, Voltaire’s well-documented love-hate relationship with Shakespeare is not as perplexing as may now seem.15 Many contemporary English commentators who accepted neoclassical tenets as holy writ also shared some of Voltaire’s reservations about Shakespeare (Monaco 1974, 7); therefore, Voltaire was not exaggerating when he claimed that the English “saw as well as I the boorishness of their favorite author; but they sensed better than I his beauties which are all the more singular for being flashes which shine in the deepest of nights” (Essai sur la poésie épique, 1728; see Voltaire 1964, 6).16 It was when Pierre Le Tourneur suggested the English playwright as a model for “real” tragedy that Voltaire saw Shakespeare as a genuine threat to French dramatic traditions: What is frightful is that this monster has support in France; and, as the height of calamity and horror, it was I who in the past first spoke of this Shakespeare; it was I who was the first to point out to Frenchmen the few pearls that were to be found in this enormous dunghill. It never entered my mind that by doing so I would one day help the effort to trample on the crowns of Racine and Corneille in order to wreathe the brow of this barbaric mountebank. (Letter to the Comte d’Argental, July 1776; quoted in Voltaire 1964, 10)

38  Part 1 Voltaire’s hostility towards Shakespeare marks the beginning of the neoclassicist challenge in France, which would be countered by the French Romantics.17 The impact of this conflict would be felt nearly ninety years later in Thomas’s opera, as well as in India, where Bankimchandra Chatterjee (discussed in chapter  4) would reject outright both English and French neoclassical criticisms of Shakespeare. The Romantic resistance was possible in part due to Pierre Le Tourneur’s prose translations, which stay much closer to the Shakespearean texts: Le Tourneur’s Hamlet (1779) restores, among others, the gravediggers (who were left out in Ducis) and the original tragic ending. Le Tourneur, who knew English well, left out only those passages where he felt the words were too vulgar for French tastes, or where the wordplay was too complicated; such passages were explained in his notes (Bailey 1964, 20). The differences between Ducis, who intended his version of Hamlet to be performed, and Le Tourneur, whose translation of Hamlet was meant for readers, reveal that Shakespeare on stage needed to be transculturated more thoroughly than Shakespeare on the page. This is not surprising: given the higher financial risks of mounting productions, as well as the well-entrenched conventions of genre, form, and performance in the theatre and the opera house, multimedia adaptations of Shakespeare required—and still require—adapters to adhere more to the cultural codes informing the receiving culture rather than those of the source culture. Therefore, when Dumas and Meurice made their version of Hamlet, they incorporated elements from the Ducis translation, including the happy ending, even though Dumas admired Le Tourneur’s translation and knew it almost by heart (Bailey 1964, 69). For the same reason, Thomas provided a “happy” ending for performances of his Hamlet in France (Ophélie dies and Hamlet lives) and a tragic ending for performances in England (in which Hamlet dies as well), although, for reasons that remain unclear, when the British première took place at Covent Garden on 19 June 1869, the French version with the happy ending was sung in an Italian translation by Achille de Lauzières.18 The greater degree of departures from Shakespeare’s original text in adaptations meant for the stage, as well as the various endings of Thomas’s opera, shows “performative transculturation” at work. As we shall see, institutional regulations also played an important role in ensuring that such transculturations did take place. This is not to assume that the conditions of reception, or that theatrical or operatic conventions in any given culture, are immutable. If Garrick’s visits to France facilitated the reception of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Charles Kemble’s Paris debut in 1827, with an English troupe, stunned French audiences, which included Dumas, Berlioz, and Victor Hugo, and helped Shakespeare become a major source of inspiration to the French Romantics, who sought to break free from neoclassicism. Dumas remarked of the Shakespeare performances by Kemble et al. that

Shakespeare Reception in France  39 “it was the first time I saw in the theatre real passions, giving life to men and women of flesh and blood” (quoted in Showalter 2005, 83). Berlioz explicitly pitted Shakespeare against neoclassicism, decrying “the pitiable narrowness of our old poetics, decreed by pedagogues and obscurantist monks” (quoted in Barzun 1956, 67).19 The Romantics’ responses to Shakespeare are embodied in Berlioz’s Shakespeare-inspired musical works,20 plays such as Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio (1834) and Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton (1835), and the paintings of Eugène Delacroix,21 who painted many of the play’s scenes that had offended the neoclassicists, such as the Ghost scene, the play scene, the gravedigger scene, and Ophelia’s madness and death.22 These and other paintings, especially those related to Ophelia’s death, provide important visual intertextual references for the Dumas-Meurice and Thomas Hamlets. French neoclassical audiences found Ophelia an unnecessary diversion (Heylen 1993, 30). Dumas and Meurice brought her back into focus. Thomas brought her to the centre stage. Because of the Dumas-Meurice version, French critics became more open to the mixing of genres found in Shakespeare. The critic for the Globe, for instance, argued that the presence of the comic element in Hamlet, far from being incongruous in a tragedy, was actually inherent in the subject itself, while Charles Magnin found the grotesque so poignant and fused with Hamlet’s character, that he thought that the effect was far from comic (Bailey 1964, 68). Nevertheless, by the time the English actor Charles Macready toured Paris in 1844, the enthusiasm for Shakespeare had waned with the decline of the Romantic movement in France. As a result, when Dumas wanted to mount Hamlet, he found that no theatre was willing to risk the enterprise. Consequently, Dumas established a Théâtre Historique in 1847, which he inaugurated with his adaptation of Hamlet. Given the conditions in which he opened his theatre, it is reasonable to assume that Dumas deemed financial success essential. His adaptation had to be consonant with the cultural codes informing the receiving culture which, unlike in the 1820s, was not likely to be responsive to something radically different from well-established theatrical conventions it was familiar with. Hence, Dumas and Meurice chose to produce a Shakespeare adaptation that would capitalise on spectacle, drawing especially on scenes that had already been made famous by painters such as by Delacroix, rather than emphasising Hamlet’s psychological complexities. The conditions of production of theatrical adaptations explain, more than any other factor, why the “history of Hamlet in France during the rise and decline of the Romantic movement shows greater progress towards faithful interpretation in the study than on the stage” (Bailey 1964, 77). The Dumas-Meurice Hamlet, too, therefore modifies, transposes, or omits a number of Shakespeare’s original scenes. For example, their Hamlet opens with a scene involving the king, the queen, and the courtiers,

40  Part 1 while Thomas’s opera opens with a dark, sinister orchestral prelude (the music for which is later associated with the appearance of the Ghost) before moving on to the same scene with which the Dumas-Meurice adaptation opens. In both adaptations, the love between Hamlet and Ophelia/Ophélie is represented soon afterwards—before Hamlet meets the ghost of his father—in a scene in which Hamlet declares his love to Ophélie and writes her a note (Dumas and Meurice 1853, 2; Barbier and Carré 1993, 48–51). In the Dumas-Meurice version, this note is read by Polonius later to the King (Dumas and Meurice 1853, 9), while in Shakespeare (Hamlet 2.2.114–17), we find the note only in reported form. In the opera, Polonius does not read out this letter, but its words are converted into a love duet for Hamlet and Ophélie in act 1, and the music to which it is set is quoted later, in Ophélie’s act 4 mad scene—an effective use of thematic recall. In both Shakespeare and Dumas-Meurice, Laertes/ Laerte discourages Ophelia/Ophélie from loving Hamlet, unlike in the opera, where Laerte asserts early on his support to the lovers. In both Dumas-Meurice and Thomas, Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost occurs after he has declared his love for Ophélie, and Hamlet never sounds as misogynistic as he does in Shakespeare; rather, he is caught between love and duty. The next significant change in the Dumas-Meurice Hamlet is the rearrangement of scenes following the enactment of “The Murder of Gonzago,” such that the closet scene, in which Polonius dies, follows soon afterwards, and Claudius’s urge to try to pray is occasioned not so much by the sense of guilt aroused by his seeing the play within the play, as is the case in Shakespeare (3.3.36–72), but by the death of Polonius (Dumas and Meurice 1853, 21). Furthermore, in the Dumas-Meurice adaptation, Claudius’s plan to have Hamlet killed with Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s help is also omitted, and the part of Osric is transferred, somewhat implausibly, to Guildenstern. Most importantly, the play ends with Ophélie, Laerte, Gertrude, and Claudius dying, while Hamlet lives to take up the throne, and as was the case with theatrical productions in English in Shakespeare’s own country, Fortinbras is left out in both the Dumas-Meurice and Thomas Hamlets. It should be noted here that in the Dumas-Meurice version, Meurice was the primary translator, and Dumas “polished” the text, making several changes to both plot and language. Over time, this led to the two men having major differences regarding the liberties Dumas took with Shakespeare’s play. In 1864, Meurice revised the text of the adaptation and restored Shakespeare’s original ending, hoping that his version, closer to Shakespeare’s play, would be performed at the tercentenary celebration of Shakespeare’s birth. That performance was stopped by royal decree, and it was finally performed with success in December  1867 (three months before the première of Thomas’s Hamlet, on 9 March  1868), prompting Dumas to argue in several articles that his own dénouement was better than Shakespeare’s (Heylen 1993, 56–57).

Shakespeare Reception in France  41 Even in the 1880s the Comédie-Française thwarted Meurice’s attempts to present versions closer to Shakespeare. Only in the 1890s were attempts successfully made by the actor Jean Mounet-Sully to bring the French Hamlet closer to Shakespeare’s, one of the reasons for which was Mounet-Sully’s familiarity with the prose translations of Victor Hugo’s son, François-Victor Hugo (Heylen 1993, 57–59). In 1868, when Thomas’s Hamlet was premièred, even such a degree of closeness as Mounet-Sully sought was inconceivable. If we make the mistake of neglecting the pressures exerted by previous adaptations, generic conventions, audience expectations, institutional demands, and material constraints on the decisions taken by adapters, then a number of the adaptational choices taken by Thomas and his librettists would seem to be arbitrary and ill conceived. They do not seem so when we keep in mind that the opera was created at a time when a century of highly transculturated Shakespeare dominated French stages and shaped audience expectations. From Ducis, through the DumasMeurice adaptation, to the opera, Hamlet did not put on an antic disposition. The changes to the plot and language also made Hamlet less misogynistic, especially in the opera. And just as Ducis’s adaptation has more in common with that of Sumarokov, so has Thomas’s opera with that of the Dumas-Meurice Hamlet, the most well known among French theatrical versions of Hamlet at the time of the opera’s composition. Secondly, the Dumas-Meurice version, with its five-act structure common to French grands opéras as well and its emphasis on visual splendour rather than verbal richness, facilitated the task of adaptation from spoken play to opera. For this reason, diachronic comparisons with Shakespeare and Elizabethan England illuminate less about the nineteenth-century spread of Hamlet in France (and, by extension, Europe) than does a combination of synchronic and diachronic approaches within France (and areas under the ambit of influence of French culture). But the constraints imposed by intermedial adaptation also need to be kept in mind: given that it takes much longer to sing words than to speak them, if Hamlet’s text were not abridged, the running time of an operatic adaptation of the play would be simply unfeasible for a single evening. The analyst must also consider traditions of operatic adaptation and of the means by which affect is generated in opera through musical, rather than verbal, means. My analysis of Thomas’s opera is, therefore, historicist in its emphasis, and geared in particular to its musical, visual, and theatrical intertexts.

Thomas’s Hamlet as Opéra Lyrique Although it is now customary to name an opera only after its composer, this practice tends to ignore the role played by librettists as adapters and the connections between operatic subgenres and their venues of performance. In the context of spoken drama, the Comedie-Française

42  Part 1 imposed regulations regarding the ending of Hamlet till as late as the 1890s. Similarly, the fact that Thomas, Barbier, and Carré were adapting Shakespeare’s play for the Paris Opéra, which had its own strict representational codes, put practical constraints on their aesthetic choices as adapters. Barbier and Carré were experienced librettists and counted Thomas and Charles-François Gounod as among those composers who were most amenable to suggestions from them (Speare 1997, 36).23 Their work was collaborative in nature, and, for reasons that I discuss later, it involved working within the operatic conventions of the day, not challenging them. The conventions in place at the Paris Opéra in the 1860s are best understood in terms of word-music relationships in opera. As is well known, opera began in Italy due to the efforts of the group of humanists collectively known as the Florentine Camerata, who sought to bring together words and music in a new art form in which neither element was to gain the upper hand, the first extant example of which, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600), is contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s mature works. However, music eventually regained the upper hand, as it had done in the realm of polyphonic church music: not surprisingly, the word used to refer to the text of an opera, “libretto,” is a diminutive of the Italian word libro (book). Telling a story through characters that sing makes the genre ab initio artificial, and the fact that it takes longer to sing words than to speak them means that, in the case of adapting a full-length spoken drama as opera, the plot necessarily becomes reduced to essentials, and the words become less important than in the spoken play. Among the ways in which composers sought to overcome the problem of storytelling through music was to have musical numbers separated by spoken dialogue (the latter sections carrying the action forward), as in the French opéra comique and the German Singspiel. The classificatory principle behind these operatic subgenres was the relationship of music to the spoken word and not the plot: Georges Bizet’s Carmen, one of the most famous operatic tragedies in terms of its plot, is formally an opéra comique since, in the form in which Bizet left the work, there were extensive passages of spoken dialogue. But this combination of spoken and sung words did not facilitate the willing suspension of disbelief—the acceptance of a highly stylised representational convention as a convention—and in certain operatic subgenres, French and Italian composers replaced spoken dialogue with recitatives, a style of delivery in which the singer adopted the rhythms and delivery of ordinary speech while uttering the syllables of the words to notated pitches, often accompanied only by a cello and harpsichord. These were known as the recitativo secco (dry recitative). Over time, the orchestra came to be used to accompany recitatives, thereby blurring to an extent the difference between the recitatives and the musical numbers; these were termed recitativo accompagnato (accompanied recitative). Composers also developed the arioso, a

Shakespeare Reception in France  43 category of solo vocal piece that was somewhere in-between recitative and solo aria, accompanied by the orchestra, which made the musical texture even more continuous. If French and Italian opera composers sought to make the number opera more continuous musically through the use of ariosos and accompanied recitatives, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, German opera composers such as Louis Spohr, Carl Maria von Weber, Heinrich Marschner, and, most influentially, Richard Wagner started composing what are known as through-composed operas, in which the distinctions between musical numbers, on the one hand, and recitative and arioso passages, on the other, were increasingly blurred. Wagner sometimes carefully wove in musical numbers into his unbroken arcs of music even in his mature works. However, in general, Wagner’s vocal writing could be described as declamatory song which would be heard over a continuous stream of orchestral music. Consequently, Wagner laid greater expressive emphasis on the orchestra, which now had much more significant melodic content and expressive burden than was the case in number operas, especially Italian ones, which continued to give greater expressive emphasis on the human voice.24 Wagner developed to a very high degree the use of recurrent themes in order to comment upon the action on stage, and to reveal the inner psychological states of his characters. As Liszt wrote in 1849, in Tannhäuser, he [Wagner] has made a striking operatic innovation, in which melody not only expresses but actually represents certain emotions by recurring when these reappear, and by being duplicated in the orchestra independently of the singing on stage, often with modulations that depict the passions to which they correspond. Such recurrence not only gives rise to moving recollections; it reveals the emotion it expresses. Barely glowing when these impressions still stir only vaguely in our heart, [the melody] vigorously unfolds when they forcefully grip it once again. (Journal des débats, 18 May 1849; quoted in Lacombe 2001, 142) By the 1860s, Wagner had developed this musical technique for expressing the interiority of his characters with unprecedented sophistication and expressive power, and his innovations came to be associated with the pinnacle of “progress” in operatic dramaturgy by the musical avantgarde, and resisted by others as a threat to well-established French and Italian traditions. As we shall see in the following chapter, the challenge to the dominant existing Italian operatic traditions by Wagner was one that Verdi would take up in Otello. But Wagner’s innovations also met with resistance from Thomas himself. Born in Metz on 5 August 1811 to a family of musicians, Thomas studied at the Paris Conservatoire, developing into

44  Part 1 a virtuoso pianist and winning the coveted Prix de Rome for composition in 1832. After his return to Paris in 1837, Thomas achieved success as a composer of light opéras comiques, among them Le songe d’une nuit d’été (1850), a comedy that is not based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in which Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Falstaff appear as characters.25 After 1860, Thomas stopped producing new operas till Mignon appeared in 1866, to a libretto by the team of Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, who also wrote the librettos for Gounod’s Faust (1859) and Roméo et Juliette (1867; henceforth Roméo). Thomas simultaneously worked on his Hamlet, which was first performed in 1868 and was his most successful opera after Mignon in terms of popularity, although Thomas himself considered Hamlet his best work. Both operas were provided with “happy” endings for French audiences and tragic ones for Germany (Mignon) and England (Hamlet). In 1871, Thomas was appointed director of the Paris Conservatoire. Consequently, his compositional output slackened, and Thomas composed only one opera after Hamlet, Françoise di Rimini (1882, after Dante). His last stage work was a ballet, La tempête (1889), based on Shakespeare’s play. Moreover, as a result of the Franco-Prussian war, Thomas came to espouse an antiGerman stance that, in the context of opera, translated into his professed disinterest in the operas of Wagner.26 This hostility added to the image of Thomas as a conservative, and played a role in the vagaries in the posthumous reception of his Hamlet. Thomas’s choice of Goethe’s and Shakespeare’s works as subjects for operas can be traced to personal reasons, and to larger cultural currents of the 1860s. Thomas had a sense of personal rivalry with Gounod (Rogeboz-Malfroy 1994, 261), who had scored a resounding success with his adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, and was composing Roméo at a time when operas based on Shakespeare were in vogue in connection with the playwright’s birth tercentenary in 1864, for which a committee headed by Victor Hugo had been formed (Bailey 1964, 81n109). A new set of translations of the complete Shakespeare by Victor Hugo’s son, François-Victor Hugo (1858–65), marked an important moment in the French reception of Shakespeare. Franco Faccio, who would later conduct the première of Verdi’s Otello, composed an Italian Amleto (1865) to a libretto by Arrigo Boito, who would also write the librettos for Verdi’s last two Shakespeare-based masterpieces.27 And although the planned performance of Meurice’s adaptation of Hamlet with the tragic ending and the accompanying festivities on 25 April  1864 did not materialise because of the royal ban, giving the celebrations of Shakespeare’s tercentenary a political colouring, Parisian opera houses presented Verdi’s Macbeth and Félicien David’s Le saphir (based on All’s Well that Ends Well) in 1865, Otto Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor in 1866, and Gounod’s Roméo in 1867 (Yon 2011, 66), before Thomas’s Hamlet was premièred in 1868.

Shakespeare Reception in France  45 The serious theme of Shakespeare’s play required that Thomas’s Hamlet had to be performed at the Paris Opéra, the venue for the performances of grands opéras, without any spoken dialogue.28 As a result, Thomas’s opera has no spoken dialogue, and contemporary critics praised especially Thomas’s skilled deployment of recitative and arioso passages and his departures from the usual, formally rounded musical numbers for an increased focus on dramatic continuity (see Achter 1972, 256–58). Morton Jay Achter (1972) has influentially suggested that the operas of Thomas, Félicien David, and Gounod combined the intimate quality of opéra comique with the larger scale and greater musical scope of grand opéra (1972, 4–5). It is true that, unlike the grands opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy, Thomas’s Hamlet has a relatively smaller cast and features no exaggerated spectacle. But because it was conceived for the Paris Opéra, Thomas’s opera incorporates the conventions of grand opéra, such as the spectacular choral scenes (which begin and close the opera); the supernatural scenes, central to the opera both dramatically and musically; the obligatory ballet; and the use of recitatives and arioso passages instead of spoken dialogue throughout the work. The latter feature slows the dramatic pacing, and the presence of the obligatory ballet in act 4 further delays the action, such that in an unabridged performance, the crucial last act of Thomas’s Hamlet begins after nearly three hours of music. This results in a structural imbalance, and, as Achter has observed (1972, 312), the last act of the opera is somewhat abrupt, the action winding up rather perfunctorily. Hence, inasmuch as Thomas and Gounod made some reforms to operatic conventions of the times without heading towards any paradigm shift, they have been aptly termed conservative reformists (Lacombe 2001, 280). In nineteenth-century France, the dramatic content of a theatrical “source” work determined the operatic subgenre into which it could be adapted, and operatic institutions insisted upon upholding the conventions of each of these subgenres. As a result, composers and librettists found it difficult to challenge them, except in small, incremental ways.29 Thomas and his librettists faced not just the baggage of the conventions of grand opéra (Schmidgall 1990, 317); they had to adapt Shakespeare within the confines of what may now seem to be a somewhat rigid theatrical and operatic culture. To assess the opera’s departures from Shakespeare in terms of the reception history of Shakespeare and his Hamlet alone would be to ignore the conventions of intermedial adaptation from spoken play to sung opera. But even when we consider these conventions, we need to take a historicist approach, since, in nineteenth-century France, the pressures of traditional conventions and audience expectations were exerted most profoundly through the rules and regulations enforced by institutional means. Many critics have condemned the presence of the ballet music in Hamlet, overlooking the facts that the play could only be adapted as an opéra lyrique (on which, more soon), that

46  Part 1 opéras lyriques could only be staged at the Paris Opéra, and that the latter institution insisted on having a ballet. Even Wagner and Verdi provided ballets for their Paris Opéra productions of Tannhäuser (1861) and Otello (1894) respectively, even though Verdi had criticised Thomas for providing ballet music for his Hamlet.30 I have already discussed some of these departures from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the Dumas-Meurice adaptation, but there are changes that are specific to the opera. In a scene reminiscent of Gertrude’s confiding to Elvire in Ducis’s version, the operatic Gertrude, in her act 2 arioso, “Dans son regard plus sombre” (Barbier and Carré 1993, 67), confides her anxieties about Hamlet to Ophelia, although she does not confess to her crime. By leaving out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the operatic Hamlet omits an important dimension of Shakespeare’s play, namely, the need an insecure ruler like Claudius, ruling over the “rotten” state of Denmark, feels for the constant surveillance of his subjects, including their private lives, for clues about their political positions. In the same vein, Polonius does not spy on either his daughter or on Hamlet in the closet scene. Indeed, his role in the opera is severely curtailed: he does not die, and it is only because Hamlet discovers in act 3 that he, like Ducis’s Polonius, is a co-conspirator that Hamlet decides to reject Ophélie (Barbier and Carré 1993, 87) just before the commencement of the closet scene.31 Furthermore, in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet names Claudius as the murderer only in the final scene; in the opera, Hamlet does so in a public accusation in act 2, reducing the sense of constant psychological sparring in Shakespeare’s play. Finally, while in the Dumas-Meurice version, the role of Osric is reassigned to Guildenstern, the omission of the latter as well in the opera leads to a change in act 5 of Thomas’s Hamlet, in which the gravedigger scene leads head-on to a confrontation with Laerte, adding to the abruptness of the conclusion. It is difficult to rectify this latter problem since operas are less amenable to adaptation, excepting the staging details. Music plays the single most important role in determining the pacing of the action of an opera and the expression of the actor/singer, who, as Clausen observes (2005, 23), enjoys far less freedom than the actor in the theatre to change the tone of an utterance. The style of the music, too, is an indicator of the period in which the adaptation was made. Since words, melodic lines, and musical structure are all thoroughly imbricated in each other, it is extremely difficult to alter words without affecting the music. Thus, while older nineteenth-century French adaptations of Shakespeare can themselves be modified in various ways, Thomas’s opera either has to be performed as it stands or ignored altogether, save for the textual alternatives suggested by the composer or a limited number of other minor cuts (usually established by performance practice), with only the mise en scène offering opportunities for innovative interpretive departures. Thus,

Shakespeare Reception in France  47 among the various intermedial adaptations of Shakespeare available to a modern audience, Thomas’s operatic Hamlet bears the strongest traces of nineteenth-century performance practice. The opera’s treatment of Hamlet as a domestic tragedy echoes, strangely enough, “the Anglo-American Hamlet [which] has often been read through Freud as primarily a domestic drama, with some productions to this day omitting Fortinbras and much of the play’s politics” (Thompson and Taylor 2017, 27), though in a very different way. Many of the other crucial themes of the play, especially those of a sociopolitical nature, cease to exist in the opera. For example, it is impossible to read Thomas’s Hamlet as “primarily a political play enacting the possibility of dissent from various forms of totalitarianism,” as has been the case with Shakespeare’s play (Thompson and Taylor 2017, 29). Graham Holderness’s view that Hamlet himself seems to straddle the idealistic, medieval world of chivalric heroism of his father, on the one hand, and the more modern, Machiavellian world of Claudius, on the other (1989, 59), does not hold for the opera, which provides no indication of Claudius’s diplomatic skills. Again, Hamlet’s attitude towards revenge differs in the play and the opera. With regard to the play, John Kerrigan, for example, argues that, although Hamlet knows that exacting revenge would satisfy the ghost of his father, he is, nevertheless, acutely aware of its pointlessness, for evil cannot be undone (1981, 119). The operatic Hamlet, in contrast, has no qualms either about obeying the Ghost—he never doubts that the Ghost is that of his father—or about the ethics of revenge. Indeed, as the Ghost appears in act 5 of the opera,32 like the commendatore of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in a final act of redressing moral ills, a decisive and prompt Hamlet obeys his father’s commands and dutifully kills Claudius. And finally, the opera closes on a note of jubilation, with Hamlet crowned king (in the Paris version, which is almost always the one performed), implying the restoration of moral and social order, though Hamlet’s own acute sense of the loss of his beloved is underlined in the words and music of his last utterance in the opera.33 Hence, although the opera closes with trumpet fanfares, like the ones that opened the jubilations in act 1, the eeriness of mood suggested by the music of the opera’s prelude is displaced both by the music and the action onstage at the end. Thus, interpretations of Shakespeare’s play that argue against linear readings and instead point out the importance of “cyclical” or “recursive” moments in the play, such as Terence Hawkes’s reading of Hamlet,34 simply do not apply to the opera. In one respect, the opera elaborates on an aspect of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that was eagerly picked up by nineteenth-century Romantics in a way that strikingly anticipates the twentieth century—the representation of Ophelia—and it is to this theme that I now turn.

48  Part 1

The Operatic Ophélie Carol Thomas Neely has pointed out that Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s madness and death as “beautiful, natural, and eroticized” foreshadows “later representations of it and representations of female hysterics as sexually frustrated and theatrically alluring,” a standard that “implicitly introduces conventions for reading madness as genderinflected” (1991, 325). This gendered representation of madness left its impact on nineteenth-century French performances and adaptations of Hamlet: the role played by Harriet Smithson as Ophelia in the Romantic revival of Shakespeare in France was so profound that it resulted in the French regarding Shakespeare as “the inspired poet of the great tragic actresses,” as Jules Janin wrote in Rachel et la tragédie (1859; quoted in Raby 1982, 178). Moreover, because of Smithson, Ophelia came to occupy a more central position in performances of Hamlet, at least in France. Delacroix, whose Hamlet-inspired paintings have been mentioned earlier, “chose a female to represent Hamlet in his works” (Bailey 1964, 63n54), and he also made a lithograph in 1843 showing a scene that is visually represented in Thomas’s opera but is only mentioned by Gertrude in Shakespeare’s play: a portrait of Ophelia drowning (Raby 1982, 181).35 Thomas’s opera, an adaptation of its times, is influenced by these Romantic readings in its representation of Ophélie in act 4 of the opera, set in a village and beginning with the customary ballet featuring villagers among whom Ophélie suddenly turns up.36 Shakespeare’s primary mode of representing Ophelia’s madness is verbal: she mourns her father’s death through a song (4.5.183–92), into which her other losses are absorbed (Neely 1991, 323–24). Since, in the opera, Polonius does not die, Ophélie’s mad scene dispenses with the theme of Polonius’s death; the focus, instead, is entirely on the bitter outcome of her love for Hamlet. As in Shakespeare, where her distribution of flowers has been symbolically read as a ritual symbolising her lost love, deflowering, and death (Neely 1991, 324–25; Showalter 2005, 80), Ophélie distributes flowers to those surrounding her. She goes on to sing a song about the Wilis, who, in Slavonic mythology, are young brides-to-be who die before their wedding day. They rise from their graves at night and make young men who come across them dance till the men fall dead. Ophélie imagines herself to be one,37 exclaiming in her delirious state to Hamlet (who she thinks is present): “Ah! cruel! Je t’aime! / . . . Ah! cruel, tu vois mes pleurs! Ah! / Pour toi je meurs!” (Ah, cruel one, I love you! / . . . Ah, cruel one, see, I weep! Ah! / I die for you)38 (Barbier and Carré 1993, 105; translation by Avril Bardoni). Just before Ophélie’s death, the librettists employ dramatic irony by having her recall the words and music of the act 1 love duet (“Doute de la lumière”), in which Hamlet had promised her of his undying love.

Shakespeare Reception in France  49 Critics have generally found this reference to the Wilis to be dramatically unnecessary. Winton Dean found the inclusion of Scandinavian motifs,39 the “almost Griegian ballade in the mad scene, and the expansion of Ophélie’s part beyond the requirements of the drama” to be signs that “Thomas’s courage, or his artistic integrity, seems to have failed” (1964, 167), while Tchaikovsky, in a scathing review of the opera, made a positive exception for it, attributing the beauty of the melody to the richness of the Scandinavian folksong tradition.40 A  more sympathetic Hervé Lacombe writes that it is “devoid of dramatic import, but is nicely set to music and furnishes a poetic moment” (2001, 108). Seen from another angle, act 4 could be regarded as the most innovative in the entire opera. The second half of Ophélie’s act 4 ballade involves her singing a breathtakingly virtuosic coloratura passage over a single syllable, “la”—a musical marker of female madness brought into vogue by Gaetano Donizetti in the epochmaking mad scene of his Lucia di Lammermoor (1835)—over open-fifth drones in the bass, tambourine accompaniment, and the use of the oboe for snatches of the melody, all of which give the ballade, in terms of the musical devices employed, an “oriental” touch, while the sinister trills on the violins lend an apposite eeriness of mood, a device that will recur in the closing pages of another opera on a woman who loses her mind, Richard Strauss’s Salome (1904).41 Hamlet was already being exoticised in the French spoken theatre (Heylen 1993, 58), and the use of a Scandinavian tune, authentic or otherwise, along with the use of “orientalist” musical markers, suggests a translation taking place, at the musical level, of what the nineteenth-century French public considered the play’s exotic side.42 Ophélie’s ballade is interlaced with dance music, since there is, in fact, an important intertextual connection with ballet, customary in French grands opéras. The solution that Thomas, a composer of ballets himself, and his librettists came up with was ingenious. Replacing the “vulgar” songs of Ophelia with a reference to the Wilis and accompanying it by music and song of a dance-like character may have been un-Shakespearean,43 but it activated, for opera- and ballet-goers, relationships with several important non-Shakespearean intertexts, not just Donizetti’s mad scene but also, thematically, the end of act 1 of Adolphe Adam’s famous ballet Giselle (1841), in which the heroine, realising that her lover is a nobleman betrothed to someone else, dies dancing in a fit of grief.44 This balletic intertext may be lost on modern audiences because of the gradual separation of the ballet-pantomime from opera by the twentieth century, but that was certainly not the case with nineteenth-century Parisian audiences at the Opéra, who were in a position to make those connections. Adam himself spelt the parallel between opera and ballet when he likened the Act 1 finale of his Giselle to an operatic finale—­ possibly that of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, in which the heroine “loses her mind before a crowd of sympathetic onlookers in a lengthy and riveting mad scene.”45

50  Part 1 Ophélie’s mad scene is significant in other ways as well. As Achter has pointed out, in the directions provided by the libretto, snow is supposed to fall during the opera’s esplanade scene, in which Hamlet meets his father’s ghost, suggesting a winter setting. In contrast, the ballet is titled “La fête du printemps” (The festival of spring), which “suggests an interval during which Hamlet’s actions could induce [Ophélie’s] own melancholia” (1972, 297). Ophélie, like other operatic madwomen, is unable to recognise those around her, and she dwells on her memories in a state of hallucination, thinking that Hamlet is present. Hence, two motifs from the act 1 love duet figure prominently,46 and the dance rhythms, like those of other mad scenes, capitalise on a representational tradition that links madness to dancing, and both to a loss of sexual inhibition (Clausen 2005, 133). Consequently, critics have read Ophélie’s mad scene’s dance rhythms and coloratura in terms of an implicitly sexualised hysterical syndrome (Clausen 2004, 108n4). But whether the opera prepares the audience for the mad scene by showing Ophélie as someone having a “prior hysteric disposition”47 remains open to question, because the fragmentary, asymmetrical, rhythmically nervous musical idiom associated with Ophélie in the mad scene is not typical of the way she is characterised in the rest of the opera, as Clausen seems to suggest (2004, 109).48 Recent innovative productions have capitalised on the fact that in the final section of the mad scene, the offstage chorus hums (or sings à bouches fermées) the Scandinavian tune sung earlier in the scene by Ophélie, a style of singing often associated with exotic settings in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French musical works such as Léo Delibes’s Lakmé (1883), Florent Schmitt’s Danse des devadasis (1900–1908), and Maurice Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous (1912), all of them works with Indian connections. While we have seen the presence of other exotic/ oriental markers in the mad scene, the fact that Thomas has an offstage chorus hum a melody that holds the key to Ophélie’s madness has enabled modern stage directors to show her as being in a hallucinatory state of mind, since the source of that choral voice is deliberately obfuscated. In the 2003 London production of the opera by the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Natalie Dessay, the Ophélie of the production, had blood trickling down her dress, indicating that she was injuring herself (Thompson and Taylor 2017, 117); the DVD recording of the opera under Bertrand de Billy, taken from a production at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, represents her death in a similar fashion. As Thomas and his librettists conceived it, then, among the galaxy of hysterical singing and dancing women in opera and ballet, beginning with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Adam’s Giselle and culminating with Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), Ophélie’s mad scene holds its own, providing the imaginative stage director the interpretive opportunities opened up by the hummed chorus to create a mise en scène that relates music, word, and image in innovative

Shakespeare Reception in France  51 ways, and gives Thomas’s Ophélie a greater sense of interiority than do the French theatrical adaptations on which it was based. Furthermore, opera as a medium enables the audience to engage with Thomas’s Ophélie at yet another level. Arguing that the “envoicing” of female singers subverts the “traditional assignments of power and creative force in our [sic] culture,” Carolyn Abbate states that seeing a female figure may well more or less automatically invoke our culture’s opposition of male (active subject) and female (passive object). . . . But listening to the female singing voice is a more complicated phenomenon. Visually, the character singing is the passive object of our gaze. But aurally, she is resonant; her musical speech drowns out everything in range, and we sit as passive objects, battered by that voice. As a voice she slips into the “male/active/subject” position in other ways as well, since a singer, more than any other musical performer, enters into that Jacobin uprising inherent in the phenomenology of live performance and stands before us having wrested the composing voice away from the librettist and composer who wrote the score. (1993, 254–56; emphasis mine) Abbate’s insight helps us put the finger on the affective power of Ophélie’s mad scene in Thomas’s Hamlet, since its tension and poignancy emerge from the disjunction between the power of the performing voice of the singer-actress playing Ophélie in focusing all of the audience’s attention towards itself, on the one hand, and the thematic content, namely that of the complete unravelling of Ophélie’s mind, on the other. The critic Paul Bernard reported that from the very first performance, Christine Nilsson, the Swedish soprano who became the first Ophélie, “electrified the entire house,” so much so that it was feared that her mad scene would make everything else in the opera pale (quoted in Schmidgall 1990, 319). The fact that the final act that follows is quite perfunctory does lend support to such fears; indeed, when the opera dropped out of the regular repertoire, it was the mad scene, along with Hamlet’s drinking song, that continued to be regularly performed. Ralph P. Locke’s counterargument, that Abbate “risks turning the female voice into a disembodied instrument (and thereby turning opera into a string of vocal concertos)” (quoted in Clausen 2005, 256), needs to be tested against the realities of performance practice and audience response. Listeners have responded positively to the concerto-like potential of Ophélie’s mad scene, and Showalter’s observation that “the feminist revision of Ophelia comes as much from the actress’s freedom as from the critic’s interpretation” holds even truer for singers performing the role of Ophélie (2005, 79), owing to the nature of opera as a medium. However, to emphasise the relationship between media, performer, and audience in the way Abbate does—by decentering the composer and

52  Part 1 the librettist—is to also risk underplaying the dialectical relationship between institutions and the normative frameworks set in these institutions, on the one hand, and the agency (whatever its extent it may be) wrested by the composer and his librettists, on the other, in the act of adaptation. Balanced readings that takes into consideration the operatic conventions in place at the Paris Opéra in the 1860s; adopts both synchronic and diachronic views of the history of Shakespeare reception at the time of the opera’s creation; and triangulates the collaboration between Thomas, his librettists, and the performers for whom Thomas created the roles, provide as informed an understanding about the form, content, and reception history of the opera as we can get after a gap of more than 150 years.

The Afterlife of Thomas’s Hamlet Thomas’s opera fell into obscurity by the end of the First World War, and a few reasons can be suggested to account for this fact. Like Verdi’s earlycareer Shakespeare adaptation, Macbeth, Thomas’s opera is built on what has been called a “dramaturgy of contrasts” (Lacombe 2001, 107), in which the “characters function not so much as personalities, self-­sufficient psychological entities, but rather as . . . actor-agents in situations” (­ Powers 1990, 16). It is the situations, not the characters, that determine the oppositions fundamental to the “dramaturgy of contrasts.” Yet the choice of the situations and their musical treatment in Thomas’s Hamlet is done with consummate craftsmanship, so that the opera’s “dramaturgy of contrasts” is not incompatible with a musical characterisation of the psychological dimension of the protagonists, especially Hamlet and Ophelia, albeit in a limited way in the opera when compared to the drama.49 Nevertheless, the emergence of the through-composed operas of Wagner, and Verdi’s own examples of through-composition, Otello and Falstaff, opened up newer and more effective means of delineating musically the psychological dimension of operatic characters in a way that made operas like Thomas’s Hamlet and Gounod’s Roméo seem increasingly outmoded to later audiences, even though in the years following the Franco-Prussian war, the nationalistic undertones of Thomas’s antiWagner position had been counted as a virtue. And even the initial success of Thomas’s Hamlet was, in part, due to a “certain Gallic nationalism,” since only eight out of the twenty-eight operas created specifically for the Paris Opéra between 1850 and 1870 were composed by French composers, and from among these, only Thomas’s Hamlet went on to become a notable success, both nationally and internationally.50 But nationalist priorities in aesthetic choices and conditions of reception eventually made way for the greater technical, ideational, and affective complexities of Wagner’s and Verdi’s mature operas, a development fuelled by adapters like Boito, who took libretto-writing to new levels of sophistication (as

Shakespeare Reception in France  53 we shall see in the next chapter); by Wagner himself, whose own librettos became increasingly complex; and by composers like Debussy and Richard Strauss, who started adapting plays of significant literary stature themselves by abridging rather than rewriting the original texts. Thomas’s opera, like Gounod’s Roméo and many of Verdi’s earlier operas, bears transparent signs of the adapter’s attempt to make a compromise with the cultural codes informing the receiving culture, an approach that, on the face of it, does not appear to place the composer’s individual artistic ideals over the dictates of the existing operatic conventions within which composers like Thomas, an impeccable master of his craft, were happy to work.51 Such extensive transculturation made the absorption of Shakespeare’s plays possible into dramatic, literary, and operatic traditions in non-Anglophone cultures at a time when cultural self-fashioning along nationalist lines was the norm. However, as Richard Taruskin has pointed out, it was only when leading composers of opera like Wagner and Verdi professed fidelity to personal artistic ideals rather than audience expectations as their artistic credo that it became possible for opera composers to be considered “modern,” and their works of art to be subjected to serious critical attention by musicologists (2005, 3:599), even though operatic conventions leave their mark in their mature works, albeit in less obvious ways. Even Verdi’s early and more conventional works were subjected to the kind of judgemental treatment meted out more often to Thomas and Gounod, who never displayed the capacity for originality and self-renewal that the septuagenarian Verdi showed in Otello and Falstaff. One notices, therefore, such a dismissive attitude as early as 1913 in the writings of the French Wagner-admiring music critic Étienne Destranges who, after dismissing Thomas’s Hamlet as a failure on the whole (1913, 10) and declaring Gounod’s Roméo monotonous (1913, 11), declared that “the Italians do not separate the tare from the grain and admire Nabucco as much as they do Othello [sic] and Falstaff. We the French are happy to praise the great composer of the last three scores,” i.e., of Aida, Otello, and Falstaff (1913, 11; translation mine). Such prejudices remained till the 1980s, by which time three factors had helped the revival of Thomas’s Hamlet. The first of these, as mentioned earlier, is the championing of the work by vocalists of international repute. Secondly, as David Littlejohn has observed, “the ‘standard repertoire’ of opera has never been larger or more diverse” than in the present day (1992, 27), ranging from Monteverdi to newly composed operas. With operas from different periods and different styles now available on CD and DVD, critics and audiences are better prepared to accept a wide diversity of singing styles, subject matter, and forms within the broad category of opera, rather than approach opera from a preconceived, teleological perspective in which a work like Thomas’s Hamlet represents a purportedly lower stage in the evolution of the art form. The expansion of the canon, then, has opened up the possibility for interested audiences to place operas in

54  Part 1 their proper historical contexts, and to appreciate anew the virtues of a less frequently performed part of the operatic repertory, such as nineteenthcentury French grand opéra and opéra lyrique, within the conventions of which Thomas and his librettists created their operatic Hamlet. Finally, with the rise of critical interest in adaptations and adaptation theory, the tendency to denigrate adaptations, based on a discourse of fidelity, has started making way for an appreciation of adaptations as cultural barometers of the times in which they were created.52 The revival of Thomas’s Hamlet began at a propitious time, the late 1980s, when there was also an increase of Shakespeare adaptations on film, and received a boost in 2011, the bicentenary of Thomas’s birth. As Shakespeare scholarship has become increasingly concerned with the performance history of the plays, Thomas’s Hamlet has been recognised as the most significant among operatic adaptations, and the beauty and the adaptive possibilities offered by Ophélie’s death scene have been singled out for comment (Thompson and Taylor 2017, 117, 606). And with several productions of Thomas’s Hamlet taking place globally in the decade of the 2010s, it seems that the opera is going to stay in the repertoire for at least quite some time. Thomas’s Hamlet shares certain key features with other nineteenthcentury adaptations of Shakespeare from both Europe and India, such as the tendency to transculturate Shakespeare in ways so as to enable his plays to reach out to the various “national” cultural traditions of the adapters, to reimagine the Shakespearean heroine in locally inflected ways, and to present a more indigenised Shakespeare in performance vis-à-vis printed translations. These parallels make the distinction ­ between European adaptations and non-European appropriations problematic. Thomas’s opera, however, does not challenge the ideological content of Shakespeare’s play in any significant way, and in this regard, it stands apart from all the other adaptations that will be examined in the rest of this book, with the exception of the highly “faithful” translation-­ adaptation of Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth (but which, too, is subversive in a highly unusual way). But it is the adaptations of Verdi, Bankim, and Vidyasagar, all emerging from societies that were at varying degrees of cultural and political remove from Western Europe, in which the aesthetic strategies involved in the process of adaptation would be intricately tied in with the interrogation of the ideological content of the Shakespearean plays in question. The most significant of such adaptations, in the context of European opera, are the last two Shakespearean operas of Verdi, and it is to them that I turn next.

Notes 1. An earlier and shorter version of this chapter was published in S. Sen (2013, 183–204). 2. Performing a role analogous to that of the Ducis Hamlet in the eighteenth century, the Dumas-Meurice version became the source text for the first Hamlet in Arabic (1901), by Tanyus ‘Abdu (Litvin 2011a, 64–65).

Shakespeare Reception in France  55 3. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the opposing pulls of a discourse of fidelity to the source play, on the one hand, and exigencies of intermedial adaptation, on the other, affected nineteenth-century operatic composers as well. For a discussion of the ways in which this opposition informs Verdi’s comments and compositional practice in his opera Macbeth, see Clausen (2005, 17–20). 4. The two exceptions in this regard are Ophélie’s mad scene in act 4 (a favourite with sopranos) and, occasionally, Hamlet’s drinking song, from act 2. During its post–World War I slump in popularity, it was kept alive, if only on the fringes of the repertory, by exponents of the title role—French baritones such as Victor Maurel, Jean Lassalle, and Maurice Renaud, as well as the Italians Titta Ruffo and Mattia Battistini. Its present-day relative popularity too has to do with the championing of the work by a number of distinguished baritones, such as Sherrill Milnes, Thomas Hampson, and Thomas Allen, and due to the increasing production of operas outside the traditional canon, the reasons for which I discuss later in this chapter. 5. Jyotsna Singh, for example, writes that “some key terms in the postcolonial vocabulary—‘otherness,’ ‘resistance,’ ‘subversion,’ ‘appropriation,’ ‘decolonization,’ and ‘cultural translation’—are now more widely re-deployed in the new inter-cultural Shakespearean disseminations world-wide. Conceptually, these categories illuminate the trajectories of the varied modes of resistance to colonial discourse” (2019, 4; emphasis mine). The rest of her book maintains the association of the term “appropriation” with non-Western adaptations that are anticolonial in their emphasis. 6. The term is taken from Carolyn Abbate (1993, 225). 7. For example, Thomas’s Hamlet and Ophélie’s mad scene from the opera are discussed by Thompson and Taylor in the latest Arden edition of Hamlet (2017, 117, 606). 8. This overview is based largely on Hapgood (1999, 1–96). 9. For an overview of these changes, see Hibbard (1998, 6–14) and Thompson and Taylor (2017, 60–75). 10. Editorial principles have also changed significantly from the days of the publication of the First Folio to the present. For a brief overview, see Maguire (2003, 582–94). For an in-depth study of the relationship between adaptation, literary theory, and English-language editions of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, see Marsden (1995). 11. On French neoclassicism (or classicisme, to use the French term), see Jane Brown (2007) and DeJean (1989). For an overview of the critical debates between the French neoclassicists and the Romantics, see Gaudon (1989) and Hannoosh (2011); the literature specifically pertaining to Hamlet reception in France is discussed later. On neoclassicism in Elizabethan England, see Norland (2009). 12. For an overview of the reception history of Shakespeare in France in the eighteenth century, see Monaco (1974). 13. Both Hector Berlioz’s symphony Roméo et Juliette (1847) and Charles-­ François Gounod’s opera of the same name (1867) are based on Garrick’s version of the play (1750). 14. For the French text of Ducis’s 1770 version of Hamlet and an English-­language overview of the textual variants and their critical reception, see Vanderhoof (1953). On Ducis, see also Bailey (1964, 1–23), Heylen (1993, 26–44), and Raby (1982, 43–56). For an English-language translation of what seems to be the 1809 version, see Carlson (2012, 1–53). 15. See Monaco (1974, 6ff.) and Bailey (1964, 12ff.). 16. See, for example, the comments of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury: “Notwithstanding his [Shakespeare’s] natural rudeness, his

56  Part 1 unpolished style, his antiquated phrase and wit, his want of method and coherence, and his deficiency in almost all the graces and ornaments of this kind of writing, yet by the justness of his moral, and the aptness of his many descriptions, and the plain and natural turn of several of his characters he pleases his audience, and often gains their ear without a single bribe from luxury or vice” (“Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author” [1710]; quoted in McEvoy 2006, 42). 17. Shakespeare nevertheless was performed more frequently at the ComédieFrançaise than any other eighteenth-century playwright, Voltaire himself excepted (Heylen 1993, 35), with a total of 203 performances of Ducis’s adaptation of Hamlet (McMahon 1964, 15). 18. The choice of language can, however, be explained: irrespective of their original languages, many operas were performed in Italian in London in the mid-nineteenth century, where necessary through translation. Her Majesty’s Theatre had the French libretto of Fromental Halévy’s adaptation of The Tempest translated into Italian for its première in 1850 (Yon 2011, 66), and performed Weber’s Oberon, originally written in English for Covent Garden, in Italian translation in 1860. 19. Inspired by Harriet Smithson, the Ophelia in Kemble’s troupe, Berlioz composed the Symphonie fantastique (1830) and then married her in 1833. As his marriage fell apart, Berlioz composed a number of Hamlet-inspired works: the song “La mort d’Ophélie” (1842), and later the Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet (1844) for chorus and orchestra (MacDonald 2007). For the impact of Harriet Smithson on French audiences, see Raby (1982, 176–93), Showalter (2005, 83–84), and Bailey (1964, 68). 20. In addition to Roméo et Juliette and the other works mentioned above, there is Berlioz’s two-act opera Béatrice et Bénédict (1860–62), set to his own libretto based on Much Ado about Nothing. Peter Raby has suggested that, since Berlioz first conceived making an opera out of the Shakespeare play as early as 1833, the impetus could have come from “his first reciprocated love for Harriet” (1982, 191). 21. Raby points out that both Berlioz and Delacroix expressed their admiration for Shakespeare through “forms freed from the restriction of words, or in forms to which words could be the adjunct and accompaniment” (1982, 190). This partly explains why their works escape censure based on fidelity discourse, so often applied to operatic adaptations of Shakespeare, in which words and plots do play a more important role. 22. On Delacroix’s Hamlet-inspired paintings, see Bailey (1964, 61 and 62n53) and Edenbaum (1967). For the influence of Delacroix’s paintings on the Dumas-Meurice adaptation, see Johnson (1981). On the impact of ­nineteenthcentury paintings on Thomas’s opera, see Gerber (2018, 48–52). 23. As Patrick Smith has observed, a common and oft-repeated error in musicology is to credit only the composer for changes and developments in librettowriting, “the foundations and influences of which lie not in music and music theory . . . but rather in the history of the written and the spoken word: in poetry and drama” (1970, vii). Barbier’s and Carré’s method of collaboration is discussed in detail in Speare (1997, 21–56). 24. As we shall see in the next chapter, this development gave rise to a discourse in which Italian opera was associated with the primacy of the human voice and German opera with the symphonic tradition developed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. This binary, like binaries generally, essentialises and oversimplifies the development of Italian and German operatic traditions in the course of the nineteenth century, but it provided a framing context for

Shakespeare Reception in France  57 the culture war Verdi had to fight on behalf of Italian opera, especially when composing his Otello. 25. This was one of several French operas of this period that were set in England and is discussed in Macdonald (1996). 26. Thomas said of Wagner that he was “a great musician, a powerful intelligence, but too German for us” (quoted in Rogeboz-Malfroy 1994, 237; translation mine). 27. Boito based his libretto substantially on the Dumas-Meurice adaptation but also incorporated elements from Hugo’s translation of Hamlet, making Hamlet die at the end (Maeder 2011). Faccio’s Amleto has been revived in recent years with considerable success. 28. A book from this period that outlines the correspondences between different theatrical subgenres and their recommended operatic equivalents is Gustave Choquet’s Histoire de la musique dramatique en France depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours (1873); see Lacombe (2001, 247). 29. The majority of formally avant-garde, Wagner-inspired French operas by Emmanuel Chabrier, Ernest Chausson, and Vincent d’Indy, composed from the 1880s onwards, were first premièred at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, and later performed in Paris. 30. Verdi is reported to have said, “Hamlet and dance tunes!! What a cacophony! Poor Shakespeare!” (quoted in Schmidgall 1990, 317). 31. In act 5, however, speaking of Laerte, Hamlet says in an aside that “Le crime du père / Ne doit pas retomber sur le fils innocent” (The crime of the father / Must not be visited upon the innocent son) (Barbier and Carré 1993, 110; translation by Avril Bardoni). 32. The opera’s stage directions remain curiously unhelpful regarding the timing of this scene. It presumably takes place at night, for, like Shakespeare’s Ghost, this one also has to leave by daybreak. 33. Expectedly, Marjorie Garber’s reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet leads her to a diametrically opposite conclusion: she, too, draws a parallel between Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Hamlet, only to point out that it is Hamlet who gets petrified, metaphorically speaking, at the end (cited in Thompson and Taylor 2017, 32). 34. See Hawkes (2005, 310–12). Since censorship was strict under Louis Napoleon, and that it was only between 1870 and 1874 that theatre censorship was abolished in France (McCormick 1993, 108–10), the opera could not have effectively explored the anti-authoritarian dimension of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that Hawkes and others point out. Moreover, Barbier and Thomas were themselves conservative monarchists (Speare 1997, 54–55) and would have been unsympathetic to anti-monarchical readings of the play. 35. Similarly, in England, John Everett Millais, whose work Delacroix admired, produced a striking painting of Ophelia drowning, whose influence can be seen as late as Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet (see Gervais 2000, 272; Rutter 1998, 307). 36. The directions in the libretto read: “Ophélie enters, dressed in a long white robe and bizarrely covered with flowers and vines intertwined in her dishevelled hair” (quoted in Achter 299n107). This is, curiously, close to the “sharply defined” conventions of representations of insanity on the Elizabethan stage, in which “Ophelia dresses in white, [and] decks herself with ‘fantastical garlands’ of white flowers” (Showalter 2005, 80). 37. The legend, made popular throughout Europe by Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century, was the subject of operas by Alfredo Catalani (La Wally, 1892) and Giacomo Puccini (Le Villi, 1884), but it is mostly through the

58  Part 1 ballet Giselle (1841) by Adolphe Adam, that modern audiences know the myth: see M. Smith (2000, 167–200). A possible reason for the reference to this myth in the opera is discussed later. 38. Thus, Valerie Traub’s observation about Shakespeare’s Ophelia holds true for Thomas’s Ophélie as well: “Ophelia’s death is as much an outcome of Hamlet’s rage as it is an expression of her grief, madness, or self-destruction” (1988, 219). 39. Achter points out that the source of the so-called Swedish tune (Thomas, n.d. 293/3/1—294/2/1) sung by Ophélie is unknown and surmises that it was so described because the original Ophélie, Christine Nilsson, was Swedish (1972, 301n108). Thomas’s tune, however, does bear a striking resemblance to the Swedish folk tune, “Djupt i havet på Demantehallen.” 40. Rev. of 28 December  1872 [N.S.] / 16 December  1872 [O.S.] in the Russian Register; English translation by Luis Sundkvist available at http:// en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/The_Italian_Opera._Ambroise_ Thomas%27_Opera_%22Hamlet%22 (accessed 21 September 2018). 41. See Thomas (n.d., 294/3/4ff., especially 297/2/5–6). 42. The fact that Thomas brought together both a Scandinavian tune and “oriental” musical markers in order to lend couleur locale to the Danish setting suggests that, in the process of musical exoticisation, it was not always nonWestern communities that got stereotyped into an undifferentiated Other. 43. See, for example, the 3/8 Allegretto (mouvement de valse) in B flat that occurs in the mad scene at two points (Thomas, n.d., 289/3/1ff. and 301/1/1ff.). The “Scandinavian” tune of the ballade and its exotic refrain, too, have a dancelike character. 44. In the original version, Giselle commits suicide using her lover’s sword and, like Ophélie, cannot be given a proper burial as a consequence. Adam’s ballet was first performed in the Salle Le Peletier, where Thomas’s Hamlet was also premièred, and was a resounding success. Giselle, a perennial favourite, was firmly in the ballet repertoire of the Paris Opéra in the 1860s and later. 45. On this topic, see M. Smith (2000, especially xi–xvii and 167–200). 46. The first of them (Thomas, n.d., 26/3/1ff.) recurs in the choral introduction of the mad scene (Thomas, n.d., 285/1/3ff.). The second, the melody of “Doute de la lumière” (Thomas, n.d., 30/1/2ff.), reappears towards the end of the mad scene (Thomas, n.d., 308/2/1). 47. Since Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographic records of hysteria come from the 1870s, it is tempting to assume that the cultural climate was conducive to such a reading of Ophélie. As Showalter notes, images of one of his patients, Augustine, frequently resemble the reproductions of Ophelia then in wide circulation (2005, 86). 48. For example, writing of Thomas’s musical portrayal of Ophélie elsewhere in the opera, David Charlton argues that “Ophelia’s character is limited by her symmetrical, short phrases over a static bass” (1990, 366; emphasis mine), an analysis that probably goes to the other extreme. 49. This is in part because the individual numbers are skilfully linked to each other to form scene-complexes, often by means of sustained arioso passages: see Achter (1972, 324) and Charlton (1990, 365). 50. For details, see Achter (1972, 259–61) and Soldini (2011). 51. Even Thomas’s contemporaries seem to have noticed this fact when they praised him for being an intelligent assimilator of ideas, rather than for being an innovator (Achter 1972, 319). 52. See Stam (2005, 7–8, 45), Hutcheon (2006, 8–9), and Sanders (2006, 13–14).

2 Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello

Introduction In the previous chapter, we saw how strategies of adaptation are usually determined, firstly, by existing performance-related conventions pertaining to the medium of adaptation, and secondly, by the inherited critical traditions pertaining to Shakespeare and to the play being adapted. Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello (premièred at the La Scala opera house, Milan, on 5 February 1887), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello, is exceptional on both counts, since it departs from Italian operatic traditions in significant ways, as well as from the critical readings of Othello that were then current in Europe and Anglophone North America. Otello, by general critical consent the greatest among operatic adaptations of a Shakespearean tragedy, and Falstaff (premièred at La Scala on 9 February 1893), an adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, were Verdi’s last two operas. The librettos for both operas were provided by Arrigo Boito (1842–1918), the composer of the opera Mefistofele (1868, rev. 1875/6) and a poet, writer, and author of some of the best opera librettos in Italian. These late Shakespearean adaptations by Verdi are also among the most admired, performed, and widely analysed operas by one of Europe’s greatest and most respected opera composers of all time. Verdi’s Otello departs in significant ways from the race-based readings of Othello that were firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century European criticisms of the play. It also moves away from the conventions of the number-based Italian operatic tradition and is, instead, a through-­composed opera (i.e., one in which individual numbers such as arias, duets, trios, and so on, when present, are practically inseparable from the larger web of continuous music in which they are embedded). What compelled Verdi to make these departures? Were Verdi’s musical setting and his departure from the then-prevalent race-based readings of Othello’s jealousy interrelated, and if so, how? To what extent was Boito, the connecting point between the word-dominated dramatic world of Shakespeare and the music-dominated operatic world of Verdi, significant in this radical shift in Verdi’s approach? To answer these questions, one has to keep

60  Part 1 in mind the nineteenth-century context, one in which Italy, along with other European countries bordering the Mediterranean, such as Spain and Portugal, were regarded as quasi-oriental countries within Europe. During Verdi’s lifetime, a discourse from a pre-Shakespearean period that connected male sexual jealousy with the temperaments of southern Europeans and Africans was still widely prevalent, a prejudice that gained strength diachronically from Shakespeare’s times to Verdi’s. Italian actors achieved success in playing the role of Othello, but received bad press for more “Nordic” roles such as that of Hamlet. In a Europe dominated by race-based theories and hierarchies, the Anglo-Saxon/Latin divide, one that also had a religious component (the Protestant/Catholic divide), Italy occupied a Janus-like position: even as Italians embarked upon colonising missions in Africa after Italian unification, they, like Africans, were also subjected to racial stereotyping by peoples from the north of Europe. However, Italians in the nineteenth century had an “advantage” over Africans, namely that of their cultural capital in some art forms, most notably opera. Even in that field, from the late 1850s onwards, Italian operatic traditions—represented first and foremost by Verdi—were being challenged by the innovations of Wagner, another towering genius in the field of operatic composition, whose virulent German nationalism and anti-Semitic tendencies were widely known. I argue here that Verdi, the foremost representative of Italian opera, subverted the racial stereotype and successfully addressed the musical challenge by means of a crucial stylistic choice at the musical level, whose radical implications become clear when one connects the music to the verbal and visual dimensions of the operatic adaptation. It is important to note, however, that nineteenth-century Italians, like human communities anywhere and at any given time, held a diversity of opinions on various matters, and Verdi’s approach towards racial difference, one that tied in strongly with his anticolonial political position, was by no means symptomatic of Italian approaches towards race and colonialism as a whole.1 Indeed, to either whitewash or emphasise solely the potentially racist elements in Otello is to overlook the complex ways in which different attitudes towards racial difference at the verbal and musical levels interact with each other in the opera. When the relationship of the opera’s words with its music is seen in conjunction with decisions pertaining to costumes and staging, regarding which Verdi played a decisive role, then it is possible to gain a closer understanding of how Verdi’s aesthetic choices were in consonance with his anticolonial political position, even though it may be less easy to say the same about Boito. It is, therefore, perhaps more feasible to read Otello as offering a palimpsest of different approaches towards race, religion, and gender, its subversive element predominating because of the greater expressive weight carried by music and because of Verdi’s unexpected stylistic choices with regard to the music (and staging).

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  61 If Thomas’s Hamlet shows how the adaptation/appropriation binary cannot be mapped unproblematically onto a European/non-European divide, Verdi’s Otello shows how its politically conscious composer subverted racist associations of the stereotype of the “jealous husband” with Southern Europeans and Africans, while Falstaff shows Verdi going one step further and using some of his music for Otello in the context of sexual jealousy in the quintessentially English world of Windsor. These tendencies arguably tie in Verdi’s sympathetic representation of the politically marginalised with his eventual denunciation of European colonialism—including Italian colonialism—and with his solidarity with the colonised peoples of Africa and India. Furthermore, as we shall see, Verdi’s modernisation of Italian opera in the face of Wagner’s challenge is inseparable from the ways in which he musically subverted the racebased interpretations of Othello. Verdi’s Otello is, thus, invested in both the terms of the phrase “nationalist cosmopolitanism.” The nationalist aspect is manifest in Verdi’s strategies for resisting the stereotyping of Italians at a political level and in his gritty determination in retaining Italian opera’s stylistic independence in the face of the German challenge. The cosmopolitan aspect can be traced in Verdi’s structural understanding of racism and colonialism, one which led him to be refreshingly unItalocentric with regard to his political views on colonialism, as well as in his openness to a large number of foreign influences in the domains of music and drama. Indeed, the playwright whom Verdi adapted the most in his career was Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, and the one whom he claimed to have loved the best, and to whom he devoted his greatest attention, was Shakespeare. Neither of them was Italian. This chapter is divided into the following sections. In the first section, I examine race-based discourses about male sexual jealousy and vengefulness that were directed against Africans (especially from its Muslimdominated parts) and Italians in Shakespeare’s times, and the forms in which they continued diachronically into the nineteenth century. I also examine newer discursive forms of racism directed against Italy and Italians in nineteenth-century Britain, as well as racist discourses created by Italians themselves against Africans in the same period, and Verdi’s and Boito’s relationships with these discursive formations. In the second section, I  examine the religious angle connected to the discursive formations regarding vengefulness in Shakespeare’s time, one in which Christianity is posited against the other two purportedly “vengeful” Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, and connect it with the theme of jealousy. Although Boito and Verdi have often been described as being atheistic and anti-clerical respectively, Otello represents mercy, the fruit of the Christian virtue of charity, in explicitly Catholic terms, in part as a response to a nineteenth-century discourse that connected Italy’s political shortcomings with its Catholicism, as well as due to more specific factors pertaining to the Italian musical scene in the late nineteenth century. In

62  Part 1 the third section, I analyse the implications of Boito’s omission of act 1 of Shakespeare’s Othello, one which makes the libretto wittingly or unwittingly more patriarchal and racist, since it removes Shakespeare’s careful building-up of a matrix of forces that gives rise to Othello’s anxieties. In the fourth section, I discuss Verdi’s score and analyse how the unusual stylistic choices at a musical level lead to a trenchant rebuttal of the racebased discourses connecting Italians and Africans, and end up connecting male sexual jealousy with northern Europe, where this stereotype was upheld. After concluding this section with a brief analysis of how Falstaff also furthers this subversion in the context of comedy, I conclude the chapter by drawing connections between Verdi’s political views and the aesthetic choices he took in the score of Otello, thereby hopefully demonstrating how the key to understanding Verdi’s politics lies in his aesthetic choices.

Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (i): Racial Discourses The trope of jealousy in Shakespeare’s Othello has its roots in religious, racial, and patriarchal discourses. The racial discourse that created the trope was one that associated jealous temperaments with climatic conditions, according to which Africans (especially from the Muslim-majority parts) and Europeans from the Mediterranean basin displayed this tendency (Loomba 2002, 93–95). The religious discourse associated with it was based on a distinction between the purported religions of vengeance, Judaism and Islam, and the religion of forgiveness, Christianity (Lupton 1997). The patriarchal dimension can be located in a pan-European discourse linking a man’s ability to control his public affairs with his patriarchal control over his household; allegations of cuckoldry, therefore, did not affect only the domain of a man’s private life but also had implications for his public self (Foyster 1999, 4–6). All three discursive registers are intricately woven together in Shakespeare’s Othello, and Boito’s omission of act 1 of the play by way of abridgement fundamentally alters the ways in which Othello’s jealousy can be understood in the opera ­vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s play. In this section, I focus on how the racial and religious strands were once linked and later came to be separated from each other, and what forms the racialised discourse on jealousy took at the time of Verdi’s Otello. In Shakespeare’s times, the racial and religious discursive registers on jealousy could be invoked simultaneously because of conventions regarding the portrayal of non-European Others on the Elizabethan stage. Despite being by far the most numerous and conspicuous racial Others in early modern England, Africans, including Moors, were always represented on the Renaissance stage by white actors. In Shakespeare’s time, Othello was never played by a black man, nor was Desdemona by a

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  63 woman. A male, white actor in blackface could represent through mimesis any non-white Other, since blackface, as Dympna Callaghan argues, “concealed under the sign of negritude a host of ethnicities ranging from Eskimo to Guinean” (2000, 78). Othello, first played by Richard Burbage (Hankey 2005, 7), could have been thought of by the play’s first audiences as being both non-white (more specifically a light- or darkskinned Moor) and non-Christian. Only Othello’s willingness to fight against the Ottomites (1.3.231) provides the first hint that he may be a Christian, and it is much later that Othello specifically aligns himself with a pro-Christian (and anti-Islamic) discourse: “Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that / Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites? / For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl” (2.3.166–68). These words would make their way into act 1 of Otello in a modified version. The playing of the role by a black actor would have been perceived differently in Shakespeare’s times, according to Callaghan (2000), a difference that would continue well into the nineteenth century. This difference is predicated on an important distinction between “mimesis” and “exhibition.” Mimesis, Callaghan argues, is a mode of representation that “entails an imitation of Otherness, and its dynamism results from the absence of the actual bodies of those it depicts, whose access to the scene of representation, therefore, needs no further restriction or containment,” while in the case of exhibition, people are set forth as display objects, “passive and inert before the active scrutiny of the spectator, without any control over, or even necessarily consent to, the representational apparatus in which they are placed” (2000, 77). It is known that non-European peoples from Africa and the New World were exhibited in Shakespeare’s England, and records suggest that even in nineteenthcentury Britain and America, many among the white audiences would regard black actors playing Othello as merely playing themselves instead of enacting the role. Therefore, the fluidity of representational conventions of Otherness on the Elizabethan stage achieved by means of blackface made it possible for Shakespeare, unlike his later interpreters and adapters, to evoke both racial and religious Otherness at the same time (Callaghan 2000, 77–79). Callaghan states further that it was only with the tawny Restoration heroes of Aphra Behn and John Dryden that the exotic began to be considered separately from blackness in stage representations. Moreover, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Romantics displayed a new degree of “concern with nationality and ethnicity, the local and the particular” (Kujawinska-Courtney 2006, 107), which in turn led to a new wave of racist theorising about whether Othello was a black African or a tawny-skinned Moor. The German poet, critic, and Sanskritist August Wilhelm Schlegel held the view that Shakespeare made a “fortunate mistake” in making Othello the Moor “in every respect a negro,” since “we recognise in Othello the wild nature of that glowing zone which

64  Part 1 generates the most ravenous beasts of prey,” and went on to add that Othello’s jealousy was “not the jealousy of the heart, which is compatible with the tenderest feeling of adoration of the beloved object; it is of the sensual kind which, in burning climes, has given birth to the disgraceful confinement of women and many other unnatural usages” (1808, revised 1846; translated by John Black and quoted in Bate 1992, 479; emphasis mine). As far as racial prejudice is concerned, Shakespeare was not up to Schlegel’s standards since, in the play, even Iago takes a softer stance towards Othello: “The Moor, howbeit that I  endure him not, / Is of a constant, loving, noble nature, / And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona A  most dear husband” (2.1.286–89). Not surprisingly, Schlegel argued that Othello’s assumption of the civilised ways of Venice was only superfluous and that “the mere physical force of passion [put] to flight in one moment all his acquired and mere habitual virtues, [giving] the upper hand to the savage over the moral man” (quoted in Bate 1992, 479). Racism of another kind is on display in the preface to Othello by François-Victor Hugo in his translation of the complete works of Shakespeare. Hugo fils made the specious argument that the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, whom Shakespeare described as being a “tawny Moor,” was actually black and therefore repulsive to Portia, while Othello could not have been black, but must have been an Arab, a member of a race with a glorious past; thus, his marriage to the Caucasian Desdemona was to be seen as “the sympathetic fusion of these two primordial types of human beauty, the Semitic type and the Caucasian type” (Hugo 1860, 55–58; see also Hepokoski 1987, 170). The racism of Hugo fils was not unique, since Coleridge, who was once associated with the anti-abolitionist movement in England, had stated decades earlier that Desdemona could not have fallen in love with Othello, a “veritable negro,” since to do so would indicate “a want of balance” in Desdemona “which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated” (“Notes on Othello,” c. 1812; quoted in Bate 1992, 483).2 In this regard, too, Shakespeare fell short of the racist standards set by Coleridge, Hugo fils, or for that matter, his principal source. In Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, Disdemona fears that the Moor had become tired of her “because of the abundance of their lovemaking,” and that Italian ladies would “learn by my example not to tie themselves to a man whom Nature, Heaven, and manner of life separate from us” (Cinthio [1566] 1973, 248; translated by Geoffrey Bullough). Shakespeare transferred Disdemona’s lines, slightly modified, to Iago (3.3.233–5), and left the audience in no doubt as to Desdemona’s unwavering love for her husband. Addressing the question of Othello’s jealousy, Desdemona says: “I think the sun where he was born / Drew all such humours from him” (3.4.30–31). In Boito’s libretto, Desdemona finds beauty not just in Othello’s mind, as she does in Shakespeare, but precisely in his blackness, a feature that alienates others in Shakespeare’s play: “Ed io vedea fra le tue

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  65 tempie oscure / splender del genio l’eterea beltà” (And I descried upon your dusky temples / genius’ ethereal beauty shining there) (Boito 2014, 96–97; translated by Avril Bardoni—henceforth OL). And as James Hepokoski has pointed out, Boito, too, transferred some of “the most explicitly racial remarks . . . into the mouth of an evil Iago” (1987, 171), as did Shakespeare when adapting Cinthio. Although Boito has been accused, not without reason, of having embraced in his short story L’alfier nero (1867) racial stereotypes propounded by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (see Hiller 2009, 233; Campana 2015, 134), it should be remembered that at least three major nineteenth-century Italian translators of Shakespeare—Michele Leoni, Carlo Rusconi, and Andrea Maffei—appended translations of Schlegel’s commentary on Othello, that Verdi did not know English and came to know his Shakespeare principally through Italian translations, and that Boito could read English but was more comfortable with French, and used the translation by Hugo fils as the basis for his libretto, consulting English editions only occasionally (Hepokoski 1987, 163–71). If we keep in mind the critical traditions through which Othello reached Italian readers, including Verdi and Boito, the fact that the racial stereotyping of Othello was at all downplayed in Verdi’s opera should be cause for surprise. However, it is difficult to explain why Italian critics chose to translate Schlegel’s climate-based racist reading in the first place, since it was not only blacks but also Arabs and Europeans from the Mediterranean that were subjected to this kind of stereotyping from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. In his book Delle descrittione dell’Africa (1550), translated into English by John Pory (1600), the Berber Andalusian diplomat AlHassan Ibn-Mohammed Al-Wezaz Al-Fasi, better known to Anglophone readers as Leo Africanus, had written about the jealousy of Arabs and Berbers regarding their wives (Brown 1896, 2:326–27), but he regarded such jealousy as a feature of superior cultures in Africa (Loomba 2002, 101).3 In his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the easy comprehension of history; 1566), the French jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin connected the trope of jealousy with sexual intemperance, and associated sexual jealousy with both climatic conditions and the theory of humours. Bodin wrote that “southerners,” which in his mind included Spaniards and Sicilians as well as Arabs, Moors, and Africans, were superior to Northern people in intellect, but lacked strength; and it was because of their greater “wisdom and reasoning power” that they “sinned more freely for the sake of pleasure” (Method; quoted in Loomba and Burton 2007, 96). The writer who came close to later stereotypes connecting Southern Europeans and Africans was Robert Burton, who wrote in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that Southern men are more hot, lascivious and jealous, than such as live in the North: they can hardly contain themselves in those hotter

66  Part 1 climes, but are most subject to prodigious lusts. Leo Afer [Africanus] telleth incredible things almost of the lust and jealousy of his Countrymen of Africa, and especially such as live about Carthage, and so doth every Geographer of them in Asia, Turkey, Spain, and Italy. Germany hath not so many drunkards, England Tobacconists, France Dancers, Holland Mariners, as Italy alone hath jealous husbands. And in Italy some account them of Piacenza more jealous than the rest. In Germany, France, Britain, Scandia, Poland, [and] Muscovy, they are not so troubled with this feral malady . . . (Burton [1621] 1904, 3:303) Italians are here explicitly associated with jealous husbands, and the line of Othering that connects Italians with Africans—and separates both from northern Europeans—is now firmly drawn. A nineteenth-century manifestation of this development lies in the almost exclusive association of the role of Othello with Italian actors among Anglo-American audiences. Tommaso Salvini, who, along with the actress Adelaide Ristori, was the most internationally successful among Italian Shakespearean actors in the mid- to late nineteenth century, achieved his greatest critical and popular success with Othello and the least with Hamlet. While Salvini’s lack of success as Hamlet was partly due to his use of a highly abridged text, it was also “due to a kind of Anglo-Saxon possessiveness about Hamlet not felt for the more ‘southern’ Othello” (Carlson 1985, 80). The other major Shakespearean actor from Italy, Ernesto Rossi, found his interpretation of Hamlet rebuffed in the US in the following terms: Hamlet and the other great Shakespearean works exist in their integrity nowhere outside of the English language—unless, perhaps, in the German. The English ideals of them are the right ideals of them, and the English method of acting them is the right method. The foreign actors who come here ought to deal with what they really understand, and give the great works of their own literature, with companies speaking their own language. (William Winter, New York Tribune, 8 November 1881; quoted in Carlson 1985, 135) A similar prejudice informed criticism in England, too, where the anonymous reviewer for the Illustrated London News declared that plays like Othello called for “the exhibition of darker and fiercer passions . . . than would be allowed by the tame and placid manner in which we live in modern England.  .  .  . As the moral characteristics of a nation  .  .  . do not become wholly extinct in three or four centuries, it is probable that an Italian actor of the present day may perceive and appropriate some shades or hues of character which would perhaps have escaped an English performer” (17 April 1875; quoted in Bassi 1999, 58). Although

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  67 actors like Rossi resented this kind of stereotyping (Carlson 1985, 135), neither he nor Salvini attempted to underplay the ferocity of their own performances of Othello, with Rossi readily responding to his Iago’s insinuations, and reacting with even greater anger than did Salvini towards his Desdemona on stage (Carlson 1985, 155–61). The interpretations of Othello by Salvini and Rossi brought them popularity at the cost of their maintaining, instead of contesting, the stereotype connecting Italians and Africans. Hence, even Henry James could write of a performance by Salvini in Boston in 1883 that his “rendering of the part is the portrait of an African by an Italian; a fact which should give the judicious spectator, in advance, the pitch of the performance” (1949, 173–74; emphasis mine). Thus, even in the nineteenth century, performances of Othello by English actors were regarded as acts of mimesis, while those by Africans and Italians were regarded as instances of exhibition in the sense used by Callaghan, the latter actors purportedly revealing the shared “moral characteristics” of their nations as they played Othello on stage. It is unclear as to whether Salvini and Rossi failed to find ways for breaking the stereotype, or were content as long as the stereotype was applicable only to Africans and not to Italians. Certainly Salvini’s congratulatory letter of 24 February 1887 to Verdi shortly after the Otello première in which he wrote, “May God keep you for the fatherland, which is in need of light in the midst of such low morale,” suggests that sympathy for Africans was not high on his agenda, since the “low morale” he writes of pertains to what the critic Eduard Hanslick reported in 1887 as the negative mood created by the failure of Italy’s defeat in Dogali in the Abyssinian War shortly before the opera’s première (Hanslick 1963, 276).4 But the reason for Salvini’s and Rossi’s unwillingness—or failure, whichever the case may be—is not just the consequence of their views of Africans. To break free from such stereotypical expectations, one needed, firstly, to have a larger structural understanding of the problem and, secondly, to be able to imagine ways of challenging such stereotypes by means of the artistic tools at one’s disposal. Both these requirements were met admirably by Ira Aldridge, the leading black interpreter of Othello in the nineteenth century, who challenged the stereotyping of Africans by playing a variety of tragic and comic roles, as well as by taking up roles in whiteface, most notably that of Shylock, whom he portrayed with sympathy, and for which a contingent of Jews in the Ukrainian city of Zhitomir, headed by their Rabbi, thanked him (Curtiss 1968, 287). As for Aldridge’s clever juxtaposition of tragic and comic roles, Hazel Waters observes: “Much, too, was made in the reviews of his versatility in turning from the tragedy of Othello to the broad comedy of The Padlock. Although such versatility was expected of the nineteenth-century actor, the frequency of comments on Aldridge’s skill in this respect lead [sic] one to believe that it was exceptional” (2007, 101). Aldridge made one of the most remarkable imaginative breakthroughs in the history

68  Part 1 of nineteenth-century Shakespearean theatre, since he demonstrated that an effective way of breaking stereotypes was to portray one’s own ethnic or racial community in as diverse a way as possible. Moreover, by portraying Shylock in whiteface, Aldridge also demonstrated that one could leverage one’s own “marginal” status to portray other figures in Shakespeare, marginalised on other grounds (such as religious difference in the case of Shylock) with sympathy and understanding.5 One could go a step further—and better—than simply making a case for one’s own marginalised group. Like Salvini and Rossi, however, Boito did not grasp the underlying assumptions behind the stereotyping of Italians and Africans at a structural level. In his letter of 21 December 1886 to Verdi, Boito indicated that, as far as the interpretation of Othello was concerned, Salvini and Rossi were “the two giants” and that the understated interpretation of Giovanni Emanuel was “cold, monotonous, and unsympathetic.” Three days later, Verdi wrote to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, that Boito was right and that the singers were wrong to go to Emanuel’s performance,6 but his position was not quite the same as Boito’s. As Karen Henson has stated, Verdi was particularly worried about the ability of the singer Francesco Tamagno, the first Otello, “to sing quietly and to act” in what was “Verdi’s heaviest and most demanding tenor role, one known for its excesses more than its subtleties” (2015, 122). As we shall see, the relationship between the heroic, heavier sections and the subtler passages in Otello’s part is important both musically and for the extra-musical import it holds. But visually, too, Verdi’s departures from Boito are significant. In his letter of 29 October 1886 to Boito, Verdi objected to Otello being made to dress like the Zulu king Cetshwayo (Verdi spells his name “Cetywayo”), and asked him to reconsider the appropriateness of an alternative costume that was being considered, that of a toreador’s (translated by, and quoted in Weaver 1994, 111). Since the photos of Tamagno in the role of Otello at the time of the opera’s first performances show him as being dressed in Venetian costume,7 it is clear that the Spanish costume for Otello was also eventually discarded. In other words, in terms of costume choice, Verdi ended up discarding both African and Southern European (Spanish) costumes for Otello, opting instead for a Venetian one that erased any additional visual marker of difference between Otello and the other Venetians on stage other than the former’s blackface. Verdi ensured, then, that even as Boito’s libretto was at least to some extent inspired by the performing styles of Rossi and Salvini, there were no visual markers of exoticism that connected Otello with either Mediterranean Spain or any part of Africa, except his dark skin colour, as required by Shakespeare’s plot. Such a decision to de-exoticise Otello visually came after the composing of the opera when, as Hepokoski observes, Verdi “strenuously objected to any stage-costume that suggested the exotic or the primitive instead of the noble Venetian” (1987,

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  69 171, 195n7), a viewpoint about representation that ironically echoed Emanuel’s. Emanuel had stated that he had interpreted the role of Otello “as a man like us” and not as an African (Henson 2015, 24–25), and it is tempting to argue that, in the process of presenting a noble Otello, Verdi, too, cannot but also de-exoticise him: it is as if it was impossible for a nineteenth-century European to conceive of an Otello who could be both African and noble. But Verdi was aiming for something more unusual here. On the one hand, Verdi’s Otello sides with Salvini’s and Rossi’s in his ready signs of jealousy,8 his overt heroism, and his temperamental nature. On the other hand, his Otello is neither visually nor musically given exotic or “oriental” touches and, in this regard, he is closer to Emanuel’s Otello, which lay conceptually at the other end of the Salvini/ Rossi interpretive spectrum. Why Verdi chose to depict Otello’s jealousy without any visual or musical markers of the exotic or the oriental while retaining some of the temperamental, over-the-top elements from Salvini and Rossi will become clear when we examine the music, since Verdi systematically associates a musical stylistic marker of an entirely different and unexpected kind in connection with Otello’s jealousy. But first, we need to consider the religious and patriarchal dimensions of jealousy before moving on to the music.

Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (ii): Religious Discourses We have seen that racial and religious Otherness could be evoked simultaneously through blackface in Shakespeare’s times, and that such simultaneous evocation of racial and religious difference by means of that single visual signifier was no longer possible in the nineteenth century. At the same time, we saw that there was a continuity between Shakespeare’s times and Verdi’s in terms of the association of jealousy with Southern Europeans and Africans. We will see now that there was a religious dimension to European discourses on jealousy and vengeance as well, and a diachronic examination of the presence of such discursive formations also reveals continuities and discontinuities. Both Shakespeare’s play and the libretto of Otello reveal, in varying degrees, the presence of a discourse of religious Otherness based on a distinction between the Christian Self and its Other(s), the Semitic religions of Judaism and Islam. This discourse of religious Otherness also had racial implications. Julia Reinhard Lupton has argued that Shakespeare’s Othello “provides a canonical articulation of this protoracism insofar as the play fashions the Muslim in the image of the Jew according to the protocols of Pauline exegesis” (1997, 73). Her connection of Judaism with Islam is important, since it reveals how the discourse of religious Othering operates in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s desire for vengeance is connected with his

70  Part 1 Jewish identity, and is contrasted with Christian mercy, most notably by Portia in the trial scene (4.1.180–201).9 In Othello, vengeance is connected directly with sexual jealousy: as a result of Iago’s influence, Othello is transformed into identifying increasingly “with a jealous justice that must be executed at any cost, a law driven by the fierce monogamy of an immoderate monotheism” (Lupton 1997, 79; emphasis mine), the monotheism of Islam. Othello is, of course, Christian but, as a Moor, is in all likelihood a Christian convert, possibly from Islam. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, [Othello’s] identity depends upon a constant performance, as we have seen, of his “story,” a loss of his own origins, an embrace and perpetual reiteration of the norms of another culture. It is this dependence that gives Othello, the warrior and alien, a relation to Christian values that is the existential equivalent of a religious vocation; he cannot allow himself the moderately flexible adherence that most ordinary men have towards their own formal beliefs. Christianity is the alienating yet constitutive force in Othello’s identity. ([1980] 2005, 245) It is under the pressure of Iago’s malign influence, however, that “the jealousy that tears Othello apart manifests itself as a division between his Christian, loving, rational self, and the Muslim identity that erupts and disrupts it” (Loomba 2002, 96). In this regard, it is important to note that although Othello has been read as an anti-Catholic play (see Watson 1997, 234–57), the Catholic/Protestant divide became less significant when Islam came into the picture: indeed, early modern English playwrights “reverted to Roman Catholic models of chastity, martyrdom, and sacramental ritual in order to physically anchor Christian bodies against conversion” (Degenhardt 2010, 26). Shakespeare problematises these anti-Muslim discourses even as Othello seems to uphold them. Lustfulness was a quality associated with not only southern men and Africans but also Turks, a major Islamic force in Shakespeare’s times,10 but Othello’s sexual jealousy has nothing to do with his lustfulness. His faithfulness towards Desdemona is never in doubt except in Iago’s mind,11 while Othello’s anxiety surrounding the age difference between him and Desdemona could possibly be one of the additional factors behind what he fears is Desdemona’s infidelity with the younger Cassio.12 Moreover, the name of Iago, the man devoted to what Coleridge termed “motiveless malignity” (quoted in Bate 1992, 485) and the cause behind Othello’s downfall, also recalls that of the patron saint of Spain, Sant Iago, who was known as Santiago Matamoros, or Saint James the Moor-Slayer (Loomba 2002, 104). Étienne Balibar has drawn attention to the diachronic presence of such religion-based “culturalist” racism by linking contemporary Arabophobia, for example, with the centuries-old theological anti-Judaism of

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  71 Europe, terming both of them manifestations of a persistent “generalised anti-Semitism” (1991, 23–24). Islamic communities were stereotyped along Orientalist lines in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy as well, including in parts of Verdi’s Otello. For instance, when he makes his first entrance in the opera, Otello makes a stunning impression by celebrating the Venetian victory over the Turks, which he does in religious terms, since he sings of the drowning of “L’orgoglio musulmano” (Muslim pride) in the sea. As Hepokoski points out, “it is only here—and fleetingly—that we perceive an unflawed hero” (1987, 173). In the opera, therefore, Otello’s positive impression upon the audience is dependent on how heroically he announces his victory over “Muslim pride.” Indeed, Islamophobia has continued to inform Italian politics in the present day.13 Just as significant for this chapter, however, is the anti-Catholic discourse that developed in Britain from the 1840s onwards, which took place due to a number of factors ranging from the influx of Irish Catholics (1845–47) to the rise of the Oxford Movement that led to the conversions from Anglicanism to Catholicism of prominent figures such as John Henry Newman. It also led to the reinvigoration of the quasi-imperial tendency, prevalent among the British, to look down upon the peoples of the predominantly Catholic Mediterranean lands; to regard Catholicism as an impediment to the development of political liberalism; to draw a contrast between Italy’s old greatness and present decay; and to regard Italy as a European Orient, with all the attendant pejorative connotations of the latter term (Raponi 2014, 73–111). A parallel history of antiItalian prejudice developed in the US, of which we saw glimpses in the responses of American critics to the performances of Salvini and Rossi.14 Exceptions were made for Italy’s artistic greatness in certain domains such as opera, and even there, the achievements of Wagner were challenging Italian dominance from the late 1850s onwards. The Italian intelligentsia responded to these developments in Britain in multiple ways. As Danilo Raponi puts it, “Early Italian liberals, in fact, were receptive of the impulses coming from northern Europe, not however by uncritically accepting everything that came from England . . . but rather by a complex intellectual process of re-elaboration, rebuttal, and transculturation” (2014, 57), a statement that is applicable also to the Indian intelligentsia’s responses from around the same time to the cross-cultural encounter caused by British colonialism, as we shall see in the following two chapters. Among the Italian responses was, unfortunately, the creation of an internal racism within the country, based on a north/south meridional divide (Wong 2006; Raponi 2014, 60). Many endorsed Italy’s colonial ventures, which began in 1880 and encountered an extremely successful resistance from the Ethiopians in 1887 (a few weeks before the Otello première), before another defeat in Adua in 1896 “marked the end of the first Italian imperial campaign” (Wong 2006, 79–80). Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Verdi met in London in 1847, and

72  Part 1 of whom the composer and his wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, remained lifelong admirers, argued in favour of the Italian “civilising” mission in Libya in his essay “Principles of International Politics” (1871).15 However, several Italian political and social associations also protested against Italy’s military campaigns, in part fearing the “internal colonisation” of the “barbarian” Italian south, which was often compared with “uncivilised” Africa (Wong 2006, 8–9). A feature of the Italian unification movement from 1848 onwards was the increased distancing of sections of the Italian public from the influence of the Catholic Church, a trend that only intensified after Italian unification. As Manuel Borutta puts it, “while liberals strove to differentiate between politics and religion in public and private spheres, democrats and radicals wished to replace faith by knowledge” in the march towards universal progress (in Patriarca and Riall 2012, 191). Consequently, many Italians felt that a “thoroughly secular and scientific education was a powerful tool, perhaps the most powerful tool the new state could wield” in order to counteract “the traditional influence of the Church over Italian cultural, political, and economic life” (Pancaldi 1991, 154). Such a move away from Catholicism was being proclaimed by the British as a necessity for Italy’s modernisation. And as the political powers of the Italian Church in post-unification Italy were severely curbed, the Church increased its efforts to carve a new space for itself in the cultural and religious spheres of Italian society. As it happened, the “atheist” Boito and the “anticlerical” Verdi lent their support to the Church’s attempts to assert itself in Italy’s cultural domain, rather than to the secularising forces that were also at work, and its effects would be seen in Boito’s libretto for Otello. This was partly because both were ardent nationalists, and Verdi, who visited England five times between 1847 and 1875 and met Mazzini on his first trip, must have been aware of how, in this period, the inferiorisation of Italy by the British was inextricably linked with British anti-Catholic sentiments. To restore Italian cultural glory without succumbing to the terms set by a country that looked down upon the cultures of Mediterranean Europeans necessitated a more positive evaluation of the cultural impact of the Catholic Church. Secondly, as Laura Basini has observed, “the energetic revivals of past figures and artworks” driven by nationalistic motivations had a special component in the case of Italy, namely, the “aesthetic ideology of the Catholic Church” (2004, 140). The publishing house of Ricordi, which published Verdi’s works, also ran Italy’s first regular musicological and critical journal, the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, which promoted the Catholic Church’s attempts to make its influence felt in the cultural domain, this ideological orientation providing a further impetus to Boito and Verdi to lend their artistic support to the movement.16 Moreover, the “nostalgia for a vanished golden age of Italian artistic history, and an ever more energetic revival of historical artistic

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  73 forms and styles,” which were features of this movement (Basini 2004, 159), formed the subject matter of some of Boito’s poems from the 1860s. In “Case nuove” (New houses; 1866), for example, Boito regarded the erection of houses in Milan in modern architectural styles as “herald[ing] the end of old forms which [would] be replaced by those of emptiness and materialism” (O’Grady 2000, 36).17 Along with this nostalgia ran Boito’s troubled relationship with science, which he rejects explicitly in favour of beauty in his poem “Lezione d’anatomia” (Lesson in anatomy; 1865).18 And in his poem “Dualismo” (Dualism; 1864), Boito explored the implications of replacing the Creation story by replacing God with a “demented chemist” as Creator. The Bible, in fact, shaped Boito’s adaptational approach in the librettos for his opera Mefistofele (1868, revised 1875), for which he also composed the music, and for Otello. Boito had observed that, “if, forgetting Darwin’s system tonight, we must believe that Adam was the first man, then Adam is the first Faust. . . . Mephistopheles is the serpent of Eden. . . . Mephistopheles is the doubt that generates science, and is the evil that generates the good” (quoted in Nardi 1944, 302; translation mine). In Mefistofele, Faust is caught between the forces of good, represented by Margareta, and the forces of evil, epitomised by Mefistofele. This triangulation also takes place in Otello, as Otello is caught between good and evil—Desdemona and Jago. And since later in the previously quoted passage Boito links Mephistopheles, the “spirit of negation,” with Falstaff, Daniel Albright is correct in suggesting that Boito “likes to reconfigure Shakespeare’s plots along Faustian lines” (2012, 104). One could, however, go a step further and argue that Boito reconfigured both Goethe and Shakespeare along biblical lines, and that his portrayal of Desdemona had resonances specific to religious politics in post-unification Italy. As Italian men increasingly moved away from the Catholic Church, Catholicism of the nineteenth century came to be expressed increasingly “in the female gender” (de Giorgio 1993, 169). In this regard, de Giorgio quotes the linguist Niccolò Tommaseo, who wrote in a Catholic journal that “the Italian woman, capable of inspiring others, wisely obedient and commanding when necessary, is the guarantee for us of a less harsh destiny. Wherever men are more corrupt and weak, the women are less weak and less debased” (1993, 172). In Otello, too, Desdemona is firmly associated with belief in the Christian God. Elements of Mariolatry reinforce the image of Desdemona as the passive, idealised epitome of womanly perfection in the homage chorus of act 2 (“Dove guardi splendono”) and as an object of veneration by the ordinary folk, a chorus for which there is no parallel in Shakespeare’s play (Parakilas 1997, 384). In contrast, men like Otello become weak and suffer the more they become incapable of showing the Christian virtues of mercy and compassion. Boito’s tendency towards dualistic thinking along these lines is further illustrated by his insertion of two other passages in his libretto that have

74  Part 1 no Shakespearean equivalents. The first is Jago’s Credo in act 2, in which Boito grotesquely transforms the text of the traditional Nicene Creed of the Mass by replacing the God of the Mass, who descended from heaven for humankind’s salvation, by “un Dio crudel” (a cruel God). Boito’s troubled relationship with modern science, already evident in “Lezione d’anatomia,” becomes even more strongly evident in Jago’s Credo. In it, Jago imagines his self as being born from “Dalla viltà d’un germe o d’un atòmo” (the very vileness of a germ or an atom), and feels within himself the “il fango originario” (primeval slime), expressions through which Boito alludes to Darwin. In turning the Nicene Creed on its head, so to speak, Jago dismisses the afterlife and the resurrection of the dead with which the Nicene Creed ends by stating in his Credo, “La Morte è il Nulla / è vecchia fola il Ciel” (Death is Nothingness, / heaven an old wives’ tale).19 Jago is the new, secular man in post-unification Italy as seen by Boito, who, despite being a prominent member of the anti-conformist Scapigliatura movement, had a conservative side that only intensified over time.20 (As we shall see, Boito’s Scapigliatura orientation would have a modernising impact on Verdi in an entirely different sphere.) It is telling that, in creating a grotesque transformation of the Nicean Creed for Jago, Boito lets a contradiction stand. Jago’s closing words are those of an atheist, but at the beginning of his Credo, instead of disavowing his belief in any God, he affirms his faith in a cruel God. While the association of Jago with atheism ties him to the modern man in post-unification Italy, his profession of faith in a cruel God connects him with the fierce vengefulness of the monotheistic religions that formed Christianity’s Other from the early modern period onwards, Judaism and Islam. Jago’s polar opposite is, of course, Desdemona, and she remains the epitome of kindness and forgiveness. Her Ave Maria in act 4, shortly before her murder, is the antithesis to Jago’s Credo, and is another of Boito’s additions that does not have a Shakespearean parallel. Although the idea of making Desdemona sing an Ave Maria before her death came from the older adaptation of Othello by Gioachino Rossini (Otello, 1816), Boito made several textual additions that made Desdemona’s prayer particularly suited to her mental and spiritual condition. Moreover, as James Parakilas has noted, the Catholic Church actively promoted young girls and women to construct such bedroom shrines as is indicated by Boito’s stage directions in this particular scene (1997, 385). In the six-bar orchestral prelude to Desdemona’s Ave Maria (Verdi 1986, 489/1/1–6), the accompaniment for four-part muted strings “create[s] a close harmony completely within the range of women’s voices,” allowing the audience “to imagine her surrounded . . . by a company of women joining in her prayer, or to imagine her imagining herself that way” (Parakilas 1997, 385). Furthermore, as Hepokoski points out (1987, 180), Verdi was aware that, in his setting of the act 2 homage chorus, he was creating aurally a “splash of light amidst so much darkness,” which he

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  75 did by giving the melodic lines entirely to sopranos divisi, to which children’s voices are added later. (The tenors and basses mostly maintain tonic-dominant harmony.) Simultaneously, the malevolent Jago simultaneously sows the seeds of doubt in Otello’s mind. The sense of Desdemona as being part of a traditional, Christian community dominated by women and children is, therefore, highlighted musically in these two additions to the Shakespearean source. Otello is caught between the forces of tradition, represented by Desdemona, and change, represented by Jago. Just as Italian men in post-­unification Italy were moving away from the moral, cultural, and religious moorings traditionally provided by the Catholic Church, so was Otello, increasingly insistent on vengeance under the influence of Jago, moving closer to the “Dio crudel” of Judaism and Islam, and further and further away from Christian values. Otello’s moving soliloquy in act 3 of the opera, “Dio! mi potevi scagliar tutti i mali / della miseria” (OL 154–55; God! Thou couldst have rained upon my head / every affliction of poverty), shows the protagonist expressing his despair and reveals his decision to banish any idea of clemency with regard to Desdemona. Given the Christian vis-à-vis Semitic (Jewish/Muslim) binary common to both Shakespeare’s play and Verdi’s opera, it comes as no surprise that Jago and Otello “justify their conspiracy as the will of a vengeful God: the last words of their oath are ‘Dio vendicator!’ ” (Parakilas 1997, 379). Parakilas rightly states that Verdi and Boito “turn the Othello story into a nineteenth-century opera of gender difference mapped by different modes of religious expression” (1997, 376). What could be added in light of Shakespearean scholarship is that, in terms of the vengefulness/forgiveness binary, the “different modes of religious expression” were already present in Shakespeare’s times, although it is only in post-unification Italy that they became mappable along lines of gender. Here, too, the absence of any exotic or oriental elements in Otello’s or Jago’s music means that there is a stylistic asymmetry in Verdi’s score as far as the religious dimension is concerned: while the Catholic element is highlighted by musical means, the association of jealousy with Jewish or Islamic religious beliefs are not marked by any tropes connected with musical exoticism, tropes whose use would have highlighted Otello’s non-Christian—possibly Muslim—origins.

Jealousy and Vengeance in Othello and Otello (iii): The Pressures of Patriarchy Since the adaptation of a play for the operatic stage involves the compression of the original text for reasons that have been discussed in the previous chapter, it is not surprising that Boito needed to do the same, and his solution was to leave out act 1 of Shakespeare’s Othello. Boito

76  Part 1 may have taken his cue from the observation made in 1765 by Samuel Johnson: “Had the scene opened in Cyprus and the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity” (quoted in Woudhuysen 1989, 248).21 Boito sought to make up for the loss by providing a love duet for Otello and Desdemona at the end of act 1 of the opera, in which he made the couple recount the story of their courtship and, in the process, summarise Otello’s pre-Venetian history. The text of the duet was based on passages from the play itself (e.g., Othello’s speech from 1.3.129ff., Desdemona’s from 1.3.249, and parts from Othello’s and Desdemona’s conversation in 2.1.174ff.).22 Boito’s alteration, however, results in a simplification of the representation of the racial tensions and misogyny of sixteenth-century Venice in which Shakespeare situates Othello and Desdemona from the beginning of his play, tensions that the protagonists vainly strive to overcome. Shakespeare links Othello’s jealousy to a sense of insecurity that arises from his awareness of his marginal status in Venetian society. Othello observes almost immediately upon his first entrance that he knows that, given the impending war with Turkey, his utility to the Venetian state will ensure that the objections of Desdemona’s father Brabantio to Othello’s marriage with his daughter—objections that are entirely racist in nature—are overruled: “My services which I  have done the signiory / Shall out-tongue his complaints” (1.2.18–20). Behind this assertion lies Othello’s awareness that he will be accepted only on account of his usefulness, and he is able to make this argument since Shakespeare set the play in around the time of the Turkish siege of Cyprus, though Cinthio, Shakespeare’s source, did not (Emrys Jones 1968, 50). The Duke,23 too, in assuaging Brabantio, describes Othello’s marriage as a fait accompli (1.3.200–210) and does not depart from the negative connotations of blackness when defending Othello: “If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3.284–85). Such a setting, coupled with Brabantio’s warning to Othello that his daughter, having duped him, may deceive Othello as well (1.3.293–94), is crucial in establishing how Othello, on account of his race, is only qualifiedly accepted in Venetian society, and how patriarchal thought cuts across racial divides. Ania Loomba points out that the Venetian state might have been willing to accept Othello on account of the necessity of his services to the state, but it was not possible for Brabantio to agree with the Duke, a disagreement that revealed a “tension between the state and the family, although the two were so often equated in contemporary political rhetoric” (2002, 103). The rhetorical connection between state and family also had implications for Othello’s own private life, since what was, by the standards of the time, a highly unusual interracial marriage, could also leave him potentially vulnerable with regard to his public role as a Venetian general, if insinuations regarding the instability of his private life

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  77 were to gain ground. It is easy to read Othello as a deeply flawed character with regard to his treatment of Desdemona, but historicising gender relations reveals that Shakespeare’s Othello critiques the pressures felt by both men and women with regard to their socially determined gender roles. As Elizabeth A. Foyster (1999) has argued, even though there was, in private, a strong companionate ethos among married couples, this ethos also served male interests, since it was a test of “manhood that . . . [men] should prove equally capable of managing their affairs” in both public and private spheres. Cuckoldry was supposed to result from a man’s inability to assert sexual dominance over his wife, and the way defendants could assert their innocence or prove the other party wrong was through a process known as “compurgation,” which required a person’s neighbours to vouch for his or her good standing. In other words, a person’s reputation could acquire legal standing in disputes. If a person was “proven” to be a cuckold, he would be publicly humiliated in a range of rituals, among the most insulting being charivari, which were “loud, mocking demonstrations aimed at individuals who had offended community norms.” Women received worse punishments: these could range from social humiliation, such as being tied to cucking or ducking stools and then publicly displayed, to being made to undergo physically painful punishment, such as wearing branks—iron collars which cut into the tongue (see Foyster 1999, 2–11, 109–12). A man’s public reputation was, then, inextricably linked to his control over his private life, and such a view was not peculiar to England alone: “honour,” an oft-highlighted theme in early modern drama and philosophical writings, was also “of consequence in other early modern countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain” (Foyster 1999, 6). Alessandro Accinni and Paolo di Felice have written that, in old Italian states, in case a person was murdered on account of adultery, many factors were involved in determining the quantum of punishment for the murderer, such as his or her social status, the gender of the murderer, and the state of mind in which the murder took place; moreover, honour killing was abolished by law in Italy only in 1981 (2018, 83–88). Needless to say, men got away with a lesser quantum of punishment than did women, and noblemen received lesser punishments than did men of lower social standing. Some noblemen received no punishment at all, as was the case with the great composer Carlo Gesualdo, who brutally murdered his wife and her lover after catching them in flagrante delicto in 1590. Since Gesualdo was a child when Cyprus went out of Venetian control (i.e., at the time in which Othello are Otello are set), one can extrapolate from his acquittal that punishments regarding honour killings were, in all likelihood, just as favourable to Italian noblemen in Othello’s times. Laws across early modern Europe protected, in varying degrees, the “rights” of husbands who indulged in honour killings, but jealous husbands were, nevertheless, seen to come from southern Europe,

78  Part 1 Turkey, and Africa. In Cinthio, Shakespeare’s principal source, the story of the jealous Moor of Venice begins with a digression about an adulterous Florentine woman, whose husband is said to have done the prudent thing in murdering her for her adultery. Cinthio sets up a contrast with the tale of the Moor’s murder of Disdemona, which is seen as the unfortunate consequence of the effect of a villainous mind, that of the Iago figure, on that of the Moor, who believed in the Iago figure more than he needed to (Cinthio 1973, 7:241–42). Honour killing was acceptable as long as the jealousy was well founded, but those who were by their very nature prone to believing in more than what was warranted could end up making a grievous mistake—so went the argument. By depicting Othello as a person who was acutely aware of his marginal position in Venetian society, Shakespeare demonstrates why the discourse that valued patriarchal control over both one’s public and private affairs could make a middle-aged immigrant from a different racial and possibly religious background in white-/Christian-dominated Venice, and who was involved in an interracial marriage with a white woman significantly younger in age, more susceptible to insinuations of cuckoldry than would have been the case with a younger white man who belonged to the Venetian majority. Although it was a sign of weakness to admit one’s jealousy, several of Shakespeare’s characters do give voice to their jealousy, such as King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale and Mr. Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, to name but just two examples. But Othello’s situation is different from theirs, since he has a sense of personal inadequacy arising from a number of factors: his racial identity in a world where to be good-looking was to be fair-skinned, his being appreciably older than Desdemona, his being less socially sophisticated or handsome than his lieutenant Cassio, and the potential threat to his profession— his ticket to acceptance in Venice—in the event of the breakdown of his marriage. Significantly, on being convinced of Desdemona’s adultery, Othello exclaims that his “occupation” is gone (3.3.360), though his private, compassionate self expresses itself indirectly from time to time, for example, as he cries out to Iago: “But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!” (4.1.192–93). As Foyster observes, “the pun on the word ‘occupation’ to imply both vocation and copulation shows that notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ reputation were inseparable in this society” (1999, 115). Some aspects of one’s reputation could be under personal control to a greater extent: the control over one’s sexual urges, the ability to hold one’s drink, and the capability of retaining one’s sense of reason and good judgement. It is not by accident, then, that the other male protagonist whom Iago successfully brings down in social standing—Cassio—suffers because of his tendency to get drunk. All of Iago’s victims suffer because he is successful in convincing them that their honour, an attribute that had strong private, public, and legal repercussions, is at stake, and he,

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  79 Iago, is there to save it. The play brilliantly illustrates how the power of words can make possible both self-fashioning and its obverse, the undoing of others. In act 1 of Othello, therefore, Shakespeare gives us a more nuanced context for understanding Othello’s jealousy by connecting the race- and religion-based discourses on jealousy and vengeance with the special implications of the operations of patriarchy for an immigrant from a different racial/religious background, thereby complicating our responses to the play’s outcome. It is because the reasons behind Othello’s jealousy are complex that his fall is tragic; if he were simply a deluded, jealous husband who murdered his innocent wife, his fall would have merely been well deserved. Hence, critics have rightly observed that Boito’s omission of most of the material of act 1 of Shakespeare’s Othello “conceptually diminishes” the operatic Otello (Hepokoski 1987, 172), since an Otello who “is naturally more prone to jealousy  .  .  . no more commands our sympathy than a natural miser or lecher” (Budden 1992, 3:305). This conceptual diminution happens in other ways as well. In act 3 of Otello, after Otello has insulted Desdemona in public, the opera’s Venetians, who, with the exception of Jago, hardly ever hurl racist abuses at Otello, start relating Otello’s anger to his blackness and his animal-like qualities. This takes place in the largo concertato with which act 3 ends, in which Desdemona, Emilia, Cassio, Roderigo, Lodovico, and Jago all sing of their woes while the chorus simultaneously voices its concerns about the situation, the women focusing largely on Desdemona, the men on Otello. As with such concertatos,24 which traditionally occur in the penultimate act of nineteenth-century Italian operas (including Verdi’s Otello), these voices, accompanied by the orchestra, are heard simultaneously.25 It is in the men’s “choric” commentary that an allusion to a racist reading of Otello’s transformation occurs, when they sing, “Quell’uomo nero è sepolcral, e cieca / un’ombra è in lui di morte e di terror! / Strazia coll’ugna l’orrido petto” (This black man has a graveyard air, [and] a sightless / shadow of death and terror is within him / His nails tear at his fearsome breast!);26 the first line is repeated a few bars later (Verdi 1986, 425/1/2–430/1/1 and 440/1/3–442/1/2—henceforth OFS). As a result of Boito’s removal of racist comments made by other Venetians, they remind the operatic Otello less of his “inferiority” than they do in Shakespeare’s play; consequently, Verdi’s Otello has fewer reasons to feel jealous from an acute sense of social insecurity than does Shakespeare’s Othello. Furthermore, the crucial absence of the contextual-ideational web provided by act 1 of Shakespeare’s Othello, when considered along with Boito’s omission of much of the racist dialogue from the Venetians, together give the impression here—perhaps unintended on Boito’s part— that as Otello’s jealousy increases, Venetians understandably begin to relate Otello’s abusive treatment of Desdemona with the rise of his suppressed “primitive” and animal-like qualities, a reading that falls in line

80  Part 1 with Schlegel’s reading of Othello’s jealousy. The fact that the chorus’s words get tucked away in the polyphonic texture of the largo concertato significantly reduces the impact of these words for the audience, but performers who sing these lines on stage in this frequently performed opera are likely to be reminded of their racist underpinnings time and again. The effect of patriarchal thinking is also evident in the conversion of Desdemona from a human being to an idealised Marian figure. Verdi himself felt that Shakespeare could not have come across men as villainous as Iago or women as angelic as Cordelia, Imogen, or Desdemona, even though these characters rang “true” (Budden 1992, 3:317). This was part of a specifically nineteenth-century turn in the reading of Shakespeare’s heroines, with Desdemona’s outspokenness and transgressive tendencies tacitly overlooked. Boito’s views were strikingly similar: despite his decision to focus in his libretto on the ways in which Iago arouses Othello’s jealousy, he removed Iago’s insinuation that Desdemona deceived her father in marrying Othello (3.3.209), a remark that, in Shakespeare’s play, ties up remarkably well with Brabantio’s warning (1.3.293–94) to reinforce Othello’s fears regarding his marriage. Boito again dismissed the significance of Iago’s lines in a conversation in 1887 with Blanche Roosevelt (Hepokoski 1987, 179), showing how committed he was ideologically to representing Desdemona as an embodiment of Christian perfection and one who does not threaten the patriarchal order. As will be even more evident when we consider the music, the operatic Desdemona belongs to a line of female characters who served as “a focus and symbol in ideological discourses used in the construction, reproduction, and transformation of ethnic/national categories” (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989, 7), a discursive formation that was taking place in various nineteenth-century communities that felt the need to (re-)define themselves culturally across the world. Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā, whom I will examine in the next chapter, is another such character: in a novel that has Shakespeare’s Tempest as one of its principal intertexts, she is the site of struggle between the opposing impulses of tradition and (colonial) modernity. There are both parallels and differences between her and Desdemona. Both women are metonymic of the nation. That said, Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā, who is a complex amalgam of multiple literary heroines (of both Indian and European provenance), is not as idealised a figure as is Verdi’s Desdemona, even though Bankim’s reading of Desdemona (see appendix 2) idealises her in ways that are strikingly similar to Verdi’s. Secondly, in the case of Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā, it is the heroine—the woman as nation—who is the site of the struggle, whereas in Otello, an opera written in a politically independent Italy, the struggle is located in the man in charge of the nation’s political interests: it is Otello who is caught between the traditional cultural values of the nation, embodied in Desdemona, on the one hand, and Jago, the embodiment of their obverse, on the other. One could argue that this is an anachronistic

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  81 reading of Verdi’s opera, which, after all, does not change the time period in which Shakespeare’s play is set. While such an argument is, of course, valid, I have already shown how Boito’s libretto is saturated by the cultural values promoted by the politically marginalised Catholic Church in post-unification Italy. Like Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā, Verdi’s opera also alludes to the cultural conditions in which it was created, even though it is set in the past. One needs to be careful about drawing parallels, for certain, but the striking parallels between the two works reveal why a synchronic approach towards the study of Shakespeare adaptations that seeks to move beyond the East/West and European/non-European divides can show the transnational ideational forces shaping the content, form, and affective dimensions of such adaptations across the world, albeit with significant local differences. The omission of act 1 of Othello thus highlights the patriarchal underpinnings of male sexual jealousy and of the attendant concept of “honour killing.” Consequently, the argument that what is lost in opera at a conceptual level is “compensated by musical intensity” (Hepokoski 1987, 172) becomes problematic in the case of Otello since, from a modern, feminist perspective, the response to Otello’s murder of Desdemona—in the absence of the explanatory matrix provided by Shakespeare in act 1 of Othello—ought to tend towards one of outright horror unleavened by any tragic empathy. It is in its patriarchal bias, common to many other works of art across the world, especially in the nineteenth century, that the opera’s libretto appears particularly dated, and Frank Kermode aptly described it as being “Victorian” at a certain level (quoted in Weis 2017, 148). Verdi’s score does not undercut that patriarchal bias, but it does move away from the nineteenth-century race- and religion-based stereotypes pertaining to male sexual jealousy with unprecedented boldness, and it is to the music that I now turn.

Verdi’s Musical Choices and the Subversion of Racial Stereotypes regarding Jealousy Verdi, born on 9 or 10 October 1813 in the village of Roncole in the province of Parma, had assuredly become one of the greatest and most frequently performed living Italian exponents of opera, a musico-­ dramatic genre traditionally dominated by Italians, by the 1850s, and recognised as such. His success had been ensured with a string of seventeen operas, beginning with his third, Nabucco (1842), and coming to a climax with three of the most frequently performed operas of all time— Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore (1853), and La traviata (also 1853).27 However, from the 1860s onwards, these operas, in which Verdi made brilliant innovations within traditional operatic conventions, increasingly came to be regarded as aesthetically old-fashioned by several artists of the younger generation, among them Boito, his eventual librettist,

82  Part 1 and Faccio, the eventual conductor of the Otello première, whose own opera, Amleto, I  have already mentioned in the previous chapter.28 Simultaneously, Verdi came to be regarded by Italians of the newly formed state as one of the leading representatives of their culture. As Roger Parker (2001) points out, Verdi had been made a member of the newly formed Italian parliament at the personal insistence of the first Prime Minister of Italy, the Count of Cavour, and his early operas, especially Nabucco, came to be associated, perhaps retrospectively, with the Italian revolutionary struggles of the 1840s. Moreover, Verdi’s operatic output between 1853 and 1871, when Aida was premièred, declined considerably in quantity, and despite the greater complexity of the operas he composed in this period (some of which would eventually earn critical recognition as being among his greatest works), they were not as successful as the operas from the earlier part of Verdi’s career. As Axel Körner (2011) and others have shown, Italian audiences and critics were becoming increasingly receptive to the influence of Wagner, who, by the 1860s, had become a major force not only in the domain of opera, but in the world of European culture at large, drawing the admiration of the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Vincent Van Gogh, and the hostility of Leo Tolstoy. The repertoire of Italian opera houses had become more and more international in scope, and as Wagner came to be seen increasingly as embodying some of the most progressive trends in opera, a number of contemporary Italian critics started regarding Verdi and his aesthetic as being outdated (Budden 1992, 3:263–92; Hepokoski 1987, 48–49; Taruskin 2005, 3:563–68). After the successful première of Aida in 1871, Verdi was caught in a double bind. Had he made radical changes to the formal and stylistic aspects in his future operas, he would be proclaimed an imitator of Wagner.29 On the other hand, to go on developing traditional operatic forms—something Verdi had been doing all along anyway—was not enough, for he had already been labelled a conservative. Verdi was well aware of the situation, as is evident from his comment to Clarina Maffei, a supporter of Scapigliatura reformists like Boito and Faccio, in 1878: “For what reason should I write? . . . I would have it said of me all over again that I  didn’t know how to write and that I have become a follower of Wagner. Some glory! After a career of nearly forty years to end up as an imitator!” (translated by, and quoted in Budden 1992, 3:299). Creative silence, at least for a while, seemed the only way out. Between the première of Aida and Verdi’s comments to Maffei came one of his most important works, his Requiem (1874), which signalled his participation in the Sacred Revivalism movement that, as stated earlier, was also being championed through the print media—the Gazzetta musicale di Milano—by Verdi’s publisher, Giulio Ricordi. At this point, Verdi also composed his only piece of chamber music, his String Quartet in E Minor, in 1873, a year before his Requiem. As with his last

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  83 two operas, Verdi insisted that the quartet was composed for his own pleasure and ensured that that word got around. If the Requiem sought to connect the music of modern Italy with that of its Christian past, the string quartet was a genre that, by the 1870s, had come to be associated with composers from the Austro-German lands.30 When the Quartet Society of Milan was formed in 1864, Boito was one of its members who was keen to revive Italy’s old instrumental tradition.31 Verdi had initially refused to join the society; now he had written a quartet. He was not quite silent as a composer, then, but was cultivating genres in which he was not facing the discursive double bind that he was facing in opera. Through the Requiem, Verdi forged connections with that part of Italy’s musical past in which the Catholic Church played an important role, while with his String Quartet, Verdi entered into musical territory dominated by composers from the north of the Alps. However, there was a gap between Verdi’s creative activities and his pronouncements. He had famously stated in 1871 that “to go back to the past . . . will be a step forward” (translated by, and quoted in Basini 2004, 146). However, as the composition of the String Quartet and the Requiem within a year of each other suggests, Verdi was doing something far more complex than what this admittedly formulaic and regressively nationalist stand suggests. Why was there this gap between precept and practice? John H. Joughin has observed that “the formation of a national culture is dependent upon, and often invokes, a particular version of the past,” and that “nationhood articulates . . . not just a sense of beginning, but also a sense of return and beginning all over again” (1997, 1). It is not surprising that Verdi’s statement came at a time when he was being called upon to innovate by bringing Italian opera in step with international trends (i.e., to respond to Wagner’s example), on the one hand, and be the face of post-unification Italian national culture, on the other. A more personal reason could be that Verdi might well have been prepared to write his own concise, melodic, and theatrical version of a “symphonic” or “motivic” opera . . . but he was unwilling to be obliged to defend the procedure against simplistic charges of Germanic influence. All of this touches on the central paradox of Verdi’s later years, the gap between his written opinions and his own musical practice. . . . It could be that Verdi’s private and public polemics against the rise of Germanism in Italy, the insistence on the Italian traditions of melody, and so forth, were essential tactics in his own—seemingly contradictory—move towards a more complex opera. By emphatically rejecting Germanism in print  .  .  . he may have been working both to construct an acceptable self-image and to blunt the arguments of those who were suggesting that he was now sacrificing to foreign gods. (Hepokoski 1987, 49)

84  Part 1 If Verdi was creatively not as conservative in his music as he appeared in his pronouncements, then neither was Boito a rootless cosmopolitan championing only the latest international trends. He had translated several of Wagner’s own librettos, leading to Wagner writing him his “Letter to a Young Italian Friend.” But Boito had also long been interested in literature and music from Italy’s past. Over the years he had also written about Verdi’s operas with increasing warmth. With Boito also getting involved in the Sacred Revivalism movement (Basini 2004, 157, 148–49), the representatives of the old and the new guards were in a position to come together for a collaboration. Such a development would not have been possible without Giulio Ricordi, whose efforts to bring Verdi and Boito together on the project of adapting Othello showed the first signs of bearing fruit in June 1879. Ricordi, who exercised strong influence at the La Scala opera house in Milan where Otello would be first performed, turned Milan into an “antiWagnerian stronghold” and gradually acquired the publishing rights of Wagner’s operas from their erstwhile Italian publisher, thereby ensuring total control over the performance of Wagner’s works in Italy; indeed, so strong was his commitment to the championing of Verdi that he withheld all of Wagner’s scores from Italy in the year of Verdi’s death (Budden 1992, 3:297; see also Vetere 2010, 103n105). Thus, if the Paris Opéra ensured that Thomas had to adhere to convention when composing his Hamlet, the winds of change in post-unification Italy created a reverse condition, one that required Verdi to innovate. And if in doing so Verdi ran the risk of being labelled an imitator of Wagner, he also had powerful well-wishers to back him in the opera house and in the print media, and he had the librettist who would facilitate his creative renewal along new lines after the operatic hiatus since the Aida première of 1871. The efforts of Boito in steering Verdi towards modernising Italian opera, backed by Ricordi’s promotion, would not have worked had Verdi not been able to deliver, and in order to understand Verdi’s innovations in Otello, we need to keep in mind Verdi’s own views on Wagner, since it was the latter’s work that was being equated with progress in opera in this period. Despite their rivalry, Verdi respected his exact contemporary (both he and Wagner were born in 1813), and wrote to Giulio Ricordi that, with Wagner’s death in 1883, “it is a great personality that vanishes . . . a name that leaves a most powerful mark on the history of art!” (letter of 15 February 1883; translated by, and quoted in Busch 1988, 1:141). Verdi was composing Otello at this time. In a later interview he gave to the journalist Felix Philippi at the age of 86, Verdi proclaimed act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as “one of the finest creations that has ever issued from a human mind” (translated by Richard Stokes and quoted in Conati 1984, 329). Verdi knew Wagner’s strengths and respected them.

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  85 And yet, Verdi also had his reservations which he understandably articulated more forcefully in and around the time of the composition of Otello, a time when his own achievements were being unfairly cast in Wagner’s shadow. In a letter of 20 April 1878, for instance, Verdi wrote forcefully against some aspects of German music, upholding the binary between Italian church music and opera, on the one hand, and chamber and orchestral music of the Germans, on the other, this despite his having composed a successful string quartet himself.32 In that letter, Verdi boldly declared of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that “no one will ever approach the sublimity of the first movement, but it will be an easy task to write as badly for voices as it is done in the last movement,” that others would use Beethoven as their excuse for writing unidiomatically for voices, and that the growth of this trend “undoubtedly means the end of opera.” The same letter also has an oft-quoted passage that provides a useful context for situating the political implications of Verdi’s aesthetic choices in Otello: Art belongs to all nations—nobody believes that more firmly than I. But it is practiced by individuals; and since the Germans have other artistic methods than we have, their art is basically different from ours. We cannot compose like the Germans, or at least we ought not to; nor they like us. Let the Germans assimilate our artistic substance, as Haydn and Mozart did in their time; yet they remained predominantly symphonic musicians. And it is perfectly proper for Rossini to have taken over certain formal elements from Mozart; he is still a melodist for all that. But if we let fashion, love of innovation, and an alleged scientific spirit tempt us to surrender the native quality of our own art, the free natural certainty of our work and perception, our bright golden light, then we are simply being stupid and senseless. (Translated by Edward Downes and quoted in Fisk 1956, 124) Verdi is here arguing his case from the perspective of what I have termed “nationalist cosmopolitanism,” a perspective that develops from an everaccelerating rate of cross-cultural contact globally and its concomitant anxieties; indeed, the recognition of the need to learn through cross-­ cultural contact, along with fears about the potential loss of one’s cultural autonomy as a consequence, is one of the principal themes of the novel by Bankim that I discuss in the next chapter. Not only did Rossini borrow from Mozart; Verdi’s use of the orchestra developed throughout the course of his career, as did his skill at developing motifs (i.e., musical cells rather than fully developed and self-contained melodies or their constituent phrases, cells whose presence permeates the length of an entire movement or even a composition).33 The opening motif of the stormy and heroic first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—in rhythmic terms, three short notes followed by a longer one—is perhaps the most

86  Part 1 famous example of a symphonic movement permeated by a single motif, a technique developed extensively by Joseph Haydn and other composers (in the main) from the German-speaking lands in the context of the symphony. However, as early as in the masterly overture to his opera Luisa Miller (1849), Verdi had already demonstrated his ability to create a piece “carved out of a single theme,” combining “the spirit of Weber with the technique of Haydn” (Budden 2008, 216), and motivic development in instrumental, chamber, or orchestral music was by no means the exclusive hallmark of German composers. But in the Italy of the 1860s onwards, such associations were being made and forcefully upheld by the likes of the young Boito who, in a review of 14 May 1865, had exhorted composers to “practice the Symphony and the Quartet”—precisely the two genres that Verdi would single out as Germanic in his 1878 letter— “in order to be able to face opera” (translated by, and quoted in Weaver 1994, xxiii). Verdi had already cultivated the “symphonic” technique of developing motifs in earlier operas and had also written a string quartet. He was now going to use these techniques associated with German music in Otello, in which motifs rather than melodies would be markedly associated with Jago and his influence and with Otello’s jealousy. Herein lay the immediate source of the musical subversion since, at the level of musical style, the Self/Other binary was being defined not in terms of the European vis-à-vis the exotic (or oriental), but in terms of a binary at one end of which was the importance attached to melody, to the expressive supremacy of the human voice, and to harmonic simplicity, and at the other end of which was the valorisation of the systematic development of motifs, of orchestral complexity, and of increasing chromaticism. The first set of terms in this binary defined, in terms of the musical discourse of the times, the traditional Italian Self, while the other set defined those musical qualities associated with German symphonic and operatic traditions that were being increasingly equated with the modern. While in the spoken theatre and in Anglophone Shakespearean criticism, it is Othello who is the Other of the Venetians on account of his race (and, especially in the seventeenth century, religious origin), in the opera it is Jago who, as the force of modernity, represents the Other, while Desdemona embodies tradition. Otello is caught between these forces, musically and culturally speaking.34 Verdi’s decision to not depict Otello by means of exotic or oriental musical markers at a time when even Ophelia was being exoticised musically is unusual for the period, since a tradition of distinguishing between different non-European communities musically had gained ground in the course of the nineteenth century, and such musical markers could have complemented the race-based readings of the character made by literary and theatre critics in the nineteenth century. The Romantic interest in distant locales and musical traditions had led Carl Maria von Weber to modify the use of the eighteenth-century all-inclusive musical marker

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  87 of the non-European Other, the alla turca style by using a Chinese theme that he had found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique in his Turandot overture (1806, revised 1809), making him the first major European composer to use a recognised non-European melody as the basis for a Western composition (Taruskin 2005, 3:192); he repeated the feat in the operatic domain with his use of Arabic-origin melodies in his last opera, Oberon (1826; see Warrack 1976, 332).35 While other German opera composers did not take up Weber’s lead, French composers from the 1840s started making extensive use of such non-European melodies, which they either obtained themselves or received from secondary sources. Félicien David composed the then hugely popular odesymphonie Le désert (1844), based on musical material he had collected in the Middle East, and Camille Saint-Saëns, who travelled extensively around the world, especially the Maghreb, produced several works in various genres in which he made use of non-Western scales and melodies, and evoked the timbres of non-Western instruments, of which his opera Samson et Dalila (1877) and his Fifth Piano Concerto (Egyptian) (1896) are perhaps the best known. Opera composers who used or alluded to non-European musical idioms included Verdi himself, whose Aida (1871) itself is one of the most popular of operas with a non-­European setting and, as with many a nineteenth-century work by an European involving non-Europeans, has predictably evoked hostility as well as more nuanced readings.36 Jules Massenet’s operas Le roi de Lahore, set in South Asia, and Hérodiade, set in Jerusalem, had spectacular success in Italy when first performed in 1879 and 1884 respectively (Budden 1992, 3:275). Hence, there was a demand for exotic/Orientalist operas in Italy for nearly two decades before Otello was first performed. Aida was the opera Verdi completed before composing Otello, and he could have readily tapped into an exotic/oriental vein had he so wished. Verdi’s decision not to do so, therefore, needs to be seen as a deliberate choice.37 Once we reassess the opera’s politics through close textual study backed by secondary evidence, we realise why Verdi needed to avoid the exotic/ oriental vein entirely in Otello. His own comments to Ricordi in his letter of 11 May 1887 regarding the vocal requirements of the three principal roles reinforces the view of Otello as being, at the musical level, about the conflict between operatic tradition and modernity: “Desdemona is a part where the thread, the melodic line, never stops from the first note to the last. Just as Iago must only declaim and snicker (ricaner). Just as Otello, now warrior, now passionate lover, now cast down in the filth, now as ferocious as a savage, must sing and howl. . . . Therefore, the most perfect Desdemona will always be the one who sings the best” (translated by, and quoted in Hepokoski 1987, 96–97; emphasis mine). For this reason, Verdi’s Otello partakes of elements from both the passionate interpretations of Salvini and Rossi and the understated interpretive approach of Emmanuel without being exclusively aligned to either. It could also be

88  Part 1 the case that, in order to ensure that the focus of the audience remained on this German/Italian musical binary, Verdi successfully resisted having Otello dressed in Spanish or Zulu traditional clothing after completing the score; the musical binary was better not obfuscated by a different binary (European/exotic) at the visual level. It is a measure of his success that “no contemporary musical critics commented significantly on the racial issue within the opera” (Hepokoski 1987, 171). Was Verdi’s decision to take away musical markers of exoticism from his portrayal of Otello motivated principally, then, by the need to associate motivic development with jealousy and with Jago’s machinations? Perhaps; but, as I  discuss later, Verdi was aware of the political dimension of such subversion too, as will be evident from a detail in Falstaff, and from his anticolonial comments later on. An illustration of Verdi’s use of musical motifs in connection with “jealousy” can be seen in “Non ti crucciar” (OL 100–101; Do not torment yourself), Jago’s opening words of the scene which opens act 2, as Jago convinces Cassio to ask Desdemona to intercede on his behalf to Otello. At the outset a motif is heard, featuring a rising semiquaver triplet, followed by a crochet (OFS 167/1/1)—like the iconic opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, this, too, has three quick notes followed by a longer one:

Ex. 2.1 Verdi, Otello, Opening of Act 2

No sooner does Cassio leave, convinced by Jago’s talk, than this motif, played a semitone higher, fortissiomo, and in unison by the orchestra, suddenly takes on an utterly menacing tone as it becomes the introduction to Jago’s Credo (OFS 174/1/3):

Ex. 2.2 Verdi, Otello, Opening of Jago’s Credo

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  89 The Credo’s dissonant harmonies, heavy orchestration, and fragmented melodic lines are in stark contrast to Desdemona’s Ave Maria, in which her voice is surrounded by the ethereal sound of muted strings in their upper registers, reminiscent of women’s voices and, at the same time, creating a timbral halo around her praying voice (OFS 489/1/1–6). The Credo and the Ave Maria, we saw, represented polar opposites in terms of the religious values they express, but their opposition is also highlighted musically, without Verdi taking recourse to any element of musical exoticism that could link Jago’s praise of a “Dio crudel” with the monotheisms of Judaism and Islam. The music, then, retains the polarity but undercuts the religious stereotyping associated with it. This motif of a semiquaver triplet followed by a crochet is associated with the negative impact of Jago on others elsewhere as well, especially in Otello’s hauntingly beautiful soliloquy “Dio! mi potevi scagliar tutti i mali della miseria” (OFS 346/2/3ff.; God! Thou couldst have rained upon my head every affliction). Verdi indicated that it was to be sung as softly as possible with a choked voice (voce soffocata), demonstrating that his use of the motif is not as much to parody motivic composition as it is to show his mastery over the technique, which includes making expressive use of it:

Ex. 2.3 Verdi, Otello, “Dio, mi potevi scagliar”

90  Part 1 Another motif, played by violas and cellos (OFS 497/1/1ff.) appears repeatedly in the orchestra in the last confrontation between Otello and Desdemona in act 4 leading to her murder:

Ex. 2.4 Verdi, Otello, Act 4, Beginning of Desdemona’s Murder Scene

Verdi seems to develop this motif from the opening of act 3, which begins similarly with an obsessive staccato figure in the violas over a dark theme in the cellos (OFS 300/1/1–301/1/2), as Otello broods jealously. That figure, however, is technically an ostinato (a specific kind of motif that remains unchanged even as the harmony changes) that lasts for six bars, but the kinship between the two passages is unmistakable.38 Musical motifs can be easily traced in Verdi’s earlier works as well, but here they are heard over and over again exclusively in the context of either the protagonist’s obsessive thoughts about his wife’s infidelity, or Jago’s repeated insinuations about the same. Verdi’s musical technique— motivic ­development—indeed provides an apt musical correlative to the dramatic content. Frits Noske has demonstrated how the melodic kernel of Otello’s and Jago’s act 2 vengeance duet is anticipated in the form of motivic material preceding the duet; how Jago’s Credo “reverberates” in the scene that follows in the form of a motif derived from it; how these motivic connections, all linked with Jago’s machinations in act 2, are even stronger in the autograph manuscript; and how the motif following Jago’s Credo appears earlier in act 1 in the context of Cassio’s drinking song (1977, 139–40). Noske concludes that Jago’s poison is shown to work musically by means of descending chromatic scales, triplets, and a pervasive four-note motif, and he wonders whether “before or after Verdi a composer ever used the device [motivic development] in such a penetrating way, making it the structural essence of his work” (1977, 157). It should be evident, then, that the music associated with the evil influence of Jago, especially with regard to the spread of jealousy in Otello’s mind, is systematically linked with the use of musical motifs, rather than by means of any musical exoticisms; jealousy, then, gets painted musically in terms of techniques associated with northern Europe, and not with any musical exoticisms associated with the musical cultures of Southern Europe or Africa. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Desdemona’s part is both more diatonic compared to Jago’s (with whom she hardly has any interaction in the opera) and more melodic; Noske observes that she sings “in large melodic curves,” while the more jealous Otello becomes, the more his

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  91 phrases become irregular and tonally unstable (1977, 161, 164).39 “Regular” melodies are associated with the embedded traditional numbers, such as the drinking chorus and the love duet (both from act 1), the homage chorus (act 2), and the “Dio vendicator” conspiracy duet of Otello and Jago (at the end of act 2) (Noske 1977, 146).40 These traditional set pieces “touch the conventions of the Italian past most decisively” and form the “principal ‘Italian’ identifiers around and through which the more ‘progressive’ motivic drama is spun,” the set pieces being usually embedded within a network of developing orchestral motifs that enable smooth, “symphonic” transitions (Hepokoski 1987, 140). These set pieces disappear progressively as the internal drama of Otello’s mind becomes increasingly foregrounded in the later acts, with act 4 containing only the “Willow Song” and Desdemona’s Ave Maria. These latter set pieces, vestigial reminders of the older number opera of which Verdi was the master, are connected to each other through Verdi’s judicious choice of timbre. The delicate scoring of the homage chorus and of the Ave Maria, in both of which brighter sonorities predominate,41 reflects Verdi’s association of Italian music with the “bright golden light” he mentioned in his letter of 1878, cited earlier. These moments of sunlight are increasingly surrounded by darker orchestral sonorities as the work progresses, an especially chilling instance occurring at the end of Desdemona’s Ave Maria, when her ethereal melody, surrounded by the iridescent timbre of the muted strings in their upper register, is suddenly and violently replaced by the growling sonorities of cellos and double basses, to which an insistent motif—the telltale marker of jealousy—is soon added (OFS 492/2/3–493/2/5), before Otello’s tortured voice is eventually heard from the depths of the musical and spiritual darkness. Between the Ave Maria and Otello’s entry is heard a plangent theme on the cor anglais (OFS 495/1/4–6), a quicker, minor-key variant of the growling theme heard in the cellos and double basses moments earlier (OFS 492/2/9–12), the cor anglais introducing a curtailed version of the famous “bacio” theme, first heard in full at the end of the Otello-­ Desdemona love duet in act 1:

Ex. 2.5 Verdi, Otello, Cor Anglais Solo before Re-statement of “Bacio” Motif

92  Part 1 This curtailed version is heard shortly before Desdemona is murdered, and a full restatement, once again introduced by the cor anglais, is heard at the very end, when the “bacio” theme recurs with devastating pathos. The cor anglais and its sound is significant all throughout the opera: it first appears among the woodwinds in the act 1 love duet, sets up the mood at the beginning of act 4 for the “Willow Song” that follows, and introduces poignantly the last two statements of the “bacio” theme.42 What Verdi does here is to deploy themes and orchestral sonorities in ways as to ensure both local-level continuity between sections as well as across far-flung set pieces which are, in this instance, connected with the theme of love and its poignant breakdown. Verdi emphatically does not return to the past but instead tackles operatic modernity head-on: the breakdown of the relationship between Otello and Desdemona under Jago’s influence, represented by a transition from melody-based numbers to motif-based through-composition with significant expressive weight laid on the orchestra, comes to symbolise the loss of a specific Italian operatic identity under the pressure of the non-autochthonous forces of musical modernity. In one sense, therefore, Otello becomes an opera about opera. As Hepokoski puts it, Desdemona’s final adieu to Emilia “is also a farewell to a whole way of feeling, a last embrace of the old world, which will never come again” (1987, 189). And it is perhaps significant that Verdi’s Jago, unlike Shakespeare’s Iago, escapes at the end—the forces of change cannot be contained or eliminated. In this regard, it was Boito who, by means of his libretto, helped Verdi decisively in moving away from the dramaturgy of contrasts on which number operas were based, and in terms of which Verdi was thinking as late as 1880. Instead, Boito’s libretto made Verdi focus musically on the psychological changes in Otello.43 We face an apparent paradox when we consider what is radical about Otello the opera. On the one hand, the push towards operatic modernity by means of the transition from number opera to the through-composed variety, the latter associated mostly with Wagner and his German predecessors, was possible to a considerable extent here because of the way in which Boito, a composer in his own right, structured his libretto and gently guided Verdi to focus on Otello’s gradual psychological disintegration, thereby making him innovate musically.44 On the other hand, the subversion of racial and religious stereotypes pertaining to male sexual jealousy was possible more because of the musical choices Verdi made in his attempt to delineate this psychological transformation, rather than due to any radical verbal rethinking of the racial and religious dimensions of Othering in Boito’s libretto.45 Although I have used the term “thematic recall” in the previous chapter in the context of Thomas’s Hamlet and the term “motif” in conjunction with Otello, I have deliberately refrained from using the term “leitmotif.” In English the term “leitmotif” is often used to refer to any recurrent musical phrase, melody, or motif in an opera or other musico-dramatic work; however, leitmotifs often undergo transformation as they recur in

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  93 the course of a work, especially in the mature works of Wagner. In German, the term Leitmotiv, used initially in connection with the operas of Wagner and Weber (Whittall 2001), is distinguished from other musical means of thematic recall such as the Reminiszenzmotiv or Erinnerungsmotiv, in which the musical theme or motif is recalled with minimal alteration, in order to bring back earlier moments of an opera for dramatic effect. The latter kinds of motivic recall have a long history of usage, and in the mad scenes in the operas of Bellini and Donizetti, the reminiscence is often of a theme from a love duet heard previously (Kerman 1968, 496– 97); the use of such a device in Ophélie’s mad scene in Thomas’s Hamlet is, as such, firmly in keeping with this tradition. Indeed, Wagner the archrevolutionary also knew and made use of this traditional distinction. In his Ring cycle, an instance of exact thematic recall (rather than the transformed restatement associated with Leitmotive) is found in the last opera of the cycle, Götterdämmerung (act 3, sc. 2), as the hero, Siegfried, fatally wounded, regains his memory, and recalls as he sings “Brünnhilde, heilige Braut!” (Brünnhilde, holy bride), the moment when he had woken up Brünnhilde, his wife-to-be, with a kiss, in the previous opera of the cycle. At this point in Götterdämmerung, Wagner quotes in toto the music from the previous opera, Siegfried, when Brünnhilde, awakened by Siegfried’s kiss, sings, “Heil dir, Sonne!” (Hail to thee, sun) (Siegfried, act 3, sc. 3). Eros and Thanatos come together in different ways in all these instances, but the most telling example is to be found in Verdi’s Otello, as a fragment from the “bacio” theme, heard in the act 1 love duet, comes back just before Desdemona’s murder, and then with shattering emotional intensity as Otello kills himself. As Joseph Kerman observed, Verdi was much more interested in the recalling theme (Kerman 1968, 496). Limiting the number of themes that are recalled makes it possible for Verdi to make the fewer instances of recall stand out easily, and listeners who know some of Verdi’s other operas will have no difficulty in drawing parallels between the recall of the “bacio” theme in Otello with a similar recall of a single unforgettable melody towards the end of Verdi’s Rigoletto, at the point when Rigoletto discovers the body of his dying daughter, Gilda, to the strains of “La donna è mobile” (Woman is fickle), sung by the lascivious Duke who has seduced and then abandoned her, creating an unforgettable moment of dramatic irony. Whereas in as mature a work as Wagner’s Ring cycle, one finds the use of both leitmotifs and exact thematic recall, the latter in ways that accord with their use in traditional opera from which Wagner was purportedly departing, one finds not a single leitmotif in Otello, even though one finds both the masterly use of motifs as well as thematic recall that is firmly in line with Verdi’s past operatic practice. What Verdi succeeded in doing was, in effect, precisely what was hoped of him—to write a throughcomposed opera that was, however, different from Wagner’s. As if in order to signpost the difference between his through-composed opera and Wagner’s, in Otello, Verdi looked back nostalgically at the traditional Italian

94  Part 1 operatic past, drawing structural connections with his own earlier work, but never incorporated the leitmotif technique associated with German opera, a technique that had historically enabled the move away from the traditional number opera to the modern through-composed variety. Verdi had modernised Italian opera, but on his own terms, his aesthetic and technical strategies holding the key to their larger political import. A work like Otello requires time for its interpretive layers to be explored and understood in all their complexity. It should not be surprising, therefore, that early responses to it were quite contradictory, though all were in broad agreement that Verdi had moved away from the older number opera to the through-composed variety. Reporting on the earliest performances of Otello in 1887, Eduard Hanslick, one of the most respected critics of the times, stated that Verdi had remained true to his self (1964, 280). He admitted that in Otello, “independent self-sufficient, symmetrically constructed melodies appear less frequently than does the cross between recitative and cantilena which now dominates modern opera,” but Hanslick, a noted opponent of Wagner’s mature operas (“music dramas”), vociferously argued against any influence of the latter on Verdi’s transformation (1964, 281–83; translated by Henry Pleasants). Several decades later, Igor Stravinsky, who also professed to dislike Wagner’s music, saw the same development in Verdi’s mature art differently: he thought that the “poison” of Wagner’s music dramas “insinuated itself even into the veins of the colossus Verdi” in his two final operas that followed Aida (1947, 63–64). But many other critics perceptively saw even then how Verdi had composed his own kind of through-composed opera. The anonymous reviewer of Verdi’s Otello in The Musical World felt that Verdi had outdone Wagner in renouncing the musical forms typically used in the Italian operatic tradition, and noted that Verdi did not make any use of Leitmotive which, however, he thought was a mistake (12 February 1887, 117). The same author concluded his review by stating that Otello was a great work which “showed the direction to which the immediate progress of Italian opera is tending,” and that younger Italian composers would do well to follow Verdi’s example (12 February 1887, 118). What that early reviewer understandably failed to grasp was that, had Verdi adopted Wagner’s Leitmotiv technique, he could not have composed his own kind of throughcomposed opera, and would have been labeled an imitator of Wagner. It might be argued that Verdi’s musical undercutting of the race- and religion-based stereotypes pertaining to male sexual jealousy was the byproduct of a musical challenge that Verdi solved brilliantly. To an extent this is true. But one also needs to consider some of the other circumstances. Wagner, a notoriously anti-Semitic composer, was also a virulent German nationalist and a believer in the supremacy of the German master race. Since the stereotype of sexual jealousy was tied in with the larger purported divides between the so-called Anglo-Saxon and Latin peoples, it is unlikely that dismantling the stereotype in the way done by Verdi—a one-time

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  95 member of parliament, a follower of Mazzini, and a politically conscious man who was known to read newspapers with avid interest—was without any extra-musical intent on Verdi’s part; in any case, the affective responses the opera draws from us should not hinge primarily upon our knowledge of Verdi’s intent, insofar as it is recoverable to any extent. That said, it is interesting to note that Verdi would make a trenchantly anticolonial statement in 1896, once the hurt pride surrounding Italy’s initial defeat in Abyssinia a few days before the Otello première had died down. Before I  conclude this chapter with a discussion of that statement, a few words about Falstaff are in order, since that opera provides additional perspectives on some of the themes of Otello and, in a different way, also adapts Shakespeare in a spirit of nationalist cosmopolitanism in ways that need mentioning, even if briefly. Mikhail Bakhtin’s observations on parody in his essay “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” are especially useful in this regard (see Bakhtin 1981, 41–83). If the concept of “honour” is seen through the lens of tragedy in Otello, it is the “tragic heroisation” of the concept that is parodied—not so much the figure of Otello as the attitudinal codes towards “honour” in the tragic mode which he and, in varying degrees, the rest all adhere to—through figures like Falstaff. The latter’s alternative frame of reference is by no means endorsed, but shown to be just as much a part and parcel of ordinary human beings as the high tragic frame of reference is central to the lives of extraordinary ones like Otello. Jealousy, too, figures in the person of Mr. Ford, through whom Verdi once again reminds audiences that this very English character is by no means devoid of that purportedly “southern” quality. Mr. Ford’s act 2 “aria” (Verdi 1980, 178/2/7–179/1/2) even fleetingly recollects the descending chromatic phrase as well as what were, for its times, startling parallel harmonies, in the same key that Verdi deploys in Jago’s “recollection” of Cassio’s sexually charged dream in Otello (OFS 273/1/4–274/1/1) (Verdi also modifies the time signature and the ending of the melodic line):

Ex. 2.6 Verdi, Falstaff, Act 2, Ford’s Narration

96  Part 1

Ex. 2.7 Verdi, Otello, Act 2, “Era la notte” (excerpt)

While the parallel harmonies in Jago’s retelling of Cassio’s dream recur with ferocious intensity at the end of the conspiracy duet at the end of act 2 of Otello, they are limited to this single instance in Falstaff, associated only with Mr. Ford’s folly: the world of tragedy has been left behind, but is perhaps never too far away. The reference is fleeting, but Falstaff is replete with brief, intertextual references; therefore, the link between both operas should not be overlooked. The cor anglais, too, recurs, associated not with melancholy as in Otello, but as a prelude to Falstaff’s identical love letters to Meg and Alice. Verdi uses one of the most hauntingly beautiful melodies of the opera to set Falstaff’s false words of love,46 which Alice sings and which she and Meg, joined by Nanetta and Mistress Quickly, immediately laugh at, to precisely notated musical pitches—the comic musical mode laughing at a “higher” style. Then, with a sudden change of mood, all four women immediately call Falstaff a monster and decide to teach him a lesson. One hardly fails to notice that it is in this lighthearted comedy that one finds precisely what one misses in Othello and Otello: the resolve of feisty women to not submit to, but instead hold up to ridicule, patriarchal sexual jealousy. In his last opera, then, Verdi shares the tendency, noted by John R. Severn (2014, 2015) with regard to two previous operatic adapters of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Antonio Salieri (Falstaff, 1799) and Verdi’s one-time rival, Otto Nicolai (Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, 1849), to give the women characters in the operatic adaptations an increasing degree of agency. Moreover, Verdi’s choice of a fugue to end the opera is significant. Although it has often been claimed that Verdi’s closing fugue is the ideal musical means to end the opera on a happy note, there are notable instances in which fugues have been deployed for very different ends—Richard Strauss, for instance, used a fugue to depict Jewish priests quarreling with each other in his opera Salome (1905). What the closing fugue in Falstaff does is to give each of the voices a greater degree of individuality even as they come together, when compared to

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  97 the traditional closing choruses of countless nineteenth-century operas. Falstaff can be seen as an opera in which women jostle with men—and different “lower” comedic musical styles with those associated with “higher” forms of operatic tragedy—for equality. It is notable that Verdi devised this fugue, which has a number of formally surprising elements to it, at a very early stage of the opera’s composition, without any words to guide him (Budden 1992, 3:425, 530). Verdi’s parody of German opera here is gentle and benign. In ­Macbeth (1847), Verdi had failed to capture the supernatural element, in contrast to Thomas, who was specially praised for his success in Hamlet in this regard. If contemporary critics praised Thomas for creating an eerie supernatural mood comparable to that created by Weber in the paradigmatic example of Der Freischütz (Lacombe 2001, 146), Falstaff gently parodies that opera—the counting of the stroke of twelve at the beginning of the Herne’s Oak scene, only mentioned in passing by Shakespeare (4.6.19–20), directly echoes the beginning of the Wolf’s Glen scene from Der Freischütz in a mock-scary way,47 while the music for the fairy world of Weber’s Oberon and Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, alluded to earlier by Nicolai in his opera, also make their gentle presence felt in Falstaff (Budden 2008, 304). Having more than met, in Otello, the need to “modernise” Italian opera in the face of the challenge provided by Wagner, Verdi reveals his musical cosmopolitanism to the fullest in Falstaff while offering a post-Wagner model for Italian composers for operatic comedy as well.48 Falstaff also has the benefit of what is arguably a better libretto. In Otello, Boito had reduced Shakespeare’s text in ways that were problematic; in Falstaff, he made both a few excisions and a few additions, the latter superb both for their ingenuity and their poetic effect. Fenton’s sonnet, which opens act 3, scene 2 of Falstaff, is created by combining a line directly from Boccaccio’s Decameron with lines indirectly derived from Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, sonnets 8 and 128) and Ugo Foscolo, while other parts of the libretto are enriched by several references to the Henry IV plays (see Hepokoski 1983, 19–34). The casting of the love duet in the form of a sonnet shared between the lovers is Shakespearean in spirit; at the same time, the creation of a poem from lines originally written by others brings Boito’s technique close to that used for creating centos, examples of which can be found in Latin literature in the Middle Ages (Bakhtin 1981, 69). Moreover, Vincenzina Ottomano has drawn attention to how Boito drew upon archaic words, ranging from Dante backwards in time to Horace, Seneca, and Cicero, and how his assignment of word choices created a hierarchy of voices (2016, 130)—a marked departure from the macaronic Italian/German in Salieri’s Falstaff, and an illustration of how the choices of words of individual characters reflect different world views (Bakhtin 1981, 62). Boito was also well aware of Shakespeare’s indebtedness to older Italian sources, and the

98  Part 1 archaisms of word choices and creative techniques could be aligned to his desire to highlight the Italian side of Shakespeare’s sources—an assertion of the national in the context of the cosmopolitan.49 As Boito’s letter to Camille Bellaigue in April 1894 indicates, the one-time champion of Wagner in Italy was now responding positively to Nietzsche’s anti-Wagnerian call to “Mediterraneanise music” (letter translated by, and quoted in Hepokoski 1983, 34).

Conclusion It is tempting to regard Verdi’s dismantling of the racist underpinnings of the “jealous husband” stereotype as being an incidental byproduct of his need to innovate musically, but it is worth considering the connection of the demolition of that stereotype with the composer’s politics. In a conversation with Italo Pizzi in 1896, Verdi had the following to say about European colonialism: Here is a great and ancient nation [India] now fallen prey to the English. But the English will regret it! People allow themselves to be oppressed, vexed and maltreated—and the English are sons of bitches. Then comes the moment when national sentiment, which no one can resist, awakes. That is what we did with the Austrians. But now, unfortunately, we are in Africa playing the part of tyrants; we are in the wrong, and we will pay for it. They say we are going there to bring our civilization to those people. A fine civilization ours, with all the miseries it carries with it! Those people don’t know what to do with it, and moreover in many ways they are more civilized than we! (Quoted in Pizzi 1901, 83; translated by, and quoted in Martin 1988, 261) Taking an interpretive approach that is in keeping with a hermeneutic of suspicion, Jeremy Tambling writes: Perhaps guilt over imperialism is shifted on to the British, who are, however, secretly envied. Their anticipated defeat gives a pleasure which is that of both envy and a recognition of the futility of imperial adventures. In its sense of there being a standard of civilization, which emanates from Europe, but which the Ethiopians seem unexpectedly to possess, it is an expression of orientalism, as Edward Said famously defines it. (1996, 81) Tambling may be right in his assumption of jealousy on Verdi’s part, especially when we consider the fact that the repeated defeat of Italian soldiers at the hands of Ethiopians had caused an increasing number of Italians to oppose the country’s imperialist ambitions, resulting finally

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  99 in the abandonment of the first round of Italian attempts at colonising Africa in 1896 (Wong 2006, 80), the same year in which Verdi voiced his anticolonial position. But there are other elements among the contextual material, along with the opera itself, that call for closer reconsideration of what Tambling offers. The fact that Verdi considered Italy to be a country ruled by the Austrians is what led him to be particularly upset over his country taking up the role of the coloniser in Africa, a point that Tambling acknowledges (1996, 78). It is perhaps because of the same reason that, in Aida, “Verdi’s sympathies . . . are wholeheartedly on the Ethiopian side,” as opposed to the Egyptians/colonisers, and “when fascist producers staged Aida in Mussolini’s Italy, they often presented a blackshirted Radames (an Egyptian) subduing Amonasro’s Ethiopian hordes, and Amonasro himself became an obvious stand-in for Emperor Haile Selassie, engaged in a bloody anti-colonialist war against contemporary Italy” (Robinson 1993, 135).50 We may assume, then, that Verdi’s sympathy with colonised peoples, as could arguably be seen in Aida (1871), is traceable back to at least sixteen years before the Otello première and twenty-five years before his denunciation of both British and Italian imperialism. These facts should give some cause for us to rethink attributing the underlying impulse behind Verdi’s denunciation solely to a politically motivated jealousy towards British colonialism. Moreover, far from endorsing a standard of civilisation that emanated from Europe, Verdi could not have articulated with greater precision exactly the opposite argument, namely that the European civilising mission itself was a flawed project, imposed from outside on people whose own civilisational values were higher than what Europeans were willing to recognise. In this regard, Verdi’s position is far more radical than that of, say, Joseph Conrad’s in Heart of Darkness (first published serially in 1899), which was taking shape around this time, and in which Conrad drew attention to European atrocities in the Belgian Congo without ever questioning the underlying premises of the civilising mission itself. Moreover, Pizzi’s book, in which Verdi’s observation is reported, was published in 1901 (the year of Verdi’s death) at a time when the European belief in its cultural superiority was far from over; Italy would renew its colonial ventures in 1911. What, therefore, is likely to be the case is that, in the course of his life, Verdi became increasingly anticolonial in his outlook, having spent his formative years in the Italian peninsula at a time when various parts of it—including Verdi’s place of birth, Bussetto, at the time of the composer’s birth—were under different non-Italian rulers, as a result of which he remembered what it meant to be under foreign rule.51 Moreover, Verdi grew up at a time when Italian states were collectively regarded by many among northern Europeans such as the British as being part of the Orient-within-Europe, and various aspects of Italian culture, especially its Catholicism, were under attack—an attack that the opera rebuts with a somewhat problematic patriarchal defence

100  Part 1 by idealising Desdemona and making her the embodiment of cherished, traditional Italian values. By the same token, though, Verdi certainly knew that Europe did not operate according to any single standard of civilisation. A close study of the text of Otello, and a historicist approach towards its genesis and first performance together suggest that Verdi’s liberal politics left its mark—along with (perhaps) the less liberal politics of his l­ibrettist—on Otello, creating a palimpsest of different ideological positions in the adaptation. Hence, the listener who is aware of the stylistic choices that Verdi was expected to have taken at the musical level but had substituted with unexpected ones—his use of motifs rather than an exotic/oriental idiom in connection with Otello’s jealousy—would be most receptive to the opera’s radical politics. Those who are not aware of this broader musical context but are, nevertheless, responsive primarily to the affective power of the music would sympathise with Otello, perhaps (or perhaps not) forgiving and forgetting the opera’s patriarchal bias or its few (but notable) instances of the presence of an anti-Muslim rhetoric in the libretto. Finally, those who consider only the verbal text and the acting on stage may find in the opera connections between the larger-than-life, “loud” gestures of operatic dramaturgy and the deep-seated stereotypes connecting southern Europeans and Africans for centuries, without their taking into account how these stereotypes are completely overturned musically by the relentless mapping of motif-based techniques of musical development and continuity, associated with German symphony and opera, on to Otello’s jealousy and the workings of Jago’s verbal poison. With the omission of the crucial act 1 of Shakespeare’s play, the coordinates along which the opera is likely to appear the most dated are with regard to its representation of the violence done to women and its anti-Muslim rhetoric, the latter perhaps accountable in terms of the plot and the presence of such language in Shakespeare, but whose articulation by Otello in the opera to loud cheers from the Cypriots at a time when he had not lost his peace of mind can understandably be resented by many non-European audiences. One-sided analyses of historical contexts, such as the purported significance of Verdi’s and Boito’s referring to their collaborative work on Otello as their “chocolate project” at a time when the project was shrouded in secrecy, and of similarly one-sided readings of the operatic text and its musical, dramatic, and literary intertexts can result in interpretations of an opera like Otello as a representative example of Eurocentrism and racism (see André 2012, 12ff.). If, on the contrary, we grant the fact that Verdi was an individual shaped by and, in turn, responding to the historical forces which he encountered and that his responses to those forces were not identical to that of others, we would be in a position to respond better to the multiple interpretive signals that the opera offers to modern listeners instead of falling back on predictable readings. In both the

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  101 European and the Indian contexts of Shakespeare reception, we need to move away from the tendency to pigeonhole Shakespeare’s adapters into larger essentialist categories, such as the racist European or the culturally colonised “native,” without forgetting that such people also existed. Instead, we need to consider the methodological implications of the fact that individuals within a group are still individuals, and that it is the duty of the scholar to examine the extent to which the ideological coordinates of any adapter were consonant with those of his/her larger community as well to what extent they were not. The virtues of approaching the work of Shakespeare adapters from such an analytical position, one in which individual agency is neither pedestalised nor dismissed, should be selfevident. Hence, I would like to endorse strongly Sonia Massai’s call for the necessity of moving away from Foucauldian paradigms in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the politics of cross-­cultural adaptations, as well as her view that Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the cultural field (Bourdieu 1993, 161–75) offers a more viable alternative, since Bourdieu “provides a useful, alternative model to understand the dynamic interaction between established modes of critical and theatrical production and innovative strategies of appropriation” (2005, 5–6). Indeed, Verdi’s comment on colonialism offers a case in point. It was perhaps because he was a lifelong admirer of Mazzini that he characterised India as “a great and ancient nation” without having ever visited it. Mazzini had made a similar point about India, but with what seems to have been an entirely different political intent: Europe was once populated by Asian migrants who brought us the first seeds of civilization and the first national tendencies. Today, providence leads Europe to carry back to Asia the civilization that grew from those seeds on its own privileged lands. We are the sons of the Vedic peoples. After a long pilgrimage full of hardship, we are led back by an unknown hand toward our civilizational cradle. . . . We feel almost compelled to exercise our moral mission there, by transforming the religious idea. Similarly, by pursuing our industrial and agricultural activities in those lands, we will contribute to changing the material world. Europe is pushing at Asia’s borders and invades its different regions: the English have conquered India; Russia is slowly advancing in the North; China is periodically forced to make concessions; the Americans are moving beyond the Rocky Mountains; European colonies and trade are generally spreading across the Asian continent. Italy was once the most powerful colonizer of the world, and she should not lose out on this wonderful new movement. (Translated by Stefano Rechhia and cited in Recchia and Urbinati 2009, 238) Mazzini had written this passage in 1871, the same year Aida was first performed. If Verdi’s political position was no different from Mazzini’s,

102  Part 1 why did Aida offer even the opportunity for analysts to interpret the work as being one that is sympathetic to the colonised? And what was it that led Verdi to oppose both British colonialism in India and the Italian colonisation of Africa? Whatever the answer might be, it is simply impossible to maintain that Verdi’s position was indistinguishable from Mazzini’s, let alone from that of hundreds of other Italians from all across the political spectrum, unless we choose to homogenise internal differences as being irrelevant in the ultimate analysis in light of the broader, longterm picture, namely that of Italy’s participation in colonialism later on. That may be a position for analysts of a Foucauldian orientation to take; here, I am more interested in sifting through the differences and in examining what bearings such differences might have on our understanding of the musical works themselves, which, unlike Verdi’s letters or private and public pronouncements, are ultimately the source of our affective and critical responses to his body of musical work. In 1880, when Otello was still at the planning stage, Verdi was thinking in terms of the older dramaturgy of contrasts governing the number opera. The radical leap of the imagination, which led Verdi to write a through-composed opera in which motifs provided continuity at a musical level and expressed jealousy at a musico-dramatic level, came to be realised only between 1881 and 1886, the years of the opera’s composition. Verdi’s anticolonial position is likely to have helped him resist the temptation to add exotic musical markers for the music of Otello’s jealousy and take this less obvious route instead. Had he taken that more predictable route, Verdi could have realised what Salvini or Rossi failed to do—to dissociate Italians from the “jealous husband” stereotype and attribute it to Otello’s being an African, possibly a convert to Christianity from Islam. This is because, although many northern Europeans regarded nineteenth-century Italy as a European country with “oriental” elements, Italian music still lay culturally at the heart of Europe, and associating Otello’s jealousy with an exotic idiom that Verdi had already cultivated in Aida would have helped him to uncouple Italians from a stereotype that connected them with other southern Europeans and with Africans for centuries. The decision Verdi eventually took—namely that of removing all musical and visual markers connecting Otello with either southern Europeans or Africans—needs to be appreciated for the radical departure it made from conventional readings of Othello’s jealousy, including those by Verdi’s fellow Italians. What is also interesting in Verdi’s comment on colonialism is the insight he provides regarding anticolonial resistance. He realised that colonialism engendered, instead of suppressed, the “national element,” which led to resistances in Italy, Ethiopia, and India. In his own way, Verdi, like Ira Aldridge, had arrived at an understanding of the operations of subjugation and resistance from a perspective that went beyond a purely Italo-centric position, made him confront the fact that Italy was

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  103 both a victim of racism and a perpetrator of colonialism, and led him to sympathise with the colonised, even when Italy was the colonising power. To what extent was Verdi, the newspaper-devouring politically conscious composer, aware of the Indian Revolt of 1857 and its consequences? Some of Mazzini’s supporters had drawn attention to British atrocities in India, although it seems to me that Eugenio Biangini goes too far in claiming that there was “a sort of ‘Mazzinian’ consensus about the legitimacy of the Indian claim to nationhood” (2011, 109), especially when Mazzini’s own comments were far from being anticolonial. But Verdi, Mazzini’s admirer, had drawn attention to the fact that colonialism generates nationalist resistance (and not only complicity and hegemony), and after the Revolt of 1857, when the spirit of nationalist resistance started to emerge in Bengali literature, Bengali writers and critics also produced some of the most remarkable adaptations of Shakespeare and critiques of his work to emerge from colonial India. It is to that world, therefore, that I turn in the next section of this book.

Notes 1. In this period, many Italians, themselves victims of racial stereotyping by the British, sought to “mitigate” the situation by highlighting a long-standing cultural divide between northern and southern Italy, aligning themselves with the north, seen as being closer to Europe, and distancing themselves from the south, which was regarded as being closer to Africa in more than geographical terms. Some Italians also endorsed a policy of Italian colonialist expansion into Africa, while others made pioneering contributions to the dubious cause of pseudoscientific racism (see Wong 2006; Hiller 2009). 2. On Coleridge’s participation in the abolitionist movement, see Paul-Emile (1974). 3. Leo Africanus’s own life story as an educated African who was captured by pirates, who then converted to Christianity, and finally worked his way up in society, seems to be echoed as well in Othello (Ayanna Thompson and Honigman 2016, 15). 4. Salvini’s letter is translated by, and quoted in Busch (1988, 1:291); emphasis in the original. 5. Whether the Othering of Jews in Shakespeare’s time was based on racial, religious, or political grounds, or involved different degrees of overlap between them (as was the case in the category of the “Moor”) is a question that has been discussed at length in Shapiro ([1996] 2016, 167–93). 6. For translations of both letters, see Busch (1988, 1:283). 7. See, for example, Kahn (2014, photo  5). An online collection of images connected with the first production of Verdi’s Otello, including that of Tamagno in Venetian costume, can be found at www.bertelsmann.com/newsand-media/photographs/gallery/the-making-of-verdi-s-otello.jsp (accessed 27 February 2020). 8. As Otello asks Jago (Boito’s spelling) at the beginning of act 2, “Colui che s’allontana / dalla mia sposa, è Cassio?” (Boito 2014, 106–7; That man now leaving / my wife, is that Cassio?—henceforth OL; translation by Avril Bardoni), the chord accompanying Otello’s singing of Cassio’s name is that of the diminished 7th over a pedal A  played by doubles basses and divisi

104  Part 1 cellos (Verdi 1986, 194/2/1—henceforth OFS). The diminished 7th chord has had connotations of anger, danger, and mystery since the Baroque period. By sounding this chord over the unchanging pedal note, Verdi could hint at Otello’s lurking anxiety over his apparent calm, a reading that suggests that Otello had a propensity for jealousy that Jago knew, and had taken advantage of. Else, the diminished 7th chord could signal more generally the onset of tensions that would reach their catastrophic conclusion at the end of the opera. Whatever our interpretation of this moment in the opera may be, this is the point when Cassio’s actions first sow the seeds of suspicion in Otello’s mind, in exactly the way in which Jago had hoped. As in the previous chapter, the following convention is used for citing scores: page number / system number / bar number within system. 9. Shakespeare complicates this neat distinction all throughout the play, since, in the trial scene, the disguised Portia herself conveniently forgets her message of mercy, once Shylock is cornered (4.1.342–59). Bassanio, her husband, has plenty of charm but no source of income except his wife’s wealth, and in a patriarchal world where men are in charge of money matters, she needs to get as much money as she can out of Shylock’s defeat, keeping in mind her future as Bassanio’s wife. Indeed, in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare interrogates rather than endorses racial-religious prejudices in complex ways, and does something similar in the case of Othello. 10. On the discourse connecting Muslims, especially Turks, with lustfulness, see Vitkus (2003, 77–162). 11. See, for example, the lines in which Iago tells Roderigo: “I hate the Moor / And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / He’s done my office” (1.3.387), even as he goes on to admit that he does not know if it is true. The more reliable Emilia, Iago’s wife, vehemently denies the charge later on (4.2.141–49). 12. See his phrase, “I am declined / Into the vale of years” (3.3.269–70), words which get tucked into an ensemble in Verdi’s setting of Boito’s libretto. 13. For recent English-language studies on this subject, see Isabella (2012) and Re (2010, especially 3n9 and 25–29). A  similar xenophobic discourse was also being formed in India from the 1870s onwards, in which the period of Mughal rule was seen as the cause for India losing its ancient glory. The effects of this discourse are being felt more strongly in contemporary Indian politics than ever before; more on it in the following chapter. 14. For a book-length study of anti-Italian prejudice in the US, see Connell and Gardalphé (2010). 15. For a full translation, see Recchia and Urbinati (2009, 224–40). 16. Except for one minor collaborative work, all of Verdi’s religious compositions outside of the category of juvenilia, beginning with his Requiem (1874) and ending with the Quattro pezzi sacri (1895–97), were composed after Italian unification. 17. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg has drawn parallels between Englishmen like John Ruskin and William Morris and Boito and his brother Camillo, the latter a noted architect and novelist: all of them felt the “need to bridge the opposition between industrial development and the decline and destruction of older architectonic forms” (2007, 112). 18. O’Grady suggests that the terms in which the speaker of the poem dismisses science (“Scïenza, vattene,” or “Science, be gone”) recall the words of Christ (“Begone, Satan”) (2000, 47). 19. See OL (102–4). 20. The term is derived from the Italian word Scapigliati (the dishevelled ones), and the writers, musicians, and artists who contributed to the movement

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  105 were known for their iconoclasm and for their affiliation with the Decadent movement in France and England. Gherardo Ghirardini observes that Boito’s endorsement of increasingly “conservative political positions” was “attributable to the hardening of [his] character and to a certain incompatibility with the new times” (2014, 778; translation mine). 21. As Hepokoski notes, this passage was included in Carcano’s Italian translation of Othello (1987, 194n3); see Carcano (1852, 14). Carcano’s verse translation, made from the original English, was commissioned by Ernesto Rossi, the noted Shakespearean actor discussed earlier in this chapter (Calvani 2008). 22. Since act 1 of Otello opens with a storm from which Otello emerges announcing the victory of the Venetians over the Turks, it is tempting to think that Boito may have had the idea from act 1 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, another play which begins with a storm, and in which Prospero informs Miranda, years after their actual arrival on a strange and uninhabited island, why and how they came to be there. 23. This is Shakespeare’s word for the more commonly used term “doge,” the leader of the Republic of Venice. 24. On the development of this form in nineteenth-century Italian opera, see Balthazar (1991). 25. Printed librettos cannot adequately indicate how the different sets of words relate to each other when set to music and contrapuntally combined, while the length of the score makes full quotation difficult; I, therefore, refer to page numbers in the libretto and bar numbers in the full score while citing the text. The interested reader should consult the score for a full understanding of the word-setting in the section of the largo concertato under discussion. 26. See OL 186–88, where the third line in the printed libretto is separated from the first two in order to accommodate the other words that are sung simultaneously with the first two. In the score, however, the tenors and basses in the chorus sing the third line without a break. I have slightly modified OL’s translation of the first two lines for the sake of greater clarity, without changing the meaning of the original. 27. The years given are of those of the premières. 28. After the première of Faccio’s opera I profughi fiamminghi (1863), Boito, celebrating his friend’s success, improvised a “Sapphic Ode,” All’Arte italiana, in which he declared that “perhaps the man is already born, modest and pure, who will set art erect once more and cleanse the altar, befouled like a brothel wall” (translated by, and quoted in Weaver 1994, xix). There are good reasons to agree with those who argue that Boito did not intend to insult Verdi personally, but the latter also had good reasons to feel deeply offended when the Ode was published in the Museo di famiglia (22 November 1865). The deeply offended Verdi told Tito Ricordi, his publisher: “Let him [Boito] clean it and I will be the first to come and light a candle” (Budden 1992, 3:5). It took a great deal of effort on the part of Tito Ricordi’s son, Giulio, as well as the self-effacing Boito, to make the Verdi-Boito collaboration possible. For a detailed discussion of the Verdi-Boito fallout and their eventual reconciliation, see Marcello Conati’s introduction in Weaver (1994, xii–lxiv). 29. This problem was also faced by Georges Bizet in France, who was accused of being “Wagnerian” by many critics, until Nietzsche’s valorisation of Bizet’s Carmen as the antidote to Wagner’s operas completely transformed Bizet’s critical reception. The reception history of a piece of music, especially largescale ones such as an opera, often gets determined by the initial responses it elicits, which are then echoed over and over again by later generations. As

106  Part 1 such, the degree of success with which creative artists could control the reception histories of their works played an important role in determining how their works would be commented on by later critics and, by extension, the general public. 30. It is not that Italian composers did not compose string quartets in the nineteenth century: Luigi Cherubini and Gaetano Donizetti composed several, and the twelve-year-old Rossini (c. 1804) composed six that are frequently performed and recorded. But their quartets are considered to be less central to their output than their operas or, in the case of Cherubini, religious music. Significantly, the young Rossini loved the music of Haydn and Mozart and was hence dubbed Il tedeschino (“the little German”), when the word tedesca (“German”) had negative connotations in Italy (Roberts 2015, 42, 208n29). 31. The first European composer to build a successful career exclusively on the basis of instrumental compositions was an Italian, the Baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli. 32. The entire letter is cited in Fisk (1956, 123–24; translated by Edward Downes). 33. William Drabkin (2001) defines “motif” as “a short musical idea, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, or a combination of these three. A motif may be of any size, and is most commonly regarded as the shortest subdivision of a theme or phrase that still maintains its identity as an idea.” 34. For similar readings along these lines, see Parker (2001) and Hepokoski (1987, 189). 35. The use of what were then called “national melodies” to evoke local colour in the case of European operas had already gained ground in French and Russian opera in the second half of the eighteenth century; Weber started using “national melodies” of non-European provenance. Ralph Locke states that Cherubini uses the Chinese theme that Weber used in his Turandot overture in a Middle Eastern setting in his last opera Ali-Baba (1833) and makes the conjecture that Cherubini may have taken it from an earlier opera set in China, i.e., his incomplete opera Koukourgi (1793). He clarifies that the melody, as used by Cherubini, does not sound “obtrusively Far-Eastern”: see Locke (1998, 28 and 28n27). Unlike Weber, Cherubini, insofar as he can be said to have the melody at all, masks it to such an extent that I have not been able to identify the theme in recordings of either Ali-Baba or of a recent reconstruction of Koukourgi, in both of which the alla turca style is far more dominant. 36. For a spectrum of criticism ranging from charges of Orientalism to defences against such charges regarding Aida, see Said (1994, 111–32), Robinson (1993), Bergeron (2002), and Locke (2005). 37. The one exception is the ballet music for Otello for the première at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Paris in 1894. As we saw in the previous chapter, the requirement of a ballet for any opera performance at the Opéra was non-negotiable, and Verdi had to compose a ballet, for which he drew on themes from David’s Le désért and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray’s collection, Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce & d’Orient (1876). Verdi was, however, emphatic that this ballet was never to be performed anywhere else and, indeed, discouraged its publication along with the rest of the score (see Budden 1992, 3:399–406; Jürgensen 1995, 143–55). 38. For more on this act 3 prelude and its representation of Otello’s jealousy, see Kerman (1968, 504–6). 39. A stylistically odd exception is Otello’s act 2 “Ora e per sempre addio sante memorie” (OL 130–31; Now and for ever farewell, sacred memories), with

Nationalism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning  107 its regular phrasing and consonant chords, unless one chooses to contrast this early articulation of Otello’s anxiety, in which he is still rooted to a traditional melody-based expression, to later articulations of similar feelings, during which course the irregularity and the tonal instability of his phrases increase. 40. Since Jago, the force of modernity, joins hands with Otello here, one expects the music to be motif-based. As stated earlier, a motif does appear in the earlier section, anticipating the melodic kernel of the duet. But Verdi may have used a full-blown melody here since the nineteenth-century operatic credo was a genre piece, employed usually for proclamations of faith, or for recruiting people from one religious faith to another (Parakilas 1997, 376–77). Jago’s words here proclaim his success in winning over Otello to the worldview of a “cruel” monotheism. 41. In the former number, it is the sonority of children’s and women’s voices; in the closing bars of the latter, it is the violins and the violas in a very high register. 42. Although Wagner’s Tristan was first performed in Italy in 1888, i.e., one year after the première of Otello, it is difficult to resist drawing parallels between the two works (Tristan being the Wagner opera Verdi loved the best) in terms of the composers’ use of the timbre of the cor anglais and the oboe in both works. The unaccompanied melody for the shepherd’s pipe in act 3, scene 1 of Tristan is played by a solo cor anglais, which sounds a note of ineffable melancholy in much the same way as does the cor anglais solo before the “Willow Song” in Otello. 43. When, in his letter of 15 August 1880, Verdi wanted Boito to end act 3, the penultimate act, on a high note before the final catastrophe, Boito agreed and wrote some lines to that effect. But when Verdi asked for his honest opinion (letter of 14 October 1880), Boito famously stated: “Otello is like a man moving in circles beneath an incubus, and under the fatal domination of that incubus he thinks, acts, suffers, and commits his dreadful crime. Now if we invent something which must necessarily rouse Otello and distract him from this incubus that holds him fast, we destroy all the sinister fascination created by Shakespeare and we cannot arrive logically at the climax of the action” (letter of 18 October  1880; translated by, and quoted in Budden 1992, 3:309). In what was a historic first for Verdi, he deferred to the suggestion of his librettist—wisely, as it turned out. 44. Mefistofele, the only opera for which Boito composed both the words and the music, is one of two Italian operas between Verdi’s Aida and Otello to have held the stage, the other being La Gioconda of Amilcare Ponchielli, for which Boito wrote the libretto. 45. In Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of Verdi’s Otello, Otello, after killing Desdemona, burns the cross and performs what seems an African ritual (Parakilas 1997, 374). Zeffirelli also adds to this process of exoticisation by incorporating excerpts such as the “Arabian Dance” from Verdi’s ballet music for the Paris Opéra production, music that Verdi emphatically stated should be left out from performances of his opera. Such modifications seriously undermine the radical implications of Verdi’s decision and reveal the pervasive presence of racist prejudice not as much in Verdi as among his twentieth-century politically right-wing adapters like Zeffirelli. 46. “Facciamo il paio in un amor ridente / Di donna bella e d’uomo / E il viso tuo su me risplenderà / Come una stella sull’immensità” (Boito [1893] 2004, 28; translated by Gwynn Morris; Let’s make a pair in a joyful love / Of a lovely lady and a man / And your face will shine upon me / Like a star over immense space).

108  Part 1 47. Der Freischütz was first given at La Scala in 1872, most likely in a translation by Boito (Campana 2015, 66). 48. There is a sustained parodic relationship between Falstaff and Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal, an opera as different from Falstaff as one can imagine; see Linda and Michael Hutcheon (2015, 35–39). 49. Soon after the Falstaff première in 1894, Boito wrote to his friend, Camille Bellaigue: “Shakespeare’s sparkling farce is led back by the miracle of sound to its clear Tuscan source, to ‘Ser Giovanni Fiorentino.’ Come, dear friend, to hear this masterpiece; . . . to spend two hours in the gardens of the Decameron” (Walker 1962, 502). H. J. Oliver states that the relevance of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone was first pointed out by Carlo Segré in 1911 (1993, lviiin3). Boito, then, seems to have anticipated Segré by a number of years in identifying this Shakespearean source. 50. One could, of course, argue from a sceptical position that, since Aida was commissioned by the Khedive of Egypt at a time when Egypt sought to match Europe politically and would, in fact, be at war with Ethiopia between 1874 and 1876, the negative portrayal of Egyptian political might was occasioned by European jealousy. Ethiopia defeated Egypt in 1876 and would defeat Italy exactly twenty years later. Verdi’s recorded disinterest in Egyptian culture could lend weight to the sceptical position, although admirers of aspects of Egyptian culture, such as the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, could also be ardent colonialists. Interest in the culture of the colonised, or the lack of it, had no direct bearing on whether one was a supporter or an opponent of colonialism. 51. As Budden points out, Parma, the province to which Bussetto belongs, was then part of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, as a result of which Verdi’s Christian names, as entered in the municipal register, were in French rather than in Italian (2008, 2).

Part 2

3 Challenging the Civilising Mission Responses to The Tempest by Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore Introduction Along with Othello, The Tempest is the Shakespeare play that has been most frequently analysed along postcolonial lines.1 According to current scholarship on the latter play, the first anticolonial readings can be traced back to Latin American writers like Rubén Darío, who “likened New York city’s crudity and materialism to Caliban’s” in his essay “El triunfo de Calibán” (1898) (Vaughan and Vaughan 2011, 98),2 and José Enrique Rodó, who created an influential Ariel-Caliban dichotomy in his book Ariel (1900) that was widely taken up by Latin American critics (Castells 1995, 165–78) till Octave Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation (1950), translated into English as Prospero and Caliban (1956), opened up possibilities for reading The Tempest along new postcolonial lines. Such a reading was centred around a Prospero-Caliban dichotomy and was, therefore, in an important way different from the ones offered by Darío and Rodó (Vaughan and Vaughan 2011, 98–108). In contrast, in colonies such as British India in the nineteenth century, the colonialclassroom teaching of Shakespeare was, we are told, a “hegemonic activity” that resulted in the formation, especially in Bengal, of a class of people who “were specifically shaped by the assumptions of the ‘civilizing mission’ ” (Singh 1996, 123, 132). It is also argued that depoliticised views of both Shakespeare’s works and the study of Shakespeare were, till at least the 1980s, the norm both in the subcontinent and “in varying forms all over the former Commonwealth countries in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as in settler colonies such as Australia and Canada” (Singh 2019, 16). Singh is perhaps right in stating that, till the 1980s, politicised readings of Shakespeare did not make their impact felt in India, and I agree with her view that Western English departments “typically do not reflect this global ‘turn’ and intellectual diversity in the racial and ethnic make-up of their early modern faculty hires and students” (2019, 18; emphasis in the original). That said, the literary histories of vernacular-language responses to Shakespeare in colonial India and the political contexts of

112  Part 2 those responses add up to present a far more complex picture than that of cultural crawling on the part of colonial-era writers and intellectuals. In the period following the 1857 Revolt, Bengal, where English education first began systematically in South Asia, became a hotbed of anti-British resistance even as Shakespeare gained ground in popularity and critical admiration. If the development of nationalist thought resulted from the encounter of the colonised Indian elite with European thought (P. Chatterjee 1996), then one needs to examine, at the very least, whether the English-educated elite wholeheartedly endorsed colonial rule and, if so, how this endorsement was reflected in their responses to Shakespeare’s plays or to the study of Shakespeare more generally in colonial India. In the case of Verdi’s Otello, I showed how texts that are not considered for analysis along postcolonial lines because of their European origin may actually reveal the unexpected workings of an anticolonial impulse when analysed through the lens of adaptation theory. In this chapter, I  examine the responses to The Tempest in the form of the novel Kapālakunḍalā (1866) and the essay “Śakuntalā, Miranda, ebong Desdemona” (Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona 1875; henceforth “Śakuntalā”)3 by Bankimchandra Chatterjee (Chattopadhyay) (1838–94), one of the first and most influential among writers from colonial India to cultivate the novel as a genre. Bankim’s4 Shakespeare-inspired writings led Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and still one of the few writers to have won the prize despite writing primarily in a non-European language, to respond with an essay on cross-cultural exchange and the civilising mission, and with an essay on Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā that also offered a startlingly prescient anticolonial reading of The Tempest. I  argue that Bankim’s and Tagore’s readings were anticolonial and, in Bankim’s case, protofeminist as well, and that their responses to The Tempest are closer to the political readings of the play in the 1960s than are those by Darío and Rodó. It would be wrong to claim that Bankim’s and Tagore’s readings of Shakespeare enabled women to get emancipated on their own terms, or generated strong anticolonial sentiments, or succeeded even in establishing a flourishing tradition of anticolonial readings of Shakespeare. Nor would it be accurate to claim that their startlingly original readings were metonymic of Indian responses to The Tempest as a whole, except with regard to the fact that Shakespeare reached out to the majority of the population through vernacularlanguage, highly transculturated adaptations: the study of Shakespeare in English and of English and/or European literature, in general, were, by and large, male-dominated, upper-class, and upper-caste affairs that flourished most strongly in the two most cosmopolitan cities of nineteenth-century India, Calcutta and Bombay, and Bankim and Tagore remain exceptionally original figures even in the context of Bengali literature. Nevertheless,

Challenging the Civilising Mission  113 their interpretations of the play were not sui generis. In the examination of the “woman question,” in the symbolic identification of the “nation” with a female figure, and in the re-examination of some of the ideational premises of Shakespeare’s play, Bankim’s responses to The Tempest tie in with contemporary developments in literature and other art forms both in Bengal and at a global level. Tagore’s response, too, was part of a larger trend, since it came within four years of Darío’s, and was in some ways a response to Bankim’s own. For these reasons, then, Bankim’s and Tagore’s critiques ought to occupy a far more central place in the scholarship on non-Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare and, indeed, in the scholarly work on the reception histories of The Tempest. This chapter begins by situating Bankim and his work in the context of the Bengali literary and intellectual scene in Calcutta in the decade following the Revolt of 1857, when some of the most significant of transformations took place in Bengali literature’s modern history. I then examine the genesis of, and the autobiographical and literary influences behind, Kapālakunḍalā, linking it to Bankim’s critical writings in English and Bengali and to its four principal intertexts, of which The Tempest is of paramount importance. The examination of Kapālakunḍalā’s intertextual relationships with The Tempest shows how Bankim reconfigured some of the characters of Shakespeare’s play in his own novel, of which the reimagining of the characters of Miranda and Caliban—the children of the “uninhabited” island—as one figure, Kapālakunḍalā, is the most significant. I read this fusion in a historicist way to arrive at a proto-feminist reading of Bankim’s novel, and in a symbolic way to locate in Bankim’s heroine the site for a tussle between the opposing forces of tradition and colonial modernity. The latter interpretation connects Kapālakunḍalā with Bankim’s critique of the civilising mission. I  then examine the impact on Tagore of Bankim’s creative and critical responses to The Tempest and to issues pertaining to colonial modernity, and show how Tagore probed further the themes taken up by Bankim to arrive at a more trenchantly anticolonial position. I finally situate Bankim’s and Tagore’s responses to Shakespeare in the larger global context of responses to The Tempest and suggest reasons for their current obscurity in the scholarship of Shakespeare reception and adaptation.

Bankim and Bengali Literature After 1857 Modern Bengali literature can be said to have been born in the decade following the Revolt of 1857, when members of the Bengali intelligentsia started writing under the productive influence of two radically different forces.5 On the one hand, they were highly influenced by European literature, much of which they came to know through the modern, ­Western-style university curriculum that formally began in Bengal in 1817 with the establishment of Hindoo College; on the other, the aftermath of the Revolt led to their work acquiring a nationalist dimension

114  Part 2 that had been, till this point of time, far less pronounced. In this phase, Bengali literature came to be shaped profoundly by influences outside the Sanskritic and local, vernacular traditions. As Vinay Dharwadker has noted, a conceptual understanding of this shift, which took place in the course of the nineteenth century, is evident from Indian discussions on literature, which moved away from the old Classical-Sanskritic (mārga) / vernacular/post-Classical (dēśi) binary and towards the new global (viśwa) / national (rāṣtriya) binary.6 Starting with the novel Ālāler ghare dulāl (The spoilt child in the house of Ālāl; 1858) by Tekchand Thakur (1814–83),7 the major works of Bengali literature by authors now commonly considered to be part of the first generation of “modern” Bengali writers—authors such as Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–91), Michael Madhusudan Datta (Dutt) (1824–73), Kaliprasanna Sinha (1840–70), and Bankim—started emerging in this decade. From this period onwards, a strong anticolonial politics also started to gain ground in Bengal, eventually leading to the Bengal Province’s first partition in 1905, its reunification in 1911, the shifting of the capital of British India from Calcutta to New Delhi in the same year, and a final partition in 1947, i.e., at the time of Indian independence. The Bengali intelligentsia, many of its members graduates of Hindoo College, responded to the ideological content of Western education in diverse ways. As Rosinka Chaudhuri (2002) has noted, some started to articulate nationalist sentiments from as early as 1835 when, for instance, Kylash Chunder Dutt wrote a novel in English, Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945, in which he imagined Bengalis as being up in arms against the oppressive British. Others, such as the poet Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, espoused nationalist sentiments, sometimes with a strongly pro-Hindu slant, such as in his poems Vīravāhu-kāvya (Poem of Vīravāhu; 1864), Bhārat sangīt (The song of India; 1870), and “Rakhi-bandhan” (The tying of rakhis; 1886) and, at the same time, celebrated British rule in works such as Bhārateshwari Mahāranī Victoriar jubilī utsav (The jubilee celebrations of Queen Victoria, Empress of Bhārat; 1887), apparently without contradiction (R. Chaudhuri 2002, 216, 220–23). A third group was enthusiastic about English education but was not really interested in Western thought or Western-influenced social reforms (Modhumita Roy 1994, 96). And finally, there were writers like Madhusudan who, after an early period of unabashed Anglophilia, went on to draw parallels between the colonised Lanka of mythic time and the colonised Bengal of historical time in his grand and deeply intertextual epic poem Meghanādavadha-kāvya (The Poem of the killing of Meghnad; 1861), his subversive retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa, before embarking upon a final period in which he expressed his love for the Bengali language and countryside in what was the first collection of sonnets in the language, Chaturdaśpadī kavitāvalī (Fourteen-line poems; 1866). Like Madhusudan, the young Bankim was equally sympathetic to both

Challenging the Civilising Mission  115 Western and Indian literary traditions, but he moved from a period of cosmopolitan leanings, best represented by Kapālakunḍalā, to an overtly Hindu nationalist vision of India’s future, most controversially embodied in his novel Ānandamaṭh (variously translated as The Abbey of Bliss and The Sacred Brotherhood and first published in book form in 1882). The extant textual and historical evidence from Bengali literature from the 1860s onwards makes it clear that Bengali responses to colonial education and British culture were far too complex and diverse for them to be understood in terms of a theoretical paradigm of catch-all applicability such as cultural hegemony. Rosinka Chaudhuri has, in fact, argued persuasively that the Indian “nation” was “first imagined into existence” in early nineteenth-century English-language poetry written in Bengal by writers such as the Eurasian professor at Hindoo College, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, and then, later in the century, more strongly in Bengalilanguage verse and drama than in the Bengali novel (2005, 218–19). Nationalism was an import from countries that are now considered to be part of Western Europe, both into eastern European countries such as Russia and into colonies such as British India, and, therefore, drew responses from the English-educated sections of the colonised population in India first.8 But since the subcontinent was marked by massive illiteracy (Modhumita Roy 1994, 85), genres like poetry and drama, which could circulate through modes involving performance (including oral modes such as recitation), were able to reach out to a wider section of the general public than print media in the vernacular, which in turn could reach out better than the English-language print medium, the last being accessible only to the English-educated Bengali elite. As writers with a Western education started writing in Bengali, their ideas began to reach a much wider part of the Bengali-reading population. Whether these writers only filtered downwards the ideological content of English colonial education to the local population or modified it or resisted it in different degrees is, therefore, crucial to our understanding of whether colonial education truly made cultural hegemony ubiquitous. As we shall see, Bankim abandoned English early for Bengali as his medium of writing, established a journal that proved extremely popular with the Bengalireading public, and made the impact of Western ideas on Bengal one of the central concerns of his writings. If the members of the Bengali intelligentsia who did have access to Western education were quite divided in their attitudes towards the culture and politics of their colonisers, so, too, was the case in Bombay, where the college-educated, English-speaking adapters of Shakespeare freely transculturated his works in order to make them accessible to the general public, citing Samuel Johnson: “The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live.”9 Whether British colonial education resulted in a totalising cultural hegemony cannot, therefore, be answered solely through an analysis of the intentions

116  Part 2 of the British colonial administration (which is what Viswanathan does in Masks of Conquest) but, more importantly, requires an analysis of whether political and ideological complicity arose out of colonial education among the culturally elite section of the colonised population and, if so, to what extent. To omit this latter side of the colonial encounter while analysing colonial hegemony is like analysing the efficacy of a pill by taking into account only what its makers had in mind when making or marketing it and ignoring what effects it had on the patients who took it. The responses of the English-educated Indian intelligentsia were far too diverse for the concept of colonial hegemony to be useful for the analysis of literary productions in Indian languages in the colonial period; indeed, increasingly anticolonial developments in the political world of Calcutta and Bombay, the most Westernised of cities in British India, show that history took a turn quite opposite to what the theoretical model suggests. Among the three first-generation “modern” Bengali writers, the eldest, Madhusudan, peaked in the period immediately following the Revolt of 1857 but died too early to be caught up in the Hindu nationalist wave that struck the Bengali intelligentsia from the early 1870s. In any case, even after returning to his cultural roots, Madhusudan was unsympathetic towards a völkisch, militant Hindu nationalism for reasons that I  have discussed elsewhere (S. Sen 2020). The youngest, Rabindranath Tagore, who achieved greater international recognition than any other Bengali-language writer before or since, was born in 1861; he would go on to develop a strong internationalist outlook and condemn völkisch nationalism in all its forms, even while being fully committed to India’s freedom movement. Indeed, Tagore’s criticisms of colonialism, which he saw as the natural outcome of race-based nationalism, remain as insightful and relevant as ever, and his reading of The Tempest in his essay “Śakuntalā” (1902) as a play about the relentless struggle for political control arguably predates any other criticism along similar lines. One of the themes that I shall discuss in this chapter is how Tagore’s critique might not have been possible without Kapālakunḍalā, Bankim’s own response to that play. Bankim, no less a cosmopolitan in his cultural outlook, was a decade younger than Madhusudan and a generation older than Tagore. Reaching artistic maturity in the 1860s, Bankim became the preeminent Bengali writer for the next three decades. A significant portion of his career, therefore, coincided with the period identified by Eric Hobsbawm as the Age of Empire (1875–1914) in his eponymous book, and indeed, Bankim’s Hindu nationalist thinking became pronounced from 1875 onwards. Nevertheless, all his life, Bankim deeply admired some European and Indian (especially Sanskrit-language) writers, although he never did so uncritically.10 As a result, he self-consciously presented in some of his fictional writings perspectives provided by multiple—and sometimes deliberately contradictory—positions. This abiding tendency in Bankim

Challenging the Civilising Mission  117 also resulted in overlaps between his liberal and conservative phases. With regard to the latter phase, Tanika Sarkar has rightly noted that “even in his very hard Hindu nationalist phase, Bankim would not spurn what he . . . learnt from Utilitarian and other political philosophies of the West” (2006, 3961). It can also be said of him that, conversely, even in his liberal phase, Bankim did not accept the ideas he found in Western literature and philosophy without bringing his sharply sceptical temperament to bear on the texts he read and asserting his originality when drawing inspiration from them (and from Sanskrit and Bengali literature) for his own creative work. Kapālakunḍalā is, in some ways, a product of this aspect of Bankim’s temperament, since it could not have been written without his questioning some of the fundamental ideological premises of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a work on which he wrote at length in his “Śakuntalā” essay (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 179–84; see appendix 2), and whose influence on Kapālakunḍalā was noted by critics ever since Bankim published his novel. In order to understand the aesthetic and political impulses behind Bankim’s writing that novel, we need to situate it in the context of his career and writings, of which “Śakuntalā” and another essay, “Anukaraṇ” (Imitation; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 176–79; see appendix 1),11 are the most relevant. It is to Bankim’s life and writings that I therefore now turn.

Bankim’s Life and Literary Career Bankim was born in 1838 to a Brahmin family in Kantalpara, a town north of Calcutta, where his father was a middle-rung government official who knew Persian and Sanskrit. The family’s contact with both orthodox Brahmin beliefs and Western values left an indelible mark on Bankim, who underwent an English education in school, but who also supplemented this education with Sanskrit-based learning from local teachers.12 At a time when child marriages were common in India, Bankim was married in 1849 to Mohini Debi, who died a few years later, and a number of Bankim’s works, including Kapālakunḍalā, express a certain nostalgia about childhood love (see Amiya Sen 2008, 16–17). His second marriage, which took place soon afterwards, was a happy one. By the time he was a teenager, Bankim distinguished himself both as a budding writer and as an outstanding student, and in 1858, he became one of the first two Indians to graduate under the Western system of education from Calcutta University. In the same year, Bankim became a deputy magistrate under the British colonial administration. His first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife—his only creative work in English—was published serially in 1864. This was followed by Durgeśnandinī (1865), Bankim’s first Bengali-language novel, and Kapālakunḍalā (1866), his second, both of which received critical and

118  Part 2 popular acclaim. Twelve other novels followed in the course of Bankim’s career, in addition to several other fictional and non-fictional prose works in other genres, making him the most important figure in the development of the novel as a genre in India and in the development of nineteenthcentury Bengali prose. While some of Bankim’s other novels have been more popular with the public than Kapālakunḍalā, the latter has often been regarded as his “greatest and strangest work” (Supriya Chaudhuri 2008, 226; see also F. Bhattacharya 1994, 323), and it has had a distinguished afterlife. Seven other editions of Kapālakunḍalā appeared during Bankim’s lifetime, the final one in 1892 (A. K. Basu 2009, iv–v). The novel has never been out of print and has, indeed, been often included in syllabi of Bengali literature departments in Indian universities. It was adapted for the stage by Girishchandra Ghosh and performed in Calcutta and elsewhere in 1874, 1875, and 1877. A second adaptation, by Atul Krishna Mitra, which was subsequently published, was first performed in Calcutta in 1892 and was more popular than Girishchandra’s.13 Translations of the novel have been made into Hindi (six), Sanskrit (five), Telugu (three), and at least one each in Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Assamese, Kannada, Tamil, and Sinhala. The first of the five English translations I have been able to trace was made by Gopal Krishna Ghosh and published serially in National Magazine in 1876–77. The translation by Bankim’s colleague H. A. D. Phillips was published as a book in London in 1885 (Amitrasudan Bhattacharya 2017, 407, 709). Two new English translations have already been made in this century, while older English translations have been reissued. A German translation, by Curt Klemm, was published in Leipzig in 1886, while the first French translation, by France Bhattacharya, appeared in 2005. In addition, Kapālakunḍalā has been adapted as a comic book for children in the Amar Chitra Kathā series (1979, rpt. 2014), and five film adaptations (1929, 1933, 1939, 1952, and 1981) are listed on the Internet Movie Database. Plans for a television serial in Bengali were announced in October 2019.14 Until his retirement from government service in 1891, Bankim maintained parallel careers as a deputy magistrate under the British colonial administration, a journalist (especially from 1872, as founder and editor of Bangadarśan, the most influential Bengali literary journal of the times), an essayist and translator, and a novelist. Through his official work, Bankim developed friendships with some members of the British population in Calcutta. Nevertheless, he also had several well-publicised skirmishes with the British, and the loathing he had for his own social situation, that of the English-educated Bengali bābu (gentleman), went hand in hand with an increasingly antagonistic attitude towards his British superiors. This antagonism was expressed most strongly in the most controversial of his novels, Ānandamaṭh (1882), whose Hindu fundamentalist underpinnings had their roots in Bankim’s non-literary political and religious tracts from around 1875 onwards.15 These later years of

Challenging the Civilising Mission  119 Bankim’s life, which came to an end with his death in Calcutta in 1894, just short of his fifty-sixth birthday, present a sharp contrast to his intellectual and cultural orientation in the early part of his career.16 It is his later writings that have been more influential in Hindu right-wing politics and have, consequently, been much discussed. We should not, however, forget the early Bankim’s significant contributions to the development of a liberal cosmopolitan tradition in Bengal that had simultaneously a nationalist emphasis, as we shall see. This liberal tradition would leave its mark on India’s most prominent politicians of the Freedom Movement, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, through Tagore, who became the most influential proponent and theorist of the idea of a culturally cosmopolitan and inclusive India. Bankim regarded writing as a social vocation, and his English-language essay, “A Popular Literature for Bengal,” which he first read before the Bengal Social Science Association on 28 February 1870, shows an acute awareness of the demography of mid-nineteenth-century readerships in Bengali and English and of the importance of the choice of language for the kind of creative writing that he thought was necessary for the times. In that essay, Bankim argued that “the people of Bengal” (emphasis in the original)—a class to which belonged artisans, shopkeepers, and rural lawyers and which formed a sizeable readership—were socially situated “between the ignorant peasant and the really well-educated classes” and, unlike the latter, “read Bengali and Bengali only” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 97). In this regard, Bankim also made a distinction between the impact of English education on his class vis-à-vis that on the “humbler official employé, whose English carries him no further than the duties of his office,” and argued that it was only through the Bengali language that the people could be moved (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 97). In that essay, Bankim also contested the view that the Bengali-reading public have low reading standards, and he argued instead that “books manufactured on a principle which ignores him [the Bengali reader] as an intellectual being he will not read, and he does not read” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 101). Bankim, therefore, felt a genuine need to write for Bengali readers, both elite and non-elite, with the respect that they as intellectual beings deserved. In another English-language essay, “Bengali Literature” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 103–24), first published anonymously in The Calcutta Review, no. 104 (1871), Bankim provided an overview of the history of Bengali literature. In it, he argued that Bengali writers with an English education were better because writers belonging to the Sanskrit school “seldom venture[d] on original composition,” both in terms of ideas and style. He appreciated, with some reservations, the abandonment of Sanskritised Bengali for a colloquial idiom by Tekchand Thakur and Kaliprasanna Sinha in their groundbreaking novels and by Madhusudan in two farces (for which Bankim reserved high praise). However,

120  Part 2 the work on which he bestowed his highest praise was Madhusudan’s Meghanādavadha-kāvya, which he described as being “on the whole the most valuable work in modern Bengali literature.” In this epic poem, Madhusudan, drawing heavily upon a Sanskritised register of Bengali, alluded to two canonical Indian and two Greco-Roman epics, only to depart from the ideological orientations of both epic traditions (S. Sen 2020).17 Clinton B. Seely has identified this tradition of making intertextual allusions to other works as a stylistic feature connecting Madhusudan’s epic poem to its Sanskrit exemplars (1991,143–47). What Madhusudan did, therefore, was to incorporate elements from the aesthetics of Sanskrit and Greco-Roman epic traditions to make departures from their ideological orientations, since Meghanādavadha-kāvya subverts both the religious worldview of the Rāmāyaṇa and the tendency of European epics to side with the political viewpoint of the victors. Instead, he reinterprets myth to comment on India’s colonial subjugation and in doing so, Madhusudan found an original line of development for Bengali literature—one that absorbed influences from the past and the present, and the national and the foreign—to create an original work which had an important bearing on the present. Madhusudan’s achievement in his epic poem is paralleled by Bankim in his novel. Kapālakunḍalā has four principal intertexts, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Othello, Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā, and Bhavabhūti’s Mālatīmādhava, to which Bankim alludes in terms of plot, situations, and, in the case of Bhavabhūti,18 the name of his heroine. When we compare Bankim’s novel with its principal intertexts, we find that his allusions only serve to highlight how he has departed from all four texts in significant ways. Hence, unlike any of the other works examined in this book, Kapālakunḍalā is not an adaptation of any single text, though the parallels with The Tempest are the most pronounced.19 And as we shall see, Kapālakunḍalā is also deeply connected, at multiple levels, with the Bengal of Bankim’s times. Bankim’s essay “Anukaraṇ” (Imitation) clarifies why he praised Madhusudan’s Meghanādavadha-kāvya and took a similar path in Kapālakunḍalā. While his two English-language essays suggest that he accepted a view of culture in which Europe occupied the summit, “Anukaraṇ” provides Bankim’s reasons as to why he thought that the average Bengali wished to emulate European culture. More significant in that essay are his two major caveats: firstly, imitation should not result in the slavish copying of European models by the colonised population, and secondly, imitation is dangerous if it results in the obliteration of the distinctiveness of different cultures. Indeed, at a time when English Romantic poetry was making its impact felt on the Bengali intelligentsia,20 Bankim’s essay, which balances the positive aspects of imitation with the need for innovation within imitation, is startlingly original. It is also remarkably comparatist in its approach. Bankim argues that imitation did not begin with India’s

Challenging the Civilising Mission  121 colonial encounter with Europe, but that the judicious and imaginative imitation of literary texts and of ideas has been in existence for centuries across the globe, instances of which can be found both within cultures (such as in ancient Europe and India), as well as between cultures (such as in modern Europe and in the Bengal of Bankim’s times, which was learning from Europe). By such means, Bankim situates the processes and consequences of cross-cultural encounters in a global perspective without either giving Europe sole pride of place or rejecting outright European influences from a nativist position. Nor does he treat Europe as a monolithic cultural entity, since he makes a distinction between the positive effect Greek theatre had on England and Spain vis-à-vis the insignificant theatrical traditions it generated, in his opinion, in other European countries. Furthermore, he refuses to place all English writers on the same pedestal and describes authors like Dryden, Pope, and Johnson as being too insignificant to be exemplars of writers who have made good use of imitation. It may be noted here that Madhusudan was influenced by Milton and even more strongly by the Greco-Roman poets, whom he had read in the original Latin and Greek at Bishop’s College in Calcutta (Riddiford 2013, 38), while Bankim admired Shakespeare more than any other European writer; both were profoundly influenced by the Classical Sanskritic tradition. It is for this reason that one needs to be wary of regarding Shakespeare as metonymic of English literature as a whole and of Bankim’s appreciation of Shakespeare as metonymic of the colonised native’s admiration of the culture of the coloniser as a result of British colonial education. Indeed, such an assertion is particularly problematic in Bankim’s case since he wrote in the first instalment of his serialised essay “Uttarcharit”21 that the proper appreciation of Shakespeare was only a recent phenomenon; that English-language critics such as Dryden, Pope, and Johnson praised him to the best of their abilities, but without critical insight; that even as outstanding a mind as Voltaire’s failed in this regard; and that the “true worth of this English poet was not first recognised in England; it was Schlegel and other modern Germans who created the modern reverence for Shakespeare” (Amitrasudan Bhattacharya 2017, 139; translated by, and quoted in Lipner 2006, 17n29).22 Like discerning minds of any time and age, Madhusudan and Bankim had their own preferences which need to be understood as personal preferences only. To elide the significant differences between their preferences and to regard their love for their favourite (and different) English authors as the predicament of the English-educated “colonial subject” is to read individual preferences metonymically. Such an approach creates essentialist distortions. Bankim’s position regarding the reception of Shakespeare suggests that, like his European contemporaries, he, too, sided with the Romantics in dismissing neoclassical critics on Shakespeare, both English and French.

122  Part 2 Finally, the implications of Bankim’s second caveat regarding imitation are well worth considering. Bankim’s decision to help create a body of serious literature that would be accessible to a Bengali readership, his view that engagement with European literature was desirable, and his concomitant fear of losing cultural diversity as a result of a crosscultural encounter with a body of literature that included the works of a towering genius such as Shakespeare, all suggest, when seen as a whole, that his cultural cosmopolitanism had a nationalist dimension whose presence can also be felt in Verdi’s late Shakespeare adaptations. Such a kind of cosmopolitanism, one that I have termed “nationalist cosmopolitanism,” is a marked feature of the cultural contexts in which some of the most significant nineteenth-century receptions of Shakespeare took place in Europe and India. While the rise of Britain as the world’s leading colonising power had an important bearing on Shakespeare’s global spread, the manifestations of nationalist receptions of Shakespeare varied significantly from case to case, resulting in the young Bankim reading The Tempest in as radical a way as the mature Verdi would “read” Othello musically about twenty years after Bankim wrote Kapālakunḍalā. In order to understand the nature and ramifications of Bankim’s response, we need to examine Kapālakunḍalā, its intertextual allusions and subversions, and its complicated relationship to Bankim’s “Śakuntalā” essay.

Kapālakunḍalā: Plot and Intertexts Set in Bengal in the early seventeenth century, the novel is about a sixteenyear-old girl, Kapālakunḍalā, who lost her parents to Portuguese pirates and has been brought up, like Miranda in The Tempest, in a sparsely inhabited region—in this case, in the southwestern deltaic region of Bengal—by her foster father, a Kāpālik, a member of the esoteric Hindu tāntric cult. Bankim portrays both this Hindu tradition and its adherent unequivocally as evil in his summary of an early version of the novel in his English-language essay, “Bengali Literature.”23 Kapālakunḍalā knows that the Kāpālik, her foster father, requires human sacrifice for his rites, but her innate sense of duty and compassion leads her to save from the evil priest’s clutches Navakumār, a young Bengali Brahmin whose boat has gone astray and who has been staying with the Kāpālik as a result. Just as Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda in The Tempest, Navakumār falls in love with Kapālakunḍalā. He then marries her with the help of a benevolent Hindu priest who has also known Kapālakunḍalā from her childhood days, and the couple escape to Saptagrām, Navakumār’s village, a flourishing centre for international trade in pre-Mughal times but which, by Navakumār’s time, had entered a phase of decline. Their marriage, however, starts to break down, and from this stage, allusions to Othello become prominent. Kapālakunḍalā, having grown up in isolation, is unable to adjust to the requirements of domestic life. She

Challenging the Civilising Mission  123 loves wandering in the forest by herself at night, as she has always done, and is hurt when her husband expresses his disapproval of her doing so, not knowing that she sought to collect a herb that is supposed to work as a philtre, which Navakumār’s sister Śyamāsundarī had requested in order to save her own floundering marriage. Moreover, Navakumār’s first wife, a child-bride whose brief marriage to him ended soon after her family was forced to convert to Islam and excommunicated by the Brahmin community to which she belonged, comes back several years later and, upon accidentally meeting her husband, wishes to be reunited with him. Navakumār’s haughty, impulsive, and beautiful first wife, who is also capable of great magnanimity, has been the mistress of Jahangīr, who cast her off as he was about to become the next Mughal emperor. Lutf-un-nisa24 (the name by which she is known after her conversion to Islam) attempts to separate Navakumār and Kapālakunḍalā with the help of the Kāpālik, who has followed them to Navakumār’s town of Saptagrām. However, she decides to let them be together when she realises that she cannot win back Navakumār’s love. But irreparable damage has already been done. In order to warn Kapālakunḍalā against impending harm from the Kāpālik, Lutf-unnisa left behind a note suggesting that they secretly meet in a forested area nearby. Navakumār discovers that note, unbeknownst to Kapālakunḍalā. When he sees her later meet Lutf-un-nisa in the forest, the latter in male disguise, his jealousy is aroused, and it leads to the rupture of his relationship with his wife.25 Navakumār has only been able to elicit Kapālakunḍalā’s compassion, not her love. She is a girl of nature, and although she has been kind and faithful to her husband, she is unable to adjust to the demands of marriage and social life and ultimately decides to drown herself in the sea, from where she had been rescued as a child. Navakumār, repentant at the end, dies trying to save her.26 Purnachandra Chatterjee, Bankim’s younger brother, wrote that in around 1860, when Bankim lived for a while in a bungalow in Chandpur, a sea town with a dense forest close by in the subdistrict of Neguya, where he had been posted, a Kāpālik would appear from time to time at night (Amitrasudan Bhattacharya 2017, 63). Both the character and the locale, unnamed, appear in his novel. Sometime later (but before he had written his novel), Bankim asked Dinabandhu Mitra and Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay whether a girl who has grown up in isolation from her early childhood to the age of sixteen in a secluded forest by the seashore, cared for by none save a Kāpālik, would be able to give up her undomesticated ways or the influence of her father figure if she were to get married and attempts were made to integrate her into society.27 While Dinabandhu did not proffer an answer, Sanjibchandra’s answer in the affirmative left Bankim unconvinced (Amitrasudan Bhattacharya 2017, 66). Since we know from Bankim’s friend and fellow deputy magistrate Srischandra Majumdar that at the time of writing Kapālakunḍalā,

124  Part 2 Bankim was immersed in Shakespeare (Amitrasudan Bhattacharya 2017, 89), Bankim’s personal experience of a part of Bengal that, with some stretch of the imagination, could be compared with the uninhabited island of The Tempest, and his reading of Shakespeare were, one could surmise, among the motivating influences behind his writing the novel. That said, our understanding of the character of Kapālakunḍalā is enhanced when we consider not only The Tempest and its heroine but also other heroines of English and Sanskrit theatre that went into her creation—Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā, Bhavabhūti’s Kapālakunḍalā, and Shakespeare’s Desdemona. Comparing Bankim’s novel with its intertexts helps us also discover contrasts and enables us to examine how and why Bankim used these intertextual references. In his “Śakuntalā” essay, Bankim argued that Śakuntalā’s upbringing in relative isolation has a parallel in Miranda’s upbringing under comparable circumstances and, similarly, that the treatment meted out to Śakuntalā in the court of her husband, King Duṣyanta, has a parallel in the unsympathetic treatment meted out to Desdemona by Othello. Furthermore, in Bhavabhūti’s Sanskrit play Mālatīmādhava, an evil sorceress, who has the same name as that of Bankim’s heroine, tries to kill the lovers Mālatī and Mādhava, in order to avenge the death of her Kāpālik guru. Bankim derives some of his visual imagery from Bhavabhūti as well as that aspect of the plot in which a couple’s relationship is put to the test by means of scheming figures; indeed, the allusions to Śakuntalā and Mālatīmādhava are the strongest in the opening and closing sections of the novel. However, the comparisons also show that Bankim departs from his intertexts in significant ways. Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā is, like Bhavabhūti’s, the disciple of a Kāpālik, but instead of her being the evil figure that attempts to separate the lovers, Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā herself becomes the victim of a conspiracy to separate her from her husband. Like Desdemona and Miranda, Kapālakunḍalā is kind and chaste, but she displays neither Miranda’s self-effacing love for Ferdinand, nor Desdemona’s readiness to suffer in silence her husband’s jealousy. And unlike Śakuntalā, Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā values her independence of spirit more than her marriage and willingly dies by drowning, led by what she perceives as a call from Bhairavī, the mother goddess she worships. Furthermore, it can also be seen that the Prospero figure is split into the characters of the Kāpālik and the benevolent priest, while the figures of Caliban and Miranda are fused into one. The last is the most noteworthy of the modifications Bankim introduced in Kapālakunḍalā, for reasons that I will soon discuss. Bankim thus evokes all four intertexts, European and Indian, only to depart from all of them in significant ways. Imitation went hand in hand with innovation, which Bankim had posited as a goal in “Anukaraṇ.” Innovation was necessary, since imitation was useful only as long as it did not result in the surrender of the autonomy of one’s imagination

Challenging the Civilising Mission  125 and sense of judgement. Such a view was in keeping with the spirit of Bengali writers in the 1860s, when the show of resistance to British administration in the Revolt of 1857 was beginning to inspire the Englisheducated Bengali intelligentsia to embark upon building a body of modern vernacular literature that strategically returned to the past Sanskritic inheritance while simultaneously engaging with European ideas and models. By ingeniously weaving in references to these four canonical texts from Sanskrit and English literatures, Bankim could place his novel on the crest of this tidal wave of change. Moreover, the publication of Bankim’s “Śakuntalā” essay after that of Kapālakunḍalā also made it possible for readers to draw parallels between Bankim’s novel and its intertexts without considering it to be derivative. Connections between the novel and The Tempest were indeed made by Srischandra Majumdar in his essay, “Miranda o Kapālakunḍalā” (Miranda and Kapālakunḍalā; 1880), in Bangadarśan.28 These publications resulted in readers situating Kapālakunḍalā in the context of works by Shakespeare and Kālidāsa, since Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā, ever since Sir William Jones’s pioneering translation in the late eighteenth century, had been receiving accolades from Europeans, including no less an author than Goethe (Figueira 1991, 13). The nationalist impetus behind this kind of artistic self-fashioning by means of a novel that made creative use of both Shakespeare and Kālidāsa, coming as it did about thirty years after the “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), in which Lord Macaulay infamously dismissed Indian literature and culture, is apparent. Admittedly, such an exercise runs the risk of appearing merely clever, and modern readers are likely to find fault with certain aspects of Bankim’s novel (or novella, Kapālakunḍalā’s length being comparable to that of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), its convoluted plot and lack of psychological depth being among the most obvious ones. But to make such criticisms would be to overlook the fact that Bengali literary prose had only started to develop sixty years earlier in the hands of Raja Rammohan Roy and others while, as Alok Ray has observed, the novel form was only in its infancy, the Bengali word for it (upanyās) being then generally used to refer to “strange, imaginary tales” (1994, 490), a description that well befits Bankim’s Tempest-inspired novel.29 For all its shortcomings, Bankim’s novel is a pioneering work. Among its several strengths is the deployment of a highly Sanskritised register of Bengali prose for the unusual purpose of expressing romantic love and for evoking the Bengali countryside, qualities that appear, along with a mordant sense of humour absent from Kapālakunḍalā, in Bankim’s English-language novel Rajmohan’s Wife. In her study of the impact of ancient Indian literature on Bankim, Sukumari Bhattacharji observes that Bankim’s “vocabulary, syntax, and in some part, the imagery are quite Sanskritic, especially in the first two novels” (1994, 280). Bankim’s ability to use this register to evoke poetically the visually striking deltaic region of West Bengal,

126  Part 2 Kapālakunḍalā’s uncoventional beauty, and the European merchant ships “skimming the ocean like gigantic birds with great white spreading wings” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 121),30 as well as to create new kinds of characters, was strikingly inventive because, traditionally, “characterization in the majority of Sanskrit poetry and drama [used to be] largely stereotyped” (Sukumari Bhattacharji 1994, 282).31 The differences between Shakespeare’s English and that used at present is, therefore, paralleled to some extent by the differences between Bankim’s Bengali and its modern-day counterpart, and Bengali-language readers of Bankim’s novel get immersed in a linguistic register that is stylistically and grammatically “distant” but also complex and richly expressive, an experience that also lies in store for modern readers of Shakespeare when they encounter him for the first time. Bankim’s allusions to his four principal intertexts had a larger purpose as well. In addition to the aesthetic goal of creating a body of modern Bengali literature, these allusions also enabled him, through the figure of Kapālakunḍalā, to critique the state of women in his times and to challenge the civilising mission. The following two sections examine these critiques one by one.

The Tempest, Kapālakunḍalā, and Women in NineteenthCentury Bengal (i): A Historical Perspective As mentioned earlier, the question that prompted Bankim to write Kapālakunḍalā was how a woman who had not been properly socialised from her childhood till her mid-teens (a marriageable age in Shakespeare’s England and Bankim’s Bengal) would react if she were married off and expected to integrate into society. What would Miranda’s life be after her marriage to Ferdinand? A happy-ending answer to that question is only implied in The Tempest, since the play concludes with them headed for Naples for their upcoming marriage; the potential difficulties that Miranda could face upon her arrival in the court of the King of Naples are not taken up. Virginia and Alden T. Vaughan remind us that, in the years that Miranda and her father spend isolated on the island, Prospero constantly makes efforts to “educate his daughter and prepare her for her royal role” (2011, 179), but it is one thing to learn by instruction and another to have that instruction tested against the experience of real life. Furthermore, Srischandra Majumdar observes that Prospero’s intelligence, inclined as it is towards learning rather than towards practical matters, is unable to intuit the greed and narrow-mindedness of ordinary human beings, and makes him a somewhat idealistic protagonist (1982, 153). Given the age at which Miranda was forced into exile with her father, the circumstances in which she grew up, and the amazement with which she responded to Ferdinand when she first met him, it does not seem that Prospero’s tutelage prepared Miranda adequately to anticipate

Challenging the Civilising Mission  127 a world of deception and intrigue. It was from such a courtly world that Prospero and Miranda had in the first place been expelled, and, indeed, it is to such a world that they will eventually return. Bankim’s “Śakuntalā” essay and his disagreement with Sanjibchandra indicate that, from the outset, he was convinced that a girl in Miranda’s situation—one who grew up in the wilderness—would have difficulties in adjusting to her new life, though not for any moral failings on her part. Othello provided for him the most compelling example from Shakespeare of a marriage that failed despite the extraordinary intensity of the wife’s love and faithfulness, and it led Bankim to allude to that play in the latter sections of his novel. Nevertheless, the “Śakuntalā” essay also reveals how forced Bankim’s parallels between Śakuntalā and Desdemona appear when compared to those between Śakuntalā and Miranda. And what larger point did the Śakuntalā-Desdemona parallel illustrate? Bankim is unable to clarify, since the Śakuntalā-Desdemona comparison does not provide any insight regarding the feasibility of late socialisation that had piqued Bankim’s interest in the first place. It is for this reason that the part of Kapālakunḍalā which depicts the heroine’s life after her marriage follows Othello less closely than the novel’s earlier part, which depicts Navakumār’s love for her, follows The Tempest. A point that Bankim’s Śakuntalā-Desdemona comparison does reveal to the modern reader is that his fascination with wifely chastity, loyalty, and unwavering connubial love, and his tendency to think of Desdemona as a purer-than-life heroine curiously (and independently) shows up in Boito’s similar reading of Desdemona nearly twenty years later in Italy, reflecting how pervasive such a strand of reimagining Shakespearean heroines was in the second half of the nineteenth century. It should also be remembered that Bankim had already written and published Kapālakunḍalā before writing his “Śakuntalā” essay. Since the novel could have been written only after Bankim had worked out the comparisons between Śakuntalā, The Tempest, and Othello, the fact that the novel preceded the essay suggests that, while comparing the three texts, Bankim felt the need for some kind of creative intervention. Foremost among Bankim’s interventions is his reimagining of the benevolent Kapālakunḍalā as a composite of Miranda and Caliban. In her landmark essay on the novel, Supriya Chaudhuri draws attention to what she calls the absence of Caliban in Bankim’s Tempest-inspired novel. But closer to my reading is her view that Bankim “acknowledges Caliban’s presence even where he is most absent, seeing the island’s children as one child, not a set of binary opposites” (2008, 234). Shakespeare does indeed set up a binary opposition between Caliban, the non-European savage and deformed slave, on the one hand, and Miranda, the European princess who is characterised by her melior natura, which ensures that education will bear positive results on her and only have a deleterious effect on Caliban (see Kermode 1983, xlv–xlvii; Takaki 1992; Egan 2015, 86–90).

128  Part 2 Bankim’s characterisation of Kapālakunḍalā, however, suggests that he was deeply unconvinced by this binary. Caliban is not so much absent as he and Miranda are fused into one. Kapālakunḍalā’s offer to help Navakumār, the person she will eventually marry, is strongly reminiscent of the scene in which Miranda helps Ferdinand when she meets him for the first time. And yet, like Caliban (and Śakuntalā), she is attuned to her life in the desolate deltaic region in which she has grown up, and for all the innate kindness that leads her to save Navakumār from the hands of the Kāpālik, she values more highly the independence she had in her life before marriage. Kapālakunḍalā comes to understand concepts such as jealousy and unfaithfulness quite quickly after she is introduced to society. Yet, as Arun Kumar Das Gupta has observed, her “essential rectitude” and “unwavering sense of doing right” lead her, when required, to defy social conventions, her “sylvan innocence” making her “unaware of urban decorum” (1994, 297). And since, in Kapālakunḍalā, this sense of duty, or her love for the kind of free life she led before her marriage, seems to be stronger than romantic love or its attendant sexual pleasures, she is able to tell her husband’s sister in part 4, chapter 1 of the novel: “I would never have married if I had known marriage meant slavery for a woman” (Chakravarty 2005, 74; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 122). Such an attitude towards marriage is not to be found in Śakuntalā, Mālatī (the heroine of Bhavabhūti’s play), Miranda, or Desdemona. The contrast with The Tempest is striking, since Miranda’s falling in love with Ferdinand, Prospero’s insistence on the importance of premarital chastity, Miranda’s and Ferdinand’s betrothal, and the deferral of their marriage till the couple reach Naples all draw attention to the importance of patriarchal control over women’s reproductive rights, for in Prospero’s control—over whom his daughter marries and what bloodlines intermingle as a consequence— lies his permanent solution to the conflict between Milan and Naples.32 In order to understand the historical perspective behind Bankim’s fusion of the Miranda and Caliban into the single figure of Kapālakunḍalā, it is important to remember that the novel is set in a time in which India was under the rule of what Bankim would later feel was an alien cultural world, that of Islam, but it was also a time when another group of culturally distinct people, the Portuguese, were already making their presence felt, ravaging, according to Bankim, the entire Bengal coast for slaves.33 Just as the strange and uninhabited island in The Tempest is first “colonised” in a sense by Sycorax and then by Prospero, so is the Bengal in which the novel is set placed on the cusp of two phases of colonisation, the first by the Mughals in the past,34 and the second, the incipient one, by the Europeans. The one crucial difference, of course, is that Bengal is far from being an uninhabited area of the Indian subcontinent, and the people who are most affected by the aggression of the foreign powers are its women. As part 1, chapter  8 tells us, Kapālakunḍalā grew up in a desolate part of Bengal near the sea because she had been

Challenging the Civilising Mission  129 separated at childhood from her Brahmin parents by Portuguese pirates (Chakravarty 2005, 27; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 98), while Lutf-un-nisa became a convert to Islam because of a conflict in which her Brahmin father got involved with the Pathans in Bengal, who were then fighting with the Mughals for control over the land (Chakravarty 2005, 25; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 97). Through the figures of Kapālakunḍalā and Lutf-un-nisa, then, Bankim examines the effects on women of being uprooted early from the communities into which they are born and the ways in which they negotiate such changes. Both Lutfun-nisa and Kapālakunḍalā become accustomed to the cultures in which they spend their formative teenage years. However, as a Brahmin woman who converted to Islam, Lutf-un-nisa finds herself an outcast and, therefore, barred from returning to her former husband by the conservative Hindu society of her times, while Kapālakunḍalā finds the same society stifling. Thus, in Bankim’s novel, various groups of competing colonising powers destroy the lives of the women of Bengal in different ways. However, those who are not affected by the ravages of such conflicts are also unhappy, albeit for different reasons. A character that does not have an equivalent in any of Kapālakunḍalā’s intertexts, Navakumār’s sister Śyamāsundarī, is the wife of a kulīn Brahmin.35 In nineteenthcentury Bengal, kulīn Brahmin males were notorious for their socially sanctioned marriages to several women across the entire breadth of Bengal, whom they would visit only for a few days in a year and whose family money they would live off.36 Vidyasagar condemned such marriages, as we shall see in the next chapter. Bankim would also acknowledge wholeheartedly in his essay “Bahubibāha” (Polygamy)37 that such marriages were an abomination to society, irrespective of whether that practice could be said to have scriptural support (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 273–74). Thus, in part 2, chapter  5 of his novel, Bankim writes, “Śyamāsundarī was a kulīn’s wife, and therefore a widow without actually being one” (Chakravarty 2005, 41; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 105). In the chapter that follows, significantly titled “Abarodhe” (In Captivity), Kapālakunḍalā half expresses to Śyamāsundarī her growing sense of being stifled in her marriage because she longs to “again wander in the woods by the sea” (Chakravarty 2005, 47; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 107).38 The sincerity of Navakumār’s love is never in doubt: what causes the problem is Kapālakunḍalā’s transplantation to a different culture whose norms and mores have been imposed on her from without. This reading has symbolic implications, as we shall see in the next section, but in this context, what Kapālakunḍalā’s plight exposes is how the women of Bengal were disempowered under traditional Hindu society, under Muslim rulers, and under the ravages of the Europeans, represented here by the Portuguese, who were gradually gaining control over the sea routes. (Admittedly, Śyamāsundarī accepts her situation as it is, but it is far from being perfect, and she has no other

130  Part 2 template of being to compare her life with.) Among Bankim’s works, it is only in Kapālakunḍalā that we find such a clear articulation of this position. In later essays like “Sāmya” (Equality; 1873)39 and “Prāchīna ebong navīnā” (The traditional and the modern woman; 1874),40 Bankim would condemn gender inequality and double standards regarding women’s rights and social status, but these opinions would gradually make way for an ever-increasing patriarchal attitude, as is exemplified in later works like his treatise Dharmatattwa (The essence of religion; 1884–85). Since Bankim’s works from his later, more pronouncedly conservative phase have been more influential in Indian right-wing politics and have, understandably, been commented upon more frequently than the positions he took in his earlier phase, situating Kapālakunḍalā in the early phase of Bankim’s career makes it clear why such a critique, via his reimagination of Shakespeare, could have at all emerged from his pen.41 But an obvious objection can be raised: Bankim’s novel is set in the period between the end of the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar and the beginning of the rule of his son Jahāngīr, i.e., in the year 1605. How are we justified in reading the novel in terms of debates on marriage that were prevalent during Bankim’s times, rather than in terms of the period in which it is set? The answer lies in Bankim’s allusions, in his novel, to different time periods and settings. One of the strange omissions in the scholarship on Kapālakunḍalā is the significance of the name of Navakumār’s first wife, Lutf-un-nisa, which in Arabic means the “pleasure of a woman.” It is true that the novel presents her as a pleasureseeking woman who also has more than a touch of generosity in her character. However, it should be noted that this uncommon name was the one given to his favourite wife, a convert from Hinduism, by Siraj ud-Daulah, the last Muslim ruler of Bengal, whose defeat at the hands of the British at the battle of Plassey in 1757 resulted in the definitive consolidation of the control of Bengal by the British.42 Moreover, the name of the hero, Navakumār, means “new man,” and his sensibility is closer to that of the English-educated Bengalis of Bankim’s milieu. This is made apparent in the opening chapter of the novel, in which, while the other travellers on the boat that gets stranded have come for a pilgrimage, Navakumār, their fellow traveller, tells them that he has come in order to experience the aesthetic pleasure of viewing the sea. In his rationalist approach, his dependence on his own agency rather than on divine intervention after he and his fellow pilgrims get stranded, and his marrying for love,43 Navakumār is a person whose sensibilities are closer to the English-educated urban Bengali of the nineteenth century, of which Madhav, the hero of Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife, is a precursor. Meenakshi Mukherjee makes a similar reading of Navakumār: In these contrasts between the hero and nearly all the other characters in the novel there is a suggestion of the rift between the traditionalists and the reformists within the nineteenth-century Bengali

Challenging the Civilising Mission  131 intelligentsia, for whom debates on tradition and modernity, authentic and derivative identities, reform and revival, reason and faith were often complexly tied to the controversies over women and marriage. Bankim often joined issue with these questions in his discursive writings from the 1870s, though always from a position of studied yet critical neutrality, and one can see an early articulation of some of these ideas in the novel. (Afterword, in Chakravarty 2005, 104) It is not surprising that in his 1885 translation of the novel, Phillips went so far as to suggest that Kapālakunḍalā provided “a window on contemporary Bengal” (quoted in Chakravarty 2005, xiii). Phillips’s sense of Kapālakunḍalā as reflecting the Bengal of Bankim’s times is echoed by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, who observes that “the terrain where Bankim arrived was  .  .  . the critique of society through the eyes of a woman [Kapālakunḍalā] unused to the ways of the Bengali-Hindu upper orders. It is the society of a colonized people in a half-way house towards a ‘Westernization’ that did not infuse some of the essential components of the Western civilization” (1994, 304). Thus, despite the novel being set in the first decade of the seventeenth century, it also alludes in significant ways to the phase of history in which Bengal’s colonial encounter with the British had already begun. In Kapālakunḍalā, Bankim, like Madhusudan in his Meghanādavadha-kāvya, was not merely mimicking European or Indian traditions but was strategically making intertextual allusions involving different literary traditions (English, Sanskrit, and Bengali) and carefully chosen names of characters (Lutf-un-nisa and Navakumār) and locations44 to reveal “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence,” as T. S. Eliot famously put it in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” ([1919] 1975, 38). Kapālakunḍalā draws parallels between different time periods and, unlike most historical novels, is not confined to one point of time in an invented historical past that sets the template for a desired future of the imagination. As a result, parallels between the times in which it is set and the period of British colonisation that it alludes to can be drawn. We may, therefore, read its depiction of women in terms of an oblique commentary on the “woman question” in the Bengal of Bankim’s times. And as we shall now see, these parallels also open up the possibility of another reading that ties Kapālakunḍalā in with the “civilising mission,” a phrase with wide currency in discourses seeking to justify British colonialism.

The Tempest, Kapālakunḍalā, and Women in NineteenthCentury Bengal (ii): A Symbolic Perspective As the nineteenth century progressed and the question of a “national” identity loomed large in places as far-flung as post-unification Italy, British India, and Egypt, a common pattern started emerging, no doubt in part because of the long association of women with fecundity and nurture,

132  Part 2 which had led to the mother-goddess cult in various cultures: this was the personification of the nation in the form of a female figure, imagined as woman, wife, mother, or goddess.45 In the context of Bengal, the personification of nation-as-woman was initially centred on the figure of the chaste wife, then on the desexualised figure of the mother, and finally, in some versions such as Bankim’s own Ānandamaṭh, militarised in the form of the goddess Durga, the most widely worshipped among Hindu gods and goddesses in Bengal, who is iconically represented as the slayer of evil forces (see T. Sarkar 2001, 135–63, 250–67; P. Chatterjee 1993, 116–34). As Bengali literature opened up to European influences and entered its “modern” phase in the 1860s, images of the nation-asmother also started emerging in the arts, a trend that continued well into the twentieth century. One finds it, for instance, in Madhusudan’s poem “Bangabhūmir prati” (To Bengal; 1862), in which the poet likened Bengal to a nurturing female goddess in what was the first collection of sonnets, a European form, in Bengali; in a play from 1873 titled Bhāratmāta (Mother India); in Bankim’s Ānandamaṭh (1882); and in Abanindranath Tagore’s painting Bhāratmāta (1905). As was the case elsewhere, such as Egypt (Baron 2005, 1), so was it in Bengal: this personification of the nation as a female figure was made and controlled by men. Concomitant with this opening up of Bengali literature to foreign influences was an anxiety surrounding cultural change: Bankim’s jibe at the beginning of part 1, chapter 8 of Kapālakunḍalā, namely that the Bengali is always a victim of circumstances, while circumstances are never the victim of the Bengali (Chakravarty 2005, 22; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 95), betrays, at one level, the anxiety surrounding the loss of cultural autonomy that Bankim warned against in “Anukaraṇ” and which Partha Chatterjee has noted as the dominant theme of Bengali literature of this period (1993, 135). And as we have seen, the aesthetic goals Bankim outlined in “Anukaraṇ” had deep political implications connected to the question of cultural self-fashioning in the wake of colonial modernity. Could Kapālakunḍalā and her fate, then, be connected with this larger cultural anxiety? Situating the character of Kapālakunḍalā in the development of this discourse, Tanika Sarkar has written that Kapalakundala remains the freest and most self-sufficient [of] human being[s] and embodies an ideal that Bankim was to develop later with great emphasis—the ideal of a non-attached person who encompasses wisdom, kindness, concern and selflessness but finds fulfilment entirely within herself or himself and is totally independent. But whereas in his later writings Bankim would link such ­self-sufficiency with some broader politico-religious goal—thereby making it a contingent state that emerges out of a rigorous regime of self-discipline—here it remains an aesthetic exercise which detached

Challenging the Civilising Mission  133 itself from some ulterior religious or social purposes. The unfettered woman is a radical imagining, and it is in no way linked to the more familiar woman who longs to rid herself of earthly encumbrances in order to wrap herself up within a divine attachment. (2001, 146) If, however, we consider Kapālakunḍalā’s relationships with its literary intertexts and the sociopolitical context in which it was created, we can then situate its heroine in this emergent tendency to personify the nation as a female figure, and a new reading emerges. At a symbolic level, Kapālakunḍalā’s refusal to submit to the attempts at socialisation by either Navakumār, the “new man” who anticipates anachronistically the nineteenth-century Bengali bābu, or his first wife, Lutf-un-nisa, who, despite her Hindu origins, belongs firmly to the cultural milieu of the opulent, cynical, strife-ridden Mughal court, could be read as her rejection of civilising mores that are imposed on her from without. Deeply devout and identifying strongly with nature and her mother goddess, Kapālakunḍalā, encompassing within herself elements of both Caliban and Miranda, can be seen as refusing to be swept away by either the Mughal (or Western) civilising forces.46 Seen from this perspective, Kapālakunḍalā’s rejection of civilising forces that are suddenly imposed on her from outside can be read, at a symbolic level, as Bankim’s challenge to the civilising mission, which was also imposed top-down on colonised subjects who had little or no control over the process and who were often only partially aware of what these changes ramified. What is equally interesting is Kapālakunḍalā’s rejection of her foster father. Bankim does not idealise the Hindu cultural inheritance either, representing it negatively in the figure of the Kāpālik and positively in the figure of the temple priest who marries off Kapālakunḍalā to Navakumār and helps both of them escape. The split of the Prospero figure into those of the Kāpālik and the benevolent priest can also be interpreted in terms of Bankim’s ambivalence towards valorising a traditional—even ­precolonial—order. This association of the Kāpālik and the benevolent priest with an older order is reinforced at an aesthetic level by the allusions to the classical Sanskrit dramatists, Kālidāsa and Bhavabhūti, at the beginning and the end of the novel, while the central chapters allude more to India under periods of Mughal and European/British rule. Seen from this perspective, Bankim’s novel suggests that a mere return to a precolonial order will not suffice. Kapālakunḍalā’s suicide can, then, be seen to symbolise the predicament of colonised subjects, who have neither control over the forces that colonial modernity has brought, nor the option of returning to the certainties of a precolonial past, no matter how good or bad that past might have been. Such a reading may explain why, over time, Bankim’s writings would be characterised increasingly by the presence of an “unhappy consciousness,” to borrow the apt phrase that Kaviraj used as the title of his study of Bankim (1998).

134  Part 2 The fact that Kapālakunḍalā is the only character in Bankim’s reworking of Shakespeare that is created by the fusion of two characters from the same play, Miranda and Caliban from The Tempest, acquires renewed significance. Through this fusion, Bankim collapses the binary opposition between Miranda, the European child blessed with the “natural” capacity to show the positive effects of nurture, and Caliban, the nonEuropean child in whom attempts at nurture will not efface the inner savage but will only enable him to curse his civiliser in the latter’s language. Instead, the novel suggests at a literal level that children who spend their formative years in isolation will have problems in adjusting to a culture and society radically different from the one in which they have grown up, irrespective of their innate “natures” and racial origins: this line of reading enables Bankim to make the predicament of Kapālakunḍalā both the predicament of women in nineteenth-century Bengal and the predicament of colonial subjects in the face of colonial modernity. If, as Jessica Slights argues, “past and present readings of The Tempest alike have misread the play by emphasising the nature of Prospero’s relationship with the island of his exile without considering the alternative models of selfhood, moral agency, and community life posited by the magician’s daughter” (2001, 359), Bankim seems to suggest that the children of the island, both male and female, European and non-European, would respond in similar ways to forces of acculturation for which they were not adequately prepared. The non-European “salvage man” and the European woman endowed with melior natura would not be opposed to each other in their responses to nurture but would be shareholders of a common distress. It is notable that Bankim is more ambivalent about traditional values and more sympathetic towards the forces of change in Kapālakunḍalā than Verdi and Boito are in Otello, an opera that dramatises the conflict between tradition and change in a very different way: Navakumār, unlike Jago, is a sympathetic character, by and large. Indeed, Bankim’s reservations about the traditional Hindu society that he found in Bengal in his time appear elsewhere in his writings as well, with him arguing that the rights of women and of the population belonging to the lower castes were severely curtailed in traditional India and, indeed, that the situation had improved under British colonial rule (Raychaudhuri 2002, 142–43). Why, then, would he at all wish to portray the resistance to colonial modernity in sympathetic terms? For Bankim, it was not so much the ideas brought by colonial modernity that needed to be resisted; rather, it was the lack of agency of women (at a literal level) and of colonised subjects (at a symbolic level) in effecting social change that called for resistance. Comtean positivism, which “advocated evolutionary change as against revolutionary change” has been suggested as an ideational influence behind the writings of Bankim, who knew Auguste Comte’s work well (Amiya Sen 2008, 25).

Challenging the Civilising Mission  135 The symbolic reading is supported by the fact that there are parallels between some of Bankim’s writings on women’s rights and those on colonialism. In his essay “Prāchīna ebong navīnā,” he lamented the fact that in all societies women were backwards compared to men only because of their physical subjugation by men.47 Similarly, in his view, colonised subjects were dominated through force by people with greater physical might; hence Indians needed to become physically stronger than they were, and modern Bengali literature had to instil in the people an appreciation of the qualities of “manliness” and valour.48 Again, Bankim’s argument that men desired the upliftment of women only to the extent that it was necessary for their own pleasure is paralleled by his argument that colonialism was principally about the economic exploitation of one nation in order to serve the interests of another, a phenomenon for which he cited examples from British India. Writing at a time when the civilising mission by the British colonial administration was in full swing, Bankim’s warning in “Anukaraṇ” regarding the unthinking imitation of the coloniser’s culture by the colonised was one of the necessary safeguards against the uncritical surrender to a template of modernity which had been brought by the British, whose exploitation of India was never far from Bankim’s mind. The discursive conditions for Bankim’s reimagining of Kapālakunḍalā both as a woman who longs for individual freedom and, through the fusion of Caliban and Miranda, as a symbolic representation of native resistance to the civilising mission were therefore present in the period following the Revolt of 1857, during which Kapālakunḍalā was written. Bankim’s fusion of Caliban and Miranda into a single female figure, then, collapses the Eurocentrism underlying that binary distinction in The Tempest and makes possible both a historicist reading of the “woman question” in nineteenth-century Bengal and a symbolic reading of the civilising mission. Such a double interpretation is also made possible by the fact that Kapālakunḍalā is a young bride whose unusual upbringing enables her to see clearly the problems of the society into which she is expected to integrate. In that regard, Kapālakunḍalā is very different from Bankim’s later female protagonists in a work like Ānandamaṭh, where they are imagined either as mother figures or as militant women who have voluntarily given up their sexual selves for the greater cause of the nation. The personification of the nation as a female figure can be contextually situated both within and outside India, especially in cultures where there is a tradition of worship of the divine feminine in some form or the other. We saw, in the European context, an example in the form of Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello, where she is associated with traditional Italian culture and its values, with hints of Mariolatry in act 2 of the opera. We have also seen that, independently, in Bengal, where the worship of the goddess Durgā was already prevalent by the nineteenth century, Bankim’s own works as well as those by others reveal that, with the development of a nationalist collective consciousness, the nation was beginning

136  Part 2 to be imagined as a mother, a woman, or a female goddess in Bengali literature, drama, and the visual arts from the 1860s onwards. Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā can be located on the threshold of this kind of imagining; by situating her in debates on tradition and modernity that were imbricated with controversies over women and marriage in this period, one can read her as both a character and a symbol for the emerging national collectivity. At the time of writing Kapālakunḍalā, Bankim had not yet imagined the woman-as-nation as a means for the awakening of nationalist feeling. Instead, as Sabyasachi Bhattacharya observes, Bankim’s “conception of the limits of freedom is one of the sources of the melancholy that pervades the novel,” a statement that puts the finger on Kapālakunḍalā’s affect (1994, 308; emphasis mine), though I  differ from his reading insofar as I  lay the emphasis on locating this lack of freedom not only in the personal realm but also in the political.49 This is because, in addition to the reasons given earlier, the frame of mind in which Kapālakunḍalā decides to give herself up to the will of her god becomes increasingly identified in Bankim’s writings as a condition necessary for effecting political resistance. Towards the end of the novel (part 4, chapter 8), Kapālakunḍalā imagines that she hears the terrifying voice of the goddess she worships demanding that she sacrifice her life by drowning. She gladly submits to that call, asking herself, “Why should I not give my body to the goddess who rules the world? What use have I for the five elements?” as Kapālakunḍalā demonstrates an “irresistible force” coming from “one who has no attachments” in life any more (Chakravarty 2005, 94; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 132). Soon afterwards, in her mind’s eye, Kapālakunḍalā sees the goddess she worships “guised as a warrior” (Chakravarty 2005, 95; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 133), and ends her life by drowning. The first work in which this trope of the individual’s “total surrender, a kind of voluntary self-sacrifice that is a mark of the true aristocracy of the spirit. . . [and which] is raised to a higher level in Kapālakunḍalā’s acceptance of the ‘will of the goddess’ ” (Das Gupta 1994, 298) recurs in a relatively more strident form is in Bankim’s essay “Āmār Durgotsav” (Our Durga festival)50 from the serially published collection Kamalākānter daftar (Kamalākānta’s records), in which the speaker exhorts the readers to “plunge into the dark waters” and raise the image of Durgā, the mother goddess of Bengal (Monish Ranjan Chatterjee 1992, 106; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 72), in a spirit of communal unity. That exhortation would culminate in an explicitly political turn in part 1, chapter 10 of Bankim’s later novel Ānandamaṭh, in which the implications of this complete self-surrender to the call of the divine would have a specifically Hindu nationalist dimension. Moreover, the undertones of the tāntric Hinduism of Kapālakunḍalā are also present in Ānandamaṭh (Lipner 2006, 16, 144–48).

Challenging the Civilising Mission  137 The divisive nationalist politics of Ānandamaṭh has become Bankim’s abiding and deeply controversial legacy to Indian political thought, but what has not been recognised is its ideational origin in Kapālakunḍalā, a work that is by no means Hindu nationalist in spirit, but instead challenges the Eurocentric Miranda/Caliban binary of The Tempest, draws attention to the plight of women under various phases of colonial rule in Bengal, and makes the heroine-as-national-symbol the site for the conflict between a moribund tradition and a colonial modernity over which the colonised have little control. At the time of writing Kapālakunḍalā, Bankim was, as his writings show, a “nationalist cosmopolitan” and regarded cultural cosmopolitanism as a vital means of reinvigorating national culture as long as the reins of reform were in the hands of the colonised, who, in turn, needed to be judicious in their engagement with foreign influences. By the time he wrote Ānandamaṭh, cosmopolitanism and nationalism had become, for him, opposed terms, even though he grudgingly acknowledged towards the end of that novel the necessity for a period of colonial rule.51 In turn, Tagore would develop the anticolonial reading of The Tempest further and provide a more fitting argument as to why cross-cultural exchanges were necessary, but not under the sign of colonialism. With Tagore, nationalist cosmopolitanism would make a more nuanced, more self-aware return, and The Tempest would figure once again.

Bankim, Tagore, and the Reception History of The Tempest In drawing parallels between The Tempest and Śakuntalā, Bankim built on a moment early in the cultural encounter between India and Britain when, in the preface to his 1789 translation of Kālidāsa’s famous play, Sir William Jones inaugurated the comparison between Kālidāsa and Shakespeare. This comparison continued in Indian writings especially from the 1860s onwards well into post-independence India (see Malagi 2005, 110–26). More importantly, from the 1860s onwards, India’s colonial encounter with European literature generated various kinds of engagements with non-autochthonous literary and dramatic concepts and techniques, while Bengali writers began to make probing, self-reflexive examinations of the burning social questions of those times through literature and drama. These developments were reflected in the conceptual shift in Indian discussions on literature from the mārga/dēśi binary to the viśwa/rāṣtriya binary (a point I made earlier in this chapter) and in transformations in vernacular-language literatures, especially in Bengal, where the precolonial literary canon was less distinguished than that, for instance, in Tamil, and the cultural encounter with European ideas was perhaps more thorough and prolonged than in any part of India other than the Bombay Presidency.

138  Part 2 As a result, sharp changes in the relationship of the colonised with the coloniser’s culture can be observed in Bengali literature in the relatively short time span of fifty years between the Revolt of 1857 and the beginning of the twentieth century. As I  have written elsewhere, the melancholy note in Madhusudan’s Meghanādavadha-kāvya (1861) arose from the fact that it was “an epic poem written from the perspective of the vanquished—the Lankans of mythical time—sympathetically seen by a poet from a community [Bengal] vanquished politically by British imperialism in historical time” (S. Sen 2020, 1970–71). On the other hand, the melancholy note in Kapālakunḍalā (1866), I have argued here, emerged partly from Bankim’s critique of the state of women in Bengal, and partly from his concern regarding the attenuation of the Bengali community’s selfhood, forged as it was in the anvil of colonial modernity. From the mid1870s onwards, a militant nationalist spirit came to inform the thought of the Bengali Hindu intelligentsia, which started describing the period of Muslim rule as the “night of medieval darkness” (see P. Chatterjee 1993, chapter 5, especially 102). Bankim’s own Ānandamaṭh (1882) provides the most well-known example of this shift, and nationalist cosmopolitanism made way for a militant nationalism that never lost its appeal and would, in fact, manifest itself most strongly when Hindu nationalist parties started gaining prominence at the national level in independent India more than a century later. But nationalist cosmopolitanism returned in a more conceptually nuanced fashion in the writings of Tagore from the late 1890s onwards and provided a template for a culturally pluralist India. At the time of its independence in 1947, this model would prevail over the militant-nationalist, anti-cosmopolitan view of India. Tagore’s return to nationalist cosmopolitanism is characterised by his re-evaluation of issues analysed by Bankim in the latter’s “Anukaraṇ,” “Śakuntalā,” and Kapālakunḍalā and is profoundly connected to Tagore’s own critique of The Tempest as a play about the struggle for power. In his essays “Bankimchandra” (1923) and “Sahityarūp” (The form of literature; 1927),52 Tagore congratulated Bengali intellectuals, starting with Raja Rammohun Roy, and continuing with Bankim and Madhusudan, on imbibing valuable elements from European literature instead of merely imitating them and on combining them successfully with their own literary traditions (see Tagore [1923] 2009a, 38–39; [1927] 2009b, 207). Tagore also revisited some of the points made by Bankim in “Anukaraṇ,” only to nuance them further. For instance, Tagore agreed that crosscultural exchanges of ideas and art were beneficial, but instead of upholding Bankim’s distinction between “pure” ancient cultures that evolved slowly on their own and those that developed more quickly through the judicious imitation of older, superior cultures, Tagore argued that even the ancient cultures of Greece, China, and India had learnt from each other (Tagore [1927] 2009b, 208), thereby problematising the notion of a society developing from “pure” cultural origins that characterises

Challenging the Civilising Mission  139 the anti-cosmopolitan, nationalist thinking of the political right. Tagore also rejected Bankim’s argument at the end of Ānandamaṭh, namely that in order to modernise themselves, Indians had to go through a period of British colonial rule and defer the quest for freedom for the time being. Tagore’s counterargument was not that the European ideas and knowledge brought by British colonialism should be rejected, but that these ideas would have been better imbibed if, like the Japanese, Indians could engage with them without having been colonised. As Tagore put it, “since the burden of serving the food of European knowledge belongs to the English, they do not give us the full meal” (Tagore [1923] 2009a, 39–40). We see, therefore, that Tagore’s anticolonial sentiments were geared not to the desire for a return to a culturally “pure” past, but to the desire for a time when cross-cultural exchanges took place in ways that gave each participant greater autonomy than was the case under colonialism. It was precisely this lack of autonomy under colonial rule of various kinds that formed the substance of Bankim’s critique of the civilising mission in Kapālakunḍalā. This was the spirit of nationalist cosmopolitanism that informed Bengali literary culture. In his English-language book, Nationalism (1918), Tagore distanced himself from both cosmopolitanism, expressing his dislike of its “colorless vagueness,” and from the “fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship” (quoted in Collins 2012, 120). Like Bankim in “Anukaraṇ,” Tagore felt that the world would be “unbeautiful and monotonous without variety” (quoted in Collins 2012, 121), but since Bankim and Tagore both appreciated the need for the judicious absorption of influences from other cultures for developing one’s own, it is inaccurate to suggest that they disapproved of cosmopolitanism per se, rather than of the kind of derivative cosmopolitanism that emerges from unthinking and unimaginative imitation of anything that came from the coloniser’s culture.53 Nothing could, then, be further removed from Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry than Bankim’s and Tagore’s concept of imitation, in which the exercise of the autonomy of the imitator’s imagination was of paramount importance. It is, therefore, more accurate to say that a different—more rooted—sense of cosmopolitanism developed among the Bengali intelligentsia following the Revolt of 1857, and its proponents sought to balance the benefits of cross-cultural exchange with the need to maintain the cultural distinctiveness of their community. It is because both Bankim and Tagore valued this need for balance that I  connect Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā and Tagore’s reading of The Tempest in his “Śakuntalā” essay (first published in Bengali in 1902), written shortly before Bengal’s first partition in 1905, which otherwise departs from Bankim’s “Śakuntalā” in important ways. The main difference lies in Tagore’s subtler reading of Kālidāsa, which enabled him to claim a higher place for the Sanskrit dramatist; but in the process, Tagore made explicit the political undertone of Shakespeare’s play in a way that is

140  Part 2 prescient of critical approaches of the 1960s and 1970s. Having noted the centrality of nature and of the deep bond between human beings and nature in Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā, Tagore observes: In The Tempest, man has not enlarged his being by extending himself into the universe beneficently in a tie of love; he has tried to dominate the universe by curtailing and tyrannizing over the latter. In fact, the principal theme of The Tempest is the conflict and strife to dominate. There Prospero, ousted from rule over his own kingdom, establishes stern rule over nature by the power of magic. When a few creatures reach the shore of the island after somehow escaping death, they too engage in conspiracies, betrayals and attempts at assassination, to dominate over what is virtually a desert island. By the end, their efforts have been stayed; but no one can say that they have finally ended. Demonic nature falls silent, like the persecuted Caliban, out of fear, oppression, and lack of opportunity; but its fangs and talons still bear venom. Everybody gains what is due, but that is only an external gain. It might be the goal of a mercenary community; it cannot be the final outcome of a poetic work. The Tempest is in content as it is in name: a conflict between nature and humankind, between one human being and another—and, at the root of that conflict, the struggle for power. It is full of strife from beginning to end. (Tagore 2010, 244; translated by Sukanta Chaudhuri) It can easily be argued that Tagore’s notion of what the final outcome of a poetic work should be is different from, and more limited at that point of his career, than Shakespeare’s. Ariel’s rebuke to Prospero’s enemies, the former disguised as a harpy (3.3.54–81), evokes different kinds of responses—Alonso begins to feel contrite (3.3.95–102), while Sebastian and Antonio remain oblivious to the moral dimension of Ariel’s speech and decide to continue fighting (3.3.102–03). Art affects different individuals in different ways: no words of contrition emerge from Antonio in act 5. Prospero’s act of forgiveness at the end of the play, too, may also be only temporary, since, after threatening Sebastian and Antonio for being traitors, he tells them, “At this time / I will tell no tales” (5.1.128–29; emphasis mine). As Stephen Orgel puts it, the concern with repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and regeneration is one that is voiced often throughout The Tempest. But a much less clear pattern is the one that is acted out: repentance remains, at the play’s end, a largely unachieved goal, forgiveness is ambiguous at best, the clear ideal of reconciliation grows cloudy as the play concludes. And in this respect, the play is entirely characteristic of its author and genre: Shakespearean comedy rarely concludes

Challenging the Civilising Mission  141 with that neat and satisfactory resolution we are led to expect, and that criticism so often claims for it. (2008, 13) Indeed, claims of compassion as the “tonic chord” of The Tempest were prevalent in Tagore’s times and are present even now (Kirsch 1997, 345), and what may seem to be the limitations of Tagore’s observation about The Tempest’s “unsatisfactory” ending seem less so when placed in the context of the history of reception and interpretation of The Tempest that he was challenging. Tagore’s reading seems all the more impressive when we note that his line of interpretation would be taken up no earlier than the 1960s. Indeed, the implications of Tagore’s cryptic comment regarding the “conflict between nature and humankind” in the play would be explored even later, from around 2000 onwards, as ecocritical readings of Shakespeare began to gain ground (see, for example, Bate 2000, 68–93). In his response to The Tempest, Bankim focused on the figure of the oppressed, fusing the characters of Miranda and Caliban into one composite female figure. Tagore, on the other hand, focused on the oppressors, starting with Prospero, at a time when the tradition of regarding Prospero as a benevolent figure—and equating him with Shakespeare— had been made a critical commonplace in the course of the nineteenth century by commentators such as Coleridge and Edward Dowden (Vaughan and Vaughan 2011, 88). Between them, Bankim and Tagore responded critically and creatively to The Tempest in colonial India along lines that would be taken up by other writers several generations later. I say this because Latin American writers like Darío and Rodó neither recognised Caliban as the figure that was central to an anticolonial reading of the play, nor felt the need to probe the darker side of Prospero’s character; hence, their readings, influential as they were in their times, were along lines that would be abandoned by commentators on and adapters of The Tempest in the years following World War II. Mannoni’s replacement of the Ariel-Caliban dichotomy with the Prospero-Caliban dichotomy led Shakespearean scholars (such as, for example, Philip Brockbank in 1966) to entertain the possibility that The Tempest could be read as a play about colonisation. Concomitantly, Francophone adapters such as Aimé Césaire (Une tempête, 1969) and Spanish-language commentators such as Roberto Fernández Retamar (in his essay “Caliban” [1971]; translated into English in 1974), along with Caribbean writers such as George Lamming (The Pleasures of Exile [1960]) and Edward Kamau Brathwaite (in his poem “Caliban” from Islands [1969]), moved away from the Ariel-Caliban to the Prospero-Caliban antithesis. By 1978, John Reid could write about the “decline” of the Ariel-Caliban antithesis (1978, 346), tracing Rodó’s reading back to Ernest Renan’s Caliban, suite de la tempête (1878), a work that was anything but anticolonial in spirit. By the 1960s, however, Tagore, who was an international celebrity in

142  Part 2 the interwar years, had fallen into obscurity outside South Asia, and the implications of Bankim’s nationalist cosmopolitanism were forgotten in favour of the militant nationalism of Ānandamaṭh, the latter criticised by scholars of the political left and celebrated by politicians of the Hindu right. As a result, until the publication of Supriya Chaudhuri’s essay (2008), the relationship between Kapālakunḍalā and The Tempest never came to be re-evaluated by scholars focusing on Indian Shakespeares in light of the newly emerging postcolonial readings of Shakespeare’s play, while Tagore’s groundbreaking essay, published in the new series of Bangadarśan that was established under his editorship, came to be forgotten, with no English translation of it made till Sukanta Chaudhuri’s in 2001, to the best of my knowledge. This brief history of Bankim’s and Tagore’s responses to The Tempest explains only in part why their readings were forgotten in the context of Shakespeare reception, even though Kapālakunḍalā maintained its classic status in Bengali literature. Two more reasons account for their absence. In studies of Shakespeare’s impact on Bengali literature and theatre, scholars of Bengali literature and drama have tended to focus on straightforward adaptations of his plays rather than on works inspired by him. For example, in his list of Shakespeare-inspired Bengali plays in his magisterial Bānglā nāṭyasāhityer itihās (The history of Bengali theatrical works), Ashutosh Bhattacharya did not list a play like Navīn tapaswinī (The young female ascetic; 1863) by Bankim’s friend, the playwright Dinabandhu Mitra, as an adaptation of, or a work inspired by Shakespeare, even though he acknowledged the influence of The Merry Wives of Windsor on it in the main body of his text (2002, 299–300, 626–27). Moreover, since Bankim’s novel also involves intermedial transfer from stage to page, studies such as Sanat Kumar Mitra’s Shakespeare o Bānglā nāṭak (Shakespeare and Bengali theatre) omit Kapālakunḍalā entirely. Hence, the Bengali-language scholarship on Shakespeare reception has not been particularly helpful in drawing renewed attention to the significance of Bankim and Tagore in the history of Shakespeare reception in India, an attention that was needed especially as postcolonial and adaptation-based approaches to Shakespeare reception began to gain ground in the Anglophone world. Bankim’s essays “Anukaraṇ” and “Śakuntalā” have fared better, as several India-based critics writing in English cited these texts in the context of the cultural dimension of the Bengali reception of Shakespeare and of English literature (e.g., Bagchi 1991, 156), although only Supriya Chaudhuri (2008) has so far examined the connections between those essays, Kapālakunḍalā, and Tagore’s “Śakuntala” essay. As far as the English-language scholarship on Indian receptions of Shakespeare is concerned, writings on vernacular-language adaptations of Shakespeare, led, among others, by scholars such as Poonam Trivedi, are only beginning to take their place in the academic world, and I see

Challenging the Civilising Mission  143 this book as a contribution to this welcome development. As I have mentioned in my introduction, the writings of scholars like Gauri Viswanathan and Jyotsna Singh have been mostly about applying canonical postcolonial theory top-down to the topic of Indian receptions of Shakespeare. Ania Loomba, in contrast, has drawn attention to the problems in the use of a number of key concepts of postcolonial theory in the study of Shakespeare reception in India (1997, 109–41), without focusing on responses to Shakespeare in Indian vernaculars. But the absence in their work of discussions of Bankim’s and Tagore’s essays (the latter having been available in translation from 2001 onwards), at least two of which have already been cited in English by Indian scholars writing in English, lends support to Supriya Chaudhuri’s observation that “this is partly owing to the relative insulation of Shakespeare criticism in the West from literature in the Indian languages” (2008, 233).54 To any scholar working on both European and Indian receptions of Shakespeare, the differences between the two fields in terms of methodology and scholarly standards are revealing. Compared to scholars working on Indian adaptations of Shakespeare, scholars of European adaptations accord far greater importance to the adaptations themselves vis-à-vis the Shakespearean “source” material, as well as to paratextual materials such as letters and critical commentaries,55 a considerable body of which is available both in the original languages and in English translations. In the case of gaps in translations of European paratextual materials, scholars are expected to fill them in by doing the necessary translations themselves; one simply cannot leave them out of purview, as scholars “applying” postcolonial theory top-down to the study of Shakespeare reception in India can and often do. This difference in scholarly standards and approach, which has made the absence of Indian-language adaptations and criticism acceptable in the English-language postcolonial scholarship on Indian receptions of Shakespeare produced in Western academia, has led to distortions in our understanding of Shakespeare reception in India (Indian responses to the plays themselves having been subsumed under the larger and more politically significant “image” of Shakespeare) as well as of responses to his work by figures like Bankim and Tagore, whose importance in the history of Indian literature have never been in question. In the case of Verdi’s late Shakespearean operas, we have seen how an adaptation-based approach that situates Otello and Falstaff in the context of Italian operatic traditions, Shakespeare’s reception in Italy, and the broader sociocultural history in which the operas were created leads to readings that are quite different from those arrived at by the topdown “application” of theoretical paradigms and reveals the unexpected presence of a strong anti-racist dimension on Verdi’s part, which in turn was connected to his anti-imperialist political stance. In this chapter, too, we see that an adaptation-based approach reveals that groundbreaking

144  Part 2 anticolonial readings of The Tempest were made by Bankim and Tagore, both of whom grew up in Calcutta, the capital of the British Empire, where English education was first introduced partly at the request of the local Bengali population that expressed its desire, in 1816, “to be informed of everything that the English gentlemen learnt, and [to] take that which they found good and liked best.”56 This chapter also shows the inadequacy of terms like “colonial mimicry” and “colonial hegemony” for the analysis of responses to Shakespeare by the major Bengali writers from the Age of Empire, writers who belonged to a community that came into contact with English education before all other parts of India save those from the Bombay Presidency but did not lose the autonomy of their imagination and their critical discernment as a consequence. It is time, therefore, that Bankim’s and Tagore’s pioneering creative and critical contributions to the history of the interpretation of The Tempest get the recognition they deserve.

Notes 1. Whether The Tempest can be read as a play about colonisation is still a matter of controversy among Shakespearean scholars, but is not the concern of this chapter. This is because, as Thomas Cartelli has noted, “for members of the non-Western interpretive community, The Tempest has long served as an unmistakable embodiment of colonialist presumption” (1999, 89). Thus, whether The Tempest can be read as a play about colonisation may be open to debate; but whether it has been read as one is not. For readings of the play as one about colonialism, see Barker and Hulme (2002), Brown (2003), Greenblatt (2007, 22–51), Hawkes (2002), and Nixon (1987). For arguments against or modifying such readings, or on the methodological problems behind such readings, see Marshall (1998), Kastan (1999, 169–82), Skura (1989), Stanivukovic (2006), and Willis (1989). Fuchs (1997) analyses the relationship of The Tempest to the colonisation of Ireland from a historicist perspective, rather than from new historicist or cultural materialist perspectives. For analyses of the methodological issues behind these debates, see Graff and Phelan (2000) and Pierce (1999). 2. This is the date normally assigned to Darío’s essay, for example, by Castells (1995, 165). 3. The essay was first published in Bangadarśan 4, no. 1 (April 1875): 1–9 [Baisakh 1282 BS]. For ease of reference, here and elsewhere in this book, the dates of publication in the Bengali calendrical system are given in square brackets. 4. It is in the shortened form of his first name that Bankimchandra Chatterjee, like many other Bengali authors, is referred to in the critical literature. Following a similar convention, I have referred to Michael Madhusudan Datta [Dutt] by his middle name, Madhusudan. 5. Based on their ideological positions, historians have variously labelled the Revolt of 1857 as the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny, the Indian Insurrection, and the First War of Independence, among others: on the Revolt, see Habib (1998), Joshi (2013), Pati (2007), and the essays in the collection 1857: Essays from Economic and Political Weekly (2008).

Challenging the Civilising Mission  145 6. For an English-language overview of the development of Bengali literature, see Kaviraj (2003); on the conceptual shift, see V. Dharwadker (2012). 7. This is the date given in Asitkumar Bandopadhyay (2019, 98). Tekchand Thakur was the nom de plume of Peary Chand Mitra. 8. On Russia, see Thaden (1954), Hudson (1999), and Taruskin (2009, 32); on India, see P. Chatterjee (1993, 76–115). 9. “Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury Lane” (1747; quoted in Malick 2005, 84). Malick adds that the Parsi theatre personnel often quoted these lines in print, sometimes followed by a translation into an Indian language such as Gujarati (Malick 2005, 94n3). 10. For an English-language overview of the impact of Sanskrit literature on Bankim’s oeuvre, see Bhattacharji (1994). 11. This was first published as a two-part essay, “Śekāl ār ekāl” (Then and now), Bangadarśan 3, no. 9 (December 1874): 393–401 [Poush 1281 BS]. This edition differs in some details from the version published in Bankimchandra Chatterjee (2010). 12. For a detailed study of Bankim’s schooling in Sanskrit, see Shyamali Chakraborty (2014). 13. For a fuller discussion of the reception histories of these stage adaptations, see Amitrasudan Bhattacharya (2014, 400–409). 14. “A new TV show based on Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Kapalkundala to launch soon,” Times of India, 19 October 2019, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tv/news/bengali/new-daily-soap-kapalkundala-to-launch-soon/ articleshow/71661649.cms. 15. For studies of Bankim’s ideational world, see Kaviraj (1998), Raychaudhuri (2002, 105–218), P. Chatterjee (1993, 76–95, 1996, 54–84), and Amiya Sen (2008). The standard biographies of Bankim are by Amitrasudan Bhattacharya ([1991] 2017; in Bengali) and Sisir Kumar Das (1996; in English). 16. Srischandra Majumdar recalls that, in around 1879–80, Bankim confided to him that, although he always felt more comfortable speaking and writing in English, he had stopped writing letters in it, since he found the language increasingly “insincere” (1982, 109, 118). 17. The widely cited influence of Milton on Madhusudan was, in fact, more at the level of language, as Bankim, writing of Meghanādavadha-kāvya, astutely observed: “Nor is the verse broken up into couplets complete in themselves, in the Sanskrit fashion, but, abounding like Milton’s in variety of pause, it seems to us musical and graceful, as well as a fitting vehicle for passionate feelings” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 115). 18. Although Bankim did not include Bhavabhūti in his “Śakuntalā” essay, he valued that dramatist more highly than any other Sanskrit-language dramatist save Kālidāsa. Bankim wrote his essay “Uttarcharit” on Bhavabhūti’s play Uttararāmacharit in the form of a serialised book review of a recent Bengali translation of that play, in which he compared appreciatively Bhavabhūti’s adaptation of the Rāmāyaṇa with Shakespeare’s adaptation of Homer in his Troilus and Cressida (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 141). The whole essay was originally published in five instalments in Bangadarśan 1, no. 2 (May 1872): 88–91 [Jaistha 1279 BS]; 1, no. 3 (June 1872): 107–17 [Ashar 1279 BS]; 1, no. 4 (July 1872): 163–70 [Shravan 1279 BS]; 1, no. 5 (August 1872): 201–08 [Bhadro 1279 BS]; and 1, no. 6 (September 1872): 268–78 [Ashwin 1279 BS]. Furthermore, in part 1, chapter  12 of the first edition of Durgeśnandinī, Bankim cited Bhavabhūti’s play Mālatīmādhava as being one of those works of Sanskrit literature in which the blessing of the literary muse is most pronounced, and replaced it with Uttararāmacharit in later

146  Part 2 editions (Amitrasudan Bhattacharya 2017, 83). It was from Mālatīmādhava that Bankim borrowed the name of Kapālakunḍalā, the heroine of his second novel. 19. Moreover, the epigraphs to each chapter of Kapālakunḍalā are from English, Sanskrit, and Bengali literature, with each language given roughly one-third of the total share. This, again, indicates Kapālakunḍalā’s negotiation of multiple literary traditions as a conscious novelistic strategy. 20. The great popularity of Byron and Sir Walter Scott among nineteenth-century Bengali writers provides another parallel with Europe in the same period, as numerous operas and musical works inspired by both these English authors demonstrate. Bankim himself developed the historical novel in Bengali literature, although he underplayed his dependence on Scott in this regard. For nineteenth-century musical works based on Byron, see Pascall (1988); for operas based on Scott, see Mitchell (1976, 1996). 21. The essay was first published in Bangadarśan 1, no. 2 (May 1872): 88 [Jaistha 1279 BE]. 22. As Amitrasudan Bhattacharya notes (1991, 139), this passage is missing from the version of the essay printed in the collected works (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 141–63). 23. In that summary, Bankim describes the Kāpālik as a “member of one of those strange sects which practiced the wild and terrible Tantric forms of ­worship—whose temple is the burning ghāṭ, and for whom no rite is too bloody or disgusting” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 120). 24. I have departed from the spelling of her name (Lutfunissa) in the excellent English translation of Kapālakunḍalā by Gautam Chakravarty that I  have cited throughout, since his transliteration of that name is not correct. Bankim’s own spelling in his English-language summary, Lutf-un-nissa, is more accurate, since it reflects the rules of doubling the “sun” letters (harf-ē-shamsi) like n in Arabic and Urdu and makes the meaning of the name (“the pleasure of a woman”) immediately evident to those who know those languages; however, Bankim adds an s in “nisa,” which is not uncommon in English spellings of that word, but which I have dropped since it does not transliterate accurately the orthography in the original language. The name’s meaning and historical origin are significant for my analysis and will be discussed later in this book. 25. The whole episode where Navakumār spies on Kapālakunḍalā and Lutf-unnisa—in male disguise—is, in fact, strongly reminiscent of the handkerchief scene in Shakespeare’s Othello. 26. This is the ending in the final edition (1892) of the novel that was published in Bankim’s lifetime. In earlier versions, only Kapālakunḍalā dies, while Navakumār is implausibly rescued by the Kāpālik. For this reason, the ending of Kapālakunḍalā as summarised in English by Bankim himself in his essay “Bengali Literature” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 123), written after the publication of the second edition, does not match the ending upon which Bankim finally settled. 27. Dinabandhu Mitra was Bankim’s friend and one of the leading Bengali dramatists of the times. Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay was Bankim’s older brother and a writer himself. 28. The article can be downloaded from www.southasiaarchive.com/Content/ sarf.120198/218323. In 1918, Lalitkumar Bandyopadhyay went further and connected Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā with the noble savage figure and suggested, in addition to The Tempest and Śakuntalā, the influence of JeanJacques Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (especially Paul et Virginie

Challenging the Civilising Mission  147 [1784] and La chaumière indienne [The Indian cottage; 1790]), and Byron (the figure of Haidee in Don Juan, 1818–23), among others (6–36). Bankim quotes from Byron’s Don Juan in the epigraph of part 1, chapter  3 of the novel. As for the French references, although no direct proof of Bankim’s knowledge of the texts mentioned can be provided, Bankim seems to have known French, since he reviewed Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire’s Le Bouddha et sa réligion (1860) in his English-language essay, “Buddhism and the Sankhya Philosophy” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 125–36). 29. As Tagore observed in 1895, Rammohan “felt it necessary to explain in a Preface the principles for comprehending prose,” when translating the Vedāntasūtra into Bengali in 1815 (2010, 182). Rammohan’s Bengali translation was dated 1815 by Collet and Sarkar (1914, 23). 30. The quotation is from Bankim’s own English-language summary of Kapālakunḍalā in his essay “Bengali Literature.” 31. Comparing Bankim with Flaubert, novelist Amitav Ghosh has observed that, in his novels, “Bankim has, in a sense, gone straight to the heart of the realist novel’s ‘mimetic ambition’: detailed descriptions of everyday life . . . are therefore central to his experiment with this new form” (2016, 25). On Bankim’s depiction of nature, see F. Bhattacharya (1994). 32. For a reading of The Tempest as being primarily about dynastic succession, see Kastan (1999, 169–82). 33. Indeed, by the early seventeenth century, Portuguese pirates, known in Bengal as the “harmads,” had a strong presence in the Bay of Bengal and were mentioned in Bengali folk ballads and iconographic representations in Bengali terracotta art from the mid-to-late seventeenth century. See Pearson (2010, 21), Rila Mukherjee (2008), Deloche and Mitra (1991, 12, photograph no. 23), and Amrith (2013). 34. Bankim did not always regard the Muslim as the foreign Other. In his essay, “Bhāratvarsher swādhinatā ebong parādhīnatā” (India’s independence and subjugation), initially published as “Prāchīn o ādhunik Bhāratvarsha” (Ancient and modern India) in Bangadarśan 2, no. 5 (August 1873): 220–29 [Bhadro 1280 BS] and 2, no. 6 (September 1873): 241–47 [Ashwin 1280 BS], Bankim made a distinction between parādhīnatā (“subjugation”) and paratantra (“foreign rule”), and argued that if the ruler of a country was of a different ethnic or religious identity, it did not mean that the country was subjugated. (Bankim cites King George II of England, of German origin, as an example.) Instead, a country was truly subjugated if its original inhabitants felt harassed because of the foreign ruler, or if the economic wealth of the colony was being depleted in order to serve the interests of the colonising country. This distinction led Bankim to state that India under the British was a colony because of the economic exploitation of the former by the latter, for, under “home charges,” India had to pay for the costs of wars that served British interests. In contrast, India under Akbar was both free and independent (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 211–12). In Kapālakunḍalā, both the Pathans and the Portuguese are shown as committing actions that destroy the lives of Bengali women, making these foreigners colonisers under Bankim’s first criterion. 35. Like Navakumār, Ferdinand, too, has a sister, Claribel, whose marriage to the King of Tunis prompts Gonzalo to compare her with “widow Dido” and prompts a conversation (The Tempest 2.1.77–86) whose significance has been much discussed (see, for example, Wilson-Okamura [2003]). However, Claribel does not appear in the play, and the parallels between her and Shyamāsundarī cannot be pursued further in the way those between Navakumār and Ferdinand can.

148  Part 2 6. On kulīn Brahmin marriages, see Karlekar (1995) and R. Majumdar (2004). 3 37. Bangadarśan 2, no. 3 (June 1873): 97–109 [Ashar 1280 BS]. 38. Indeed, as part 1, chapter  8 shows (Chakravarty 2005, 24; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2018, 96), at the time of her escape with Navakumār, Kapālakunḍalā was, like countless nineteenth-century child-brides who would be married off for life to a man not of their choice, completely ignorant about what “marriage” meant or entailed. 39. Bangadarśan 2, no. 2 (May  1873): 57–64 [Jaishtha 1280 BS], 2, no. 3 (June  1873): 116–23 [Ashar 1280 BS]; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 328–51. 40. Bangadarśan 3, no. 1 (April 1874): 38–46 [Baisakh 1281 BS]; Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 218–19. 41. See “Sāmya” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2010, 345–51) and Raychaudhuri’s (2002, 142–43) analysis; “Prāchīna ebong navīnā” and its analysis, including excerpts in English translation, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (1994, 304–5); and T. Sarkar (2001, chapter  4, especially 146–47) for her analysis of the figure of Kapālakunḍalā. On Bankim’s views on “the woman question” in his conservative phase, see Guha (1997, 50–55). 42. Since Lutf-un-nisa has other names as well in Bankim’s novel—Padmāvatī, before her conversion to Islam, and Motibibi, the name she assumes upon her return to Saptagrām and by which name she is referred to for the major part—Bankim’s choice of this unusual name is not incidental. In his Englishlanguage summary of the novel, Bankim refers to the character exclusively as Lutf-un-nisa. 43. On the imbrications of colonial rule and changing attitudes towards love and marriage in nineteenth-century Bengal, see Raychaudhuri (2000). 44. Consider, for instance, the ancient and now-decaying Hindu city of Saptagrām from pre-Mughal times in which Navakumār lives; the Mughal court in Agra from which Lutf-un-nisa returns; and the deltaic region of Bengal where Kapālakunḍalā has grown up, from whose beaches European ships can be seen moving around like “gigantic birds” in the Bay of Bengal (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 121). 45. We have seen the parallels between Italy and India in this book; on Egypt, see Baron (2005). 46. In part 2, chapter 4 of the novel, Bankim shows Kapālakunḍalā giving away the jewellery given to her by the generous Lutf-un-nisa, an act that represents the sylvan girl’s lack of worldliness and one that can symbolically be read to indicate her repudiation of the kind of culture into which Lutf-un-nisa welcomes her. But other interpretations are also possible. The epigraph to this chapter, from Madhusudan’s Meghanādavadha-kāvya, alludes to the section in the Rāmāyaṇa in which Sītā, abducted by the demonic rakshasa Rāvana, casts her ornaments along the route in order to provide clues to Rāma (Chakravarty 2005, 39). Seen in this light, Kapālakunḍalā’s action could be seen as symbolising her devotion to her husband. But two chapters later, significantly titled “In Captivity,” Bankim’s epigraph alludes to Kālidāsa’s epic poem Kumārasambhavam in which the throwing aside of ornaments is linked to the preference of the ascetic life for that of the married state (Chakravarty 2005, 44n1). In the light of Kapālakunḍalā’s decision to end her life in order to escape from a stifling marriage, a reading of her giving away Lutf-un-nisa’s jewellery as signifying her natural preference for the ascetic life cannot be overlooked either. 47. Bankimchandra Chatterjee (2010, 218–19); see also Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (1994, 304–5).

Challenging the Civilising Mission  149 48. One telling instance from Bankim’s English-language essay “A Popular Literature” is the following: “It would be difficult to conceive a poem more typical than the Gitagovinda of the Bengali character as it had become after the iron heel of the Musalman [sic] tyrant had set its mark on the shoulders of the nation. From the beginning to the end it does not contain a single expression of manly feeling—of womanly feeling there is a great deal—or a single elevated sentiment” (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 98; emphasis in the original). 49. For his analysis, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya largely draws upon a chapter that Bankim had originally placed at the beginning of part 4 of his novel but discarded in later editions. 50. The essay was first published in Bangadarśan 3, no. 9 (December 1874): 325– 27 [Poush 1281 BS]. 51. Such a statement could be read as Bankim’s endorsement of colonial rule— cultural hegemony at work. That said, even if one were to reject the argument that Bankim may have written so in order to placate the British, whom he criticises for the better part of the novel and who were, after all, in power, one needs to keep in mind the affective dimension, too. As Ānandamaṭh’s reception history shows, the message of learning from British rule never left any mark on its admirers, most of whom responded far more strongly to the xenophobic war cry of the novel. 52. Tagore first presented “Bankimchandra” as a talk at the Kalighat Sahitya Sammilani (the Kalighat Literary Association) in Calcutta on 28 June 1923 [8 Ashar 1330 BS] and first published it in 1923 [Bhadro 1330 BS]. “Sāhityarūp” is the concluding section of Tagore’s essay “Śāhityer pathe” (On the literary path), first published in the journal Prabāsī (1927; Baisakh 1334 BS) and reprinted on 13 April 1928 in the Anandabazar patrika, the most important among Bengali-language newspapers. On the historical background of these two essays, see B. Sarkar (2009, 45, 75–78, 228). 53. Michael Collins suggests that Tagore was sceptical about cosmopolitanism, and instead suggests a “liberal ‘politics of friendship’ ” as an alternative means of theorising Tagore’s attempts to reach out across cultural boundaries. I agree with Collins’s view that figures like Tagore were important for the establishment of what he calls “parallel modernities” (2012, 118). However, it seems to me that, as a result of Collins’s focus only on Tagore’s Englishlanguage writings, the latter’s active efforts to bring together multiple ­traditions, both national and international, in various art forms, and his valorisation of a rootedly cosmopolitan outlook in his Bengali-language ­ ­writings do not get sufficient critical consideration in Collins’s essay. For this reason, my reading of Tagore and the early Bankim as nationalist cosmopolitans is closer to Williams’s view of Tagore and his friend W. B. Yeats as “cosmopolitan nationalists” (2007, 69). 54. Singh does cite Bankim’s “Śakuntalā” essay, quoted by Jasodhara Bagchi, and states that English literature was naturalised and domesticated in Indian, and particularly Bengali, culture. However, in suggesting that “a new class of Bengalis” who “emerged from the ‘colonial apparatus,’ . . . were specifically shaped by the assumptions of the ‘civilising mission’ ” (1996, 132–33), Singh fails to grasp the thrust of Bagchi’s argument. Indeed, the problem of Singh’s reading is that she seeks to extend the analysis of Bagchi, whom she quotes, in the direction of the model proposed by Viswanathan when, in fact, Bagchi’s own essay offers a refutation of Viswanathan’s analysis. 55. For instance, although Verdi’s and Boito’s letters are carefully preserved, published, and translated, there is no complete collection of Bankim’s letters to

150  Part 2 the best of my knowledge, though his English-language letters are widely available. Similarly, the editions of Shakespeare that Bankim used have not been preserved, and Leah Marcus (2017) does not offer any information regarding which edition of The Tempest was widely read in Calcutta in the 1850s and 1860s. 56. Evidence of William Wilberforce Bird, quoted in R. Chaudhuri (2002, 11–12); see also R. Chaudhuri (2002, 20n28) for her trenchant critique of Viswanathan’s analysis of the same quote (1989, 43).

4 Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation of Shakespeare From Nineteenth-Century Bengal Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bhrāntivilās and Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth Introduction This chapter, with which I conclude my study of adaptations of Shakespeare from the nineteenth century, addresses two specific questions raised by adaptation theory. The first is: what were the kinds of transculturations that occurred in the case of minor Shakespeare adaptations from colonial Bengal? Did their adapters show anything of the sense of agency and freedom that Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore brought to their exceptionally insightful responses to The Tempest? I answer this question through an examination of an adaptation of The Comedy of Errors (henceforth Errors) by Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar (Bandyopadhyay) (1820–91), one of the greatest nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholars from India and, along with Raja Rammohun Roy, the most significant of social reformers from Bengal in that century, especially with regard to the question of women’s rights. Vidyasagar wrote a number of primers and textbooks that were enormously successful both during his lifetime and afterwards, and he was a significant contributor to the development of Bengali prose. However, the critical consensus on his original work as a writer and adapter is that it was of a lower order than those of Madhusudan, Bankim, and Tagore. Vidyasagar’s prose adaptation of Errors, Bhrāntivilās (1869), was translated into at least one other Indian language, Kannada, and was adapted into a Bengali film in 1963. Errors has been one of the most popular among Shakespeare’s plays in India and has been adapted several times, even though it is one of Shakespeare’s early, lesser works, a judgement with which Vidyasagar was himself in agreement.1 An examination of Vidyasagar’s Bhrāntivilās provides insights into the kind of strategies of adaptation minor adapters of Shakespeare took, which in turn throws light on Bhrāntivilās’s imbrications with the “woman question” discussed in the previous chapter. The second question, related to the first, is: to what extent can adaptations be subversive without any kind of strategic intervention by the adapter? An answer to this question also throws light on Homi Bhabha’s

152  Part 2 ideas regarding the ways in which “slippages” engendered by colonial mimicry end up being “at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha 1994, 86), or fail to be so. An adaptation that I examine in order to answer the second question and, by extension, of the effect of subversive “slippages” is the eponymous Bengali-language adaptation Macbeth (1893) by Girishchandra Ghosh, the most critically acclaimed among nineteenth-century Bengali actors and a popular and prolific playwright himself. It is perhaps the only example of a Shakespeare adaptation from colonial India that, surprisingly, transculturates Shakespeare as minimally as possible, not only in terms of the verbal text but also in terms of the staging. Since Shakespeare’s own Macbeth has been subjected to multiple—and mutually contradictory—readings, a straightforward adaptation of it ought to be open to such contradictory readings as well. An examination of Ghosh’s adaptation and its history of reception is, therefore, useful for us in examining the extent to which “slippages” can generate subversive readings. PART I: VIDYASAGAR’S BHRĀNTIVILĀS

Life and Times of Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar2 Unlike Bankim, who was born in a relatively affluent family in a city situated close to Calcutta, or Tagore, who was born in what was then one of Asia’s richest families in the heart of the city, Ishwarchandra Bandyopadhyay was born in an impoverished Bengali Brahmin family in Birsingha, a village situated 120 kilometres west of Calcutta, on 26 September 1820. His father, Thakurdas, decided to bring Ishwarchandra to Calcutta in 1829 in the hope of providing him a better education. Thakurdas’s employer gave father and child free board and lodging, while one of the employer’s relatives, a lady called Raimani, helped the young boy cope with the separation from his family by providing the kind of maternal affection that Ishwarchandra would remember with gratitude for the rest of his life and which, we are told, played an important role in his becoming the preeminent advocate for women’s rights in Bengal after the death of Rammohun Roy in 1833. Unlike Hindoo College, the place for a Western-style education for the more financially privileged Bengali elite, Sanskrit College, which had started taking in Brahmin and Vaidya (i.e., Hindu upper-caste) students in 1824, was, along with Fort William College and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, one of the principal seats for research into modern Indian languages, and Ishwarchandra joined Sanskrit College in 1829. The syllabus there was not only confined to Sanskrit literature and other traditional Indian disciplines—English was also taught, as was anatomy, the latter discipline being so successful with the students that the college was able to run a small hospital on its premises from 1834. It was here that Ishwarchandra had his first English lessons in 1830; he subsequently went

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  153 on to earn a prize for the academic year 1833–34 (A. Bandyopadhyay 1970, 39). But English lessons were discontinued at Sanskrit College in 1835, the year in which Macaulay’s now-infamous Minute on Indian Education made English education “virtually the only means of social and economic mobility” for Bengalis (Roy 1994, 98). Ishwarchandra was among the student petitioners from the college requesting the reinstatement of English-language classes. They were reinstated in 1842, a year after Ishwarchandra had left the college, leaving him with an imperfect knowledge of the language. In 1839, however, Ishwarchandra had successfully passed the Hindu Law Committee examination, the certificate of which, for the first time, referred to him as “Vidyasagar” (ocean of knowledge), a name by which he would be subsequently known for the rest of his life and afterwards. As we shall see, Vidyasagar’s mastery over traditional Sanskrit language and literature, his deep knowledge of Hindu philosophy and law, and his knowledge of Western disciplines and of English, a language he would go on to master in the 1840s, would together have a profound effect on his work as a translator, social reformer, and pedagogue. These factors need to be kept in mind when we examine his deliberate departures from Shakespeare in Bhrāntivilās. Funding at Fort William College, where Vidyasagar took his first job in 1841, had been drastically reduced from the late 1820s onwards, and Vidyasagar started making Bengali translations of works written in Hindi and Sanskrit for pedagogical purposes. He also went back to learning English from some prominent Calcuttans. By 1846, G. T. Marshall, the secretary of the college, could write that Vidyasagar had “a very considerable degree of knowledge of English” (Tripathi 2004, 31), and it was his mastery over both Sanskrit and English that stood him in good stead professionally. Nevertheless, he continued to study Shakespeare every evening with Anandakrishna Basu till as late as 1849 (A. Bandyopadhyay 1970, 41).3 By the end of his studies, Vidyasagar had come to appreciate Shakespeare so much that he would present exceptionally gifted students with editions of the complete works, one of whom, Chandramukhi Basu, was in 1882 the first Bengali woman to be awarded an MA degree. Over the question of the relative merits of Shakespeare vis-à-vis Kālidāsa, Vidyasagar’s favourite Sanskrit writer, he opposed Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, the poet and translator of Shakespeare, when the latter declared Shakespeare the greater writer, pointing out that Hemchandra did not know Sanskrit, and hence was not in a position to pass judgement on the merits of Kālidāsa (A. Bandyopadhyay 1970, 43–44). His own position on Shakespeare, as articulated in his preface to Bhrāntivilās, was as follows: Through his thirty-five plays Shakespeare has become immortal all over the world. His dramatic oeuvre as a whole displays poetic qualities and craftsmanship of the very highest order.  .  .  . Many people assert that not only was he England’s greatest poet but also better

154  Part 2 than any other poet from any other time and place. People like me feel that any discussion as to whether this verdict is accurate or unbiased is nothing but a display of impertinence. (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:903) Vidyasagar’s attitude towards Shakespeare suggests both a sincere veneration on his part and an unwillingness to place the English dramatist over his favourite Indian dramatist: indeed, he did not see any point in comparing the two. As we shall see, Vidyasagar exercised his agency to engage with Shakespeare on far freer terms than what an ab initio assumption of cultural hegemony might suggest, and in the changes he made while adapting Errors, he showed a hand that was strikingly original for its times, as we shall see. Some of these changes, which I discuss in the next section, have been commented on by scholars like Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay, but the most consistent of these changes, namely, Vidyasagar’s subversion of patriarchal values that are articulated (and, to an extent, problematised) in Shakespeare’s early play, has never been commented upon in the critical literature on Vidyasagar. This is all the more strange because one of Vidyasagar’s principal claims to fame was his activism for women’s rights, and there is an overt connection between Vidyasagar’s activism and the adaptation he made of Errors. While Shakespeare’s play became very popular in India and was adapted several times in the twentieth century, sometimes with Vidyasagar’s adaptation as either a primary or intermediate source, it is his Bhrāntivilās that is more radical than the Indian adaptations that followed over the next century and a half; indeed, even in Anglophone scholarship, feminist readings of Errors would start emerging more than half a century after Vidyasagar’s adaptation.4 Vidyasagar wrote Bhrāntivilās after nearly two decades of activism on behalf of the rights of women, which he began soon after he joined Sanskrit College in December 1850 and became its principal the following month. He started by playing an important role in furthering the cause of female education, regarding which a movement that had begun in Bengal from the 1830s starting to yield concrete results from the 1850s onwards. Vidyasagar had on his side reformist Bengalis and sympathetic Englishmen, and both groups met with considerable opposition from their conservative Indian and racist British counterparts. Nevertheless, Bethune Girls’ School was established in 1849; it became a college in 1879, counting among its first graduates Chandramukhi Basu and Kadambini Ganguly, the latter being the second Indian woman to qualify successfully as a practitioner of Western medicine.5 An article Vidyasagar published in 1850, on the evils of child marriage, led to reforms raising the age of consent. His two pamphlets on widow remarriage in 1855, which he later translated into English, caused a social upheaval and eventually led to the first widow remarriage in Bengal in 1856.6

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  155 Even after the movement lost its momentum in the 1870s, Vidyasagar, whom Bankim described as a Bengali Don Quixote, went on to contribute from his own considerable personal fortune made from primers, readers, and translations, to support the cause financially till as late as 1890, the penultimate year of his life, and he regarded his campaign for widow remarriage as the “single greatest good deed of his life” (Hatcher 2012, 1). As mentioned in the previous chapter, Vidyasagar also took up the case against kulīn polygamy, providing numerical data and scriptural passages to buttress his argument for banning the practice. But since no legislation could be passed before the Revolt of 1857, after which the British Crown took over the rule of India and became wary of introducing laws that could have irked the Hindu majority, Vidyasagar failed in his attempts to have it banned. Around this time, Vidyasagar also faced racism and resigned from government service in 1858. As we saw in the previous chapter, this was the time when Bengal’s colonial encounter with European thought ushered in the period of “modern” Bengali literature, as hopes of transforming India with help from the British started becoming increasingly remote, and a spirit of nationalist cosmopolitanism started to gain ground. After a series of vitriolic exchanges with Taranath Tarkavachaspati, an old and extremely close friend who had supported Vidyasagar on the issue of widow remarriage but had opposed Vidyasagar’s attempts to halt kulīn polygamy,7 Vidyasagar started spending more and more time outside of Calcutta from 1873, living among the Santhals, a tribal community in Bengal, in a village that now houses a small museum in his honour. Vidyasagar went on to establish and support educational institutions in a private capacity, but when he died in 1891, his major work was long over, and his reputation as one of India’s leading social reformers had become permanent: indeed, it is the reformer that has come to be celebrated more than the scholar and writer. Vidyasagar the translator and adapter was, in fact, more inventive than he has been given credit for. Apart from writing pedagogical books, he began translating texts from his days at Fort William College, beginning with Betāl panchaviṃśati (Twenty-five tales of Betāl; 1847),8 and continuing with prose adaptations of Sanskrit texts such as Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā (1854) and Sītār vanavās (The exile of Sītā; 1860), based partly on the Rāmāyaṇa and partly on Bhavabhūti’s Uttararāmacharit, Sanskrit texts whose importance for Bankim we have already seen. Vidyasagar also adapted fables of Aesop and Jean de la Fontaine to produce Kathāmālā (Garland of stories; 1856). Bhrāntivilās (1869) was the last of his adaptations. Although he was a not a creative writer himself, Vidyasagar recognised talent and supported Madhusudan financially during the latter’s years as a student of law in Europe, but a rivalry was fomented by the press between Vidyasagar and Bankim, who was

156  Part 2 indebted to Vidyasagar’s contributions to the language, but whose creative gifts were superior to Vidyasagar’s own. In “Bengali Literature” (1871), Bankim wrote of him: There are few Bengalis now living who have a greater claim to our respect than Pundit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar. His exertions in the cause of Hindu widows, the noble courage with which he, a pundit and a professor, first advocated their cause, the patient research and indefatigable industry with which he sought to maintain it, his large-hearted benevolence and his labours in the cause of vernacular education—all these things combine to place him in the first rank of the benefactors of his country. His claims to the respect and gratitude of his countrymen are many and great, but high literary excellence is certainly not among them. . . . [B]eyond translating and primermaking Vidyasagar has done nothing. . . . Of these it is enough to say that they are excellent translations or adaptations, better probably than anything else of the same kind in Bengali. (Bankimchandra Chatterjee 2011, 109) In an anonymous English essay written in the same journal in which “Bengali Literature” was first published, and whose style strongly suggests Bankim’s hand, the writer expressed regret that Vidyasagar chose to adapt such an insignificant play of Shakespeare’s as Errors. This initial condition of reception of Bhrāntivilās, based as it was on a false dichotomy between Vidyasagar the great reformer and scholar, on the one hand, and Vidyasagar the unadventurous translator-cum-adapter, on the other, has led to the neglect of the radical aspect of that adaptation, a neglect that has doggedly persisted among scholars ever since. It is, therefore, necessary now to examine how Vidyasagar radically altered the ideological content of Errors in tune with his own activities for bettering the rights of women.

Rereading The Comedy of Errors: Bhrāntivilās and Its Intertexts The critical literature on Vidyasagar’s Bhrāntivilās often quotes from the author’s explanatory preface that his adaptation Indianised the European names found in Shakespeare since, without such a strategy of transculturation, readers would lose interest (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:903). The preface does not mention changes of any other kind. We are told, therefore, by later critics that Vidyasagar’s adaptation is “otherwise faithful to the original” (Verma 2005, 246; Allen 2014, 169). As we shall see, in claiming that his departures from Errors consisted only of changes in names, Vidyasagar was underplaying the extent of his intervention, and readers and scholars have taken him at his word for more than a century and a half. In fact, Vidyasagar knew that the goal of creating idiomatic translations from one language

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  157 into another that were at the same time faithful to the original, was practically unrealisable. In the preface to his Jīvancharit, which contained brief biographies of nine European scientists (1847), for which he presented, in an appendix, scientific terms in Bengali that were newly coined by him, side by side with their English equivalents, Vidyasagar wrote: “It is extremely difficult to make a faithful Bengali translation of an English original. The two languages are entirely divergent in terms of traditions and genres (rīti o rachanā); hence, even when the translator takes the greatest care, the translated product ends up revealing differences in creative practice (rītivailakshaṇya), interpretation (arthapratītir vyātikram), and meaning (mūlārther vaikalya)” (Vidyasagar 2006, 1:193). Paradoxically, with regard to being “faithful” to the original, which Bengali critics, like the majority of their English counterparts of their time and later, regarded as a sign of lack of originality but which Vidyasagar, a scholarly genius, knew as being an extremely difficult task, he succeeded remarkably well. Vidyasagar observed that faithful translations from English to Bengali, like those by his contemporary Akshaykumar Dutta, often betrayed English influence in the unidiomatic nature of the Bengali translation. In contrast, Vidyasagar sought to strike a middle ground between remaining faithful to his sources and writing idiomatically in Bengali, and earned the grudging respect of his contemporary, the writer Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, for his success in this regard (S. Basu 1993, 137). Because of the “faithfulness” of Vidyasagar’s adaptation at the level of linguistic equivalence (inasmuch as it is possible), and due to the fact that each of Bhrāntivilās’s five chapters corresponds to each of the five acts of Errors, the two textual sources of Bhrāntivilās can easily be identified: these are the original text of Errors and Charles and Mary Lamb’s retelling in their Tales from Shakespeare (1806; henceforth Tales), with Vidyasagar either making his own additions, or adding prose translations from Errors in the case of passages left out from Tales. An example of the first kind of elaboration can be seen in the opening paragraph of Bhrāntivilās. The one-sentence paragraph with which the retelling of Errors in Tales begins, goes as follows: “The states of Syracuse and Ephesus being at variance, there was a cruel law made at Ephesus, ordaining that if any merchant of Syracuse was seen in the city of Ephesus, he was to be put to death, unless he could pay a thousand marks for the ransom of his life” (1985, 181). And this is how Bhrāntivilās begins: Once upon a time, there used to be two famous kingdoms, Hemakūta [Syracuse] and Jayasthala [Ephesus]. Since a serious conflict arose between the two kingdoms, it was decided that if any citizen of Hemakūta were to enter Jayasthala either on business or for any

158  Part 2 other reason, he would be charged a very heavy penalty, failing to pay which would result in a death sentence. A similar law was passed in Jayasthala against the residents of Hemakūta. Both places were centres of commerce, and the people used to trade with each other. After the passing of this heinous rule in both kingdoms, their commercial activity, which used to spread far and wide, gradually came to a stop. (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:904) Since Vidyasagar makes the narrative unfold in linear fashion while incorporating more from Shakespeare than did Charles and Mary Lamb, Vijayavarmā, the Duke Menaphon figure in Vidyasagar’s adaptation, appears twice in Bhrāntivilās, the first time in chapter 1, corresponding to his only mention in Tales (184), and the second time in chapter 5, corresponding to his only mention in Errors (5.1.368). Identifying Errors and Tales as Vidyasagar’s textual sources enables us to locate the points at which Vidyasagar borrowed from either version or departed from both of them, and it is in his departures from both his sources that the connections of Bhrāntivilās with Vidyasagar’s involvement in women’s rights issues becomes evident. In order to facilitate my analysis of Vidyasagar’s adaptation, I provide a complete list of the changes of names and places that Vidyasagar made in Bhrāntivilās: Syracuse → Hemakūta Ephesus → Jayasthala Epidamnium → Malayapura Corinth → Karnapura Egeon, Merchant of Syracuse → Somadatta Solinus, Duke of Ephesus → Vijayavallabha Emilia, an abbess at Ephesus → Lāvanyamayī Adriana → Chandraprabhā Luciana → Vilāsinī Antipholus → Chiranjīva (both) Dromio → Kiṅkara (both) Balthazar, a merchant → Ratnadatta Angelo → Vasupriya Courtesan → Aparājitā Doctor Pinch → Vidyādhara Menaphon → Vijayavarmā (In Errors, Luce/Nell is mentioned only once as the house cook; she has no name in Bhrāntivilās) A number of the names of persons and places, such as the names Chiranjīva and Somadatta, can be traced back to Vidyasagar’s Betāl panchaviṃśati,9 whose earliest textual sources go back to the eleventh

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  159 century and carry connotations of ancient India. In keeping with such a tendency towards transculturation, Vidyasagar replaces references to food items like “capon,” mentioned in Errors (1.2.44), which was in all likelihood not eaten by upper-caste Hindus in ancient India, with more general terms, and he replaces European units of time with an Indian one (daṇḍa). Vidyasagar omits the jokes pertaining to European national stereotypes and the accompanying sexual innuendos in Errors (e.g., in 3.2.70–162) while managing to retain the humour (2006, 2:922–23).10 The setting of Bhrāntivilās in ancient India needs to be kept in mind when we analyse Vidyasagar’s departures from Errors and the Tales. The first of Vidyasagar’s departures at an ideational level occurs in chapter 2, corresponding to the beginning of act 2 of Errors. As Adriana fumes over her husband’s coming late, Errors has Luciana say the following lines: LUCIANA  Good

sister, let us dine, and never fret. A man is master of his liberty; Time is their master, and, when they see time They’ll go or come: if so, be patient, sister” (2.1.6–9)

In the beginning of chapter  2 of Bhrāntivilās, these lines, uttered by Vilāsinī as she tries to console Chandraprabhā, are adapted as follows: Men are, in all matters, guided completely by their wills; women are forced to follow them. Women run their families in fear of their husbands’ anger; if men were forced to follow their wives instead, there would have been no end to the good fortune of women. Women are entirely subjugated; hence they have to carry on with their lives through suffering. They cannot afford to be indignant. (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:911–12) Vilāsinī sounds far less cheerful than Luciana, her Shakespearean counterpart. In a speech based on biblical and other religious writings,11 Luciana goes on to argue why women need to submit to their husbands’ will: LUCIANA:  Why, headstrong liberty is lashed with woe.   There’s nothing situate under heaven’s eye   But hath his bound, in earth, in sea, in sky:   The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls,   Are their males’ subjects and at their controls.   Men, more divine, the masters of all these,   Lords of the wide world and wild watery seas,   Indued with intellectual sense and souls,   Of more preeminence than fish and fowls,   Are masters to their females, and their lords:   Then let your will attend on their accords. (2.1.15–25)

160  Part 2 Luciana further states, “Ere I learn to love, I’ll practice to obey” (2.1.29). Vidyasagar’s Vilāsinī too, surprisingly, echoes similar sentiments. Shakespeare’s Adriana quickly goes on to express her not-so-groundless suspicion over her husband’s philandering, only to be told that if, after marrying, Luciana found out that her husband had cheated on her, “Till he come home again, I would forbear” (2.1.31). In contrast, Vidyasagar’s Chandraprabhā, after a pause, responds to her sister by stating, “I think that, once you get married, you’d be able to able to bear with the dominance and tyranny of men with perfect ease” (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:912). This utterance is an innovation of Vidyasagar, since the corresponding passage in his other textual source (Tales) is as follows: “Adriana, the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, was very angry when she heard that her husband said he had no wife; for she was of a jealous temper, and she said her husband meant that he loved another lady better than herself; and she began to fret, and say unkind words of jealousy and reproach of her husband; and her sister Luciana, who lived with her, tried in vain to persuade her out of her groundless suspicions” (Lamb and Lamb 1985, 186). We see, therefore, that from the very beginning of Bhrāntivilās, the two sisters agree that the institution of marriage puts curbs on a woman’s liberty, with one accepting the harsh reality and the other resisting its implications. Moreover, since Chandraprabhā speaks in a measured, thoughtful manner, she does not come across as the headstrong, impulsive woman Adriana is in Shakespeare’s play. In creating the personality of Vilāsinī in Bhrāntivilās, Vidyasagar takes up and elaborates on the way her Shakespearean counterpart, Luciana, shows a greater degree of affinity with Adriana than what act 2 suggests, since in act 5 of Errors Luciana does stand up for her sister (5.1.87–89). ­Vidyasagar’s changes to the Adriana figure, Chandraprabhā, also run the risk of simplifying the complexity of emotional responses any woman going through a difficult phase in her marriage may exhibit. In Bhrāntivilās, Chiranjīva of Jayasthala is said to have had a cordial ­relationship with Aparājitā, the courtesan figure (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:930), which justifies Chandraprabhā’s remonstrances with her husband over her perceived neglect (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:915). Less plausibly, this state of affairs does not make Chandraprabhā lose her composure or her self-esteem, as does her counterpart Adriana in Errors (2.1.86–100). Gone also are Adriana’s two homilies on adultery (2.1.103–14, 2.2.136–52). More­ over, when Vidyasagar adapts Luciana’s and Adriana’s conversation of 4.2.1–28, Adriana’s words, which lend themselves equally well to either a comic or a sentimental onstage realisation, acquire a more serious tone as Vidyasagar adapts them for Chandraprabhā (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:927). The most remarkable of all the changes, one that follows from the preceding ones in Bhrāntivilās, is Vidyasagar’s omission of the entire conversation between the Abbess and Adriana in which the former blames the latter’s jealousy and ill temper as the causes for marital discord, one

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  161 that makes Adriana realise that the Abbess “did betray me to my own reproof” (5.1.49–91).12 This omission was made not with the need to abbreviate the original, since, as I  have shown earlier, Vidyasagar usually made prose translations from Errors of passages that were left out in Tales. Indeed, the Abbess’s stern words to Adriana are fully retained in the Tales, as a comparison of the Abbess’s words (5.1.68–86) with the following passage clearly reveals: The lady abbess, having drawn this full confession from the jealous Adriana, now said: “And therefore comes it that your husband is mad. The venomous clamour of a jealous woman is a more deadly poison than a mad dog’s tooth. It seems his sleep was hindered by your railing; no wonder that his head is light: and his meat was sauced with your upbraidings; unquiet meals make ill digestions, and that has thrown him into this fever. You say his sports were disturbed by your brawls; being debarred from the enjoyment of society and recreation, what could ensue but dull melancholy and comfortless despair? The consequence is then, that your jealous fits have made your husband mad.” (Lamb and Lamb 1985, 192–93) A comparison of Bhrāntivilās with its two source texts makes it clear that Vidyasagar’s omission, in his adaptation, of this passage from the Tales and its equivalent in Shakespeare, like the other changes made by Vidyasagar, have a protofeminist orientation that is entirely his own contribution to the retelling. These changes could not have been occasioned by the need to make Errors more acceptable to contemporary Bengali tastes, since Vidyasagar knew better than any other person how strongly patriarchal many of his Bengali contemporaries, including those with an English education, were. Nor were they of a kind that occurs because no language or literary genres in a given language can be mapped exactly onto another, resulting in inevitable slippages arising out of intercultural translation. Instead, these were alterations that were carefully designed and thought through, such that the ramifications of the changes Vidyasagar made in his adaptation of the beginning of act 2 of Errors were meticulously followed through in the rest of his adaptation: even Adriana’s speech in Errors (2.2.180–86), in which she places herself in a natural position of inferiority (“Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,” etc.) is completely altered in Bhrāntivilās in a way as to suggest a more egalitarian relationship between husband and wife (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:916). Indeed, the one major alteration he made that was not of a protofeminist edge was his expansion of Balthazar’s advice to Antipholus of Ephesus in Errors (3.1.85–106) to a mini-disquisition by Ratnadatta to Chiranjīva of Jayasthala on the ubiquitous tendency towards ingratitude among human beings, which leads them to slander the very people to whom they should be grateful (Vidyasagar 2006, 2:919–20). If we keep in mind that Bhrāntivilās was written close to two decades into Vidyasagar’s

162  Part 2 campaigning for women’s rights, especially as his promotion of widow remarriage were losing support, and his campaign against kulīn polygamy was failing, it is possible to agree with Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay that this expansion of Balthazar’s speech reflects Vidyasagar’s increasing frustration with the limited amount of support he received for his causes (A. Bandyopadhyay 1970, 109).

Bhrāntivilās and Feminist Readings of Errors While Vidyasagar’s campaigns for women’s rights may have been influenced both by ideas that he received from his cultural contact with the English and their literature, and by deeply personal experiences, such as the maternal kindness he received as an impressionable nine-year-old from Raimoni, it is evident that the result of these influences was his identifying and systematically subverting the gender biases that he found in an early Shakespeare play like Errors and its retelling in Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales. How radical Vidyasagar’s approach was becomes clear when we trace the history of feminist criticism of the play. Robert S. Miola identifies feminist precursors in Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, editors of a 1903 edition of Errors, and names Agnes Mackenzie, the author of The Women in Shakespeare’s Plays (1924), as the first genuine feminist critic of Errors (Miola 2012, 26). Miola mentions Mackenzie’s ironic description of Adriana as “the most serious blemish on the play” as a sarcastic commentary on the dominant critical reading of Errors by Anglophone critics in Mackenzie’s times (Miola 2012, 16). Hers is, then, a reading strikingly similar to the one made by Vidyasagar, who changed the shrewish Adriana into the feisty and likeable Chandraprabhā fifty-six years before Mackenzie took a sympathetic view of the Adriana figure. Since, to the best of my knowledge, no English translation of Bhrāntivilās has been published, it can be concluded that Mackenzie was not influenced in any way by Vidyasagar’s adaptation, but it is significant that both she and Vidyasagar, engaging with Errors at a time when activism for women’s rights had gathered momentum in their respective societies and yet left much to be achieved, went to the heart of the problem as it is expressed in Errors—the internalisation of patriarchal discourse by women like Luciana and the Abbess themselves and their subsequent “taming” of those who protest, like Adriana. To imply, however, that such an internalisation of patriarchal discourse is endorsed unproblematically in the play would be to make a reductive reading of it. As feminist readings of Errors started to gain ground from the 1960s onwards, Gwyn Williams argued that the play “might not even have ended as a comedy” without the element of farce introduced by the two Dromios (G. Williams 1964, 65). Marilyn French drew attention to Adriana’s powerlessness caused by socially structured disadvantages that affected only women, and argued that Shakespeare’s

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  163 “granting to Adriana her deeply felt speeches, and his probing of an unhappy marriage from the point of view of the wife, are distinctly unPlautine” (1981, 72, 74). Dorothea Kehler similarly drew attention to the fact that Adriana’s “uncomic potential is released as Shakespeare, unlike earlier writers of shrew plays, considers the causes of shrewishness and the ordeal of a shrew” (1987, 233, 236). And several of them, as well as critics such as C. L. Barber (1964, 497), whose reading stood outside this emergent feminist tradition, were skeptical about the eventual reconciliation of Adriana and her husband. Even a minor play like Errors can, therefore, be realised on stage in a variety of ways so as to generate affective responses lying anywhere along a continuum that begins in the world of farce and stops just short of the problem play. That cannot be said of Vidyasagar’s Bhrāntivilās, in which Chandraprabhā, by systematically—and successfully—challenging in measured tones the kind of patriarchal discourse endorsed by her sister (and in Errors by Luciana and the Abbess), ventriloquises, so to speak, the voice of Vidyasagar the activist himself. It now becomes evident why Vidyasagar was being deliberately disingenuous in declaring in the preface to Bhrāntivilās about having changed only the names and places of characters by way of transculturation, when, in fact, he did so much more. Between 1850 and 1870, when Vidyasagar’s campaigns for women’s rights in Bengal were at their most intense, he had produced his Śakuntalā (1854) and Sītār Vanavās (1860), adaptations of Sanskrit classics in which the plight of women abandoned by their husbands figures prominently. Hatcher has connected the former work with Vidyasagar’s two tracts on widow remarriage, arguing that, taken together, these works “represent two prongs of a concerted strategy to advance the cause of women’s welfare” (2014, 85). Yet both he and Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay regard Bhrāntivilās as a diversion of sorts from Vidyasagar’s serious activism (Hatcher 2014, 158–60; A. Bandyopadhyay 1970, 98), since neither has compared it with its two identifiable textual sources, an exercise that makes Vidyasagar’s agenda clear: if Śakuntalā and Sītār Vanavās draw attention to the plight of women, Bhrāntivilās seeks to create a compelling, resistant female figure. Among his contemporaries, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay had stated that Vidyasagar’s prose lacked emotional variety, and implied the loss of a certain ambivalence of the originals in the excessive clarity of Vidyasagar’s adaptationtranslations (S. Basu 1993, 137). He was right. But if Vidyasagar was more interested in harnessing Shakespeare to the cause that he fought for all his life, namely, making women’s lives better in Bengal, would it have been better had he retained the ambivalences in Errors and left readers to discover a sympathetic portrait of Adriana that lies hidden beneath the patriarchal values that are spread over the play’s surface? Had Vidyasagar written Bhrāntivilās solely an ambitious work of art, then the answer to that question ought to be in the positive. But if

164  Part 2 we consider Bhrāntivilās as being, at the level of the representation of women, a piece that sought to further Vidyasagar’s emancipatory politics, we may need to consider some of the negative consequences of going ahead with an ambivalence-based approach. When we consider the history of the reception of Errors, we have to contend with the extent to which some of the best critics of Shakespearean comedy were deaf to Adriana’s plight and its not-so-comical causes and implications decades after feminist readings started to gain ground. I have already cited Mackenzie who, among Anglophone critics of the play, seems to have made independently, and as early as in 1924, a feminist reading that has striking parallels with Vidyasagar’s own from 1868. Yet, although feminist critics from the 1960s, like Mackenzie, started to read Adriana in more sympathetic terms, even as astute a critic as C. L. Barber could write in 1964 that “Shakespeare added the charming, sensible sister, not in Plautus, as a foil and confidant for the shrewish wife.” Barber makes this observation despite recognising that, when compared to Plautus, “Shakespeare’s husband and wife are more complex. . . [and] also more decent,” which he links to his belief that “[this] difference reflects the difference in the two cultures, Roman and Elizabethan” (1964, 495). Nowhere in his essay on Errors do we find Barber giving much sympathy to Adriana’s plight. Kehler’s overview of feminist criticism of the play shows how H. B. Charlton (1938), John Russell Brown (1957), and Bertrand Evans (1960) continued to read Adriana in negative terms, even as others, such as Ralph Berry (1972) and Theodore Weiss (1974) responded more sympathetically to Shakespeare’s depiction of her (Kehler 1987, 238n6). Juliet Dusinberre has argued that “Elizabethan wives enjoyed a working equality with their husbands which made foreigners declare them to be more liberated in practice than women in any other country” (1996, 127). Furthermore, Thomas P. Hennings has argued that sixteenth-century sermons sought to uphold the ideal of a companionate marriage rather than one in which the husband had the upper hand (Hennings 1986, 97). The strong presence of critical sympathy for Luciana’s point of view and the concomitant lack of sympathy for Adriana’s plight even in Anglophone criticism more than 350 years later is, therefore, all the more surprising. One can never be certain that ambivalence about patriarchal discourse in a Shakespeare play would be recognised without fail by even the best of critics who were raised in societies where women had traditionally enjoyed higher social status than in other parts of the world. Hence, for reformists like Vidyasagar, letting the undercurrent of sympathy for Adriana do the talking in translation, so to speak, would not have been effective in a society in which the notion of companionate marriage was nowhere as firmly established. Furthermore, in a community where the idea of a companionate marriage existed during and after Shakespeare’s times, the playwright could have expected at least a section of his audience to respond approvingly to his sympathetic portrayal

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  165 of Adriana. Could Vidyasagar, fighting his battle for greater rights for women in a society where many with or without an English education were already hostile to his efforts, afford to let his readers respond in multiple ways, especially if reformist zeal rather than an ambition for artistic immortality was the likely cause behind his adapting Errors? That the answer to that question must be in the negative lies in the history of critical reception of Bhrāntivilās: even after all of Vidyasagar’s systematic changes to the original, commentators either missed them or presumably found them so obvious, and so much in keeping with Vidyasagar’s goals as an activist, that they did not bother to examine the matter at all. Since the initial Bengali-language critics of Bhrāntivilās were writing at a time when there was no consolidated feminist criticism of the play, let alone of Shakespeare’s works as a whole, and protofeminist rereadings of Shakespeare in Bengal were only beginning to emerge, Vidyasagar’s contemporaries did not have the critical heritage or the conceptual framework within which they could assess the success or the failure of Vidyasagar’s interpretive intervention. Hence, it is perhaps true to say that it required unusual critical acumen for Vidyasagar to be among the earliest adapters to make a “reductive” rereading of Errors along feminist lines. Ambivalence was already present in Shakespeare, and, pace Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Vidyasagar’s skills in translation could have enabled him to retain it in Bhrāntivilās, had he so wished; but making a feminist rereading, even if it took away partly or wholly this ambivalence, required imaginative rethinking. And till the time other feminist rereadings of Errors, in English or in other languages, are brought to the forefront by future scholars, Bhrāntivilās ought to be recognised as one of the earliest feminist adaptations of Errors in any language. How did Vidyasagar become the leading champion for women’s rights in the mid-nineteenth century, a facet of his life that had a direct bearing on his adaptation of Errors? Vidyasagar’s education in Sanskrit College consisted of a curriculum that may have been more traditional in its scope than the one offered at Hindoo College nearby, but it offered a combination of Indian and Western disciplines, and Vidyasagar himself strove to maintain this balance when he took charge of Sanskrit College. This training led him to reject emphatically the notion of divine providence and to place responsibility squarely on human agency (Tripathi 2004, 118–19). He also placed greater importance on the quality of ideas themselves, irrespective of where they came from, and expressed dissatisfaction at what he perceived was a tendency among the learned in Calcutta, namely that “when they hear of a scientific truth, the germs of which may be traced out in the Śāstras, instead of showing any regard for that truth, [their] triumph and the superstitious regard for their own Śāstras is redoubled” (letter to J. R. Ballantyne, 7 September 1853, reprinted in Indramitra [2016, 660]; I have followed the emendation made in Sumit Sarkar [2019, 271]). While Vidyasagar may not have fully transcended

166  Part 2 the constraints imposed on him by the society of his times—constraints which no individual can fully overcome—he nevertheless availed himself of the freedom of the intellect that enabled him to take positions that not everyone from his class, caste, gender, and ethnic background would necessarily take. The Bengali conservatives came not only from Sanskrit College; many of them, in fact, had an English education at the more Westernised and elite Hindoo College. The Westernised conservatives’ regressive position towards the “woman question,” which coexisted with their endorsement of an anticolonial nationalist politics, fits well with Partha Chatterjee’s observation that, in their hands, an inner domain of sovereignty, connected with the discovery of “tradition,” was separated from the outer “arena of political contest with the colonial state” (1993, 117). Chatterjee locates this split in the last decades of the nineteenth century when the “woman question” had, by his own account, become relatively unimportant (i.e. towards the end of Vidyasagar’s life), but, as Kapālakunḍalā and Bhrāntivilās show, in the 1860s, this was far from being the case, with Bankim and Vidyasagar both responding to the cultural dimension of the colonial encounter in ways that led them to question some of the ideational premises of both Indian and Western literary works, and to use literature, including their own adaptations of Shakespeare, as a means for examining various facets of the “women’s question” pertaining to the society of their times. For Vidyasagar, too, the rational and emotional grounds that led to his taking up the women’s causes mentioned earlier in this chapter proved to be stronger impulses than any injunction provided by the Śāstras (Hindu scriptures) or patriarchal notions articulated by characters in a Shakespeare play. Consequently, Vidyasagar took the freedom to adapt Errors in ways that suited his cause. With regard to Vidyasagar’s use of Hindu scriptures, Hatcher states that scholars like Gopal Haldar (1972), Asok Sen (1977), and Subodh Chandra Sen Gupta (1993) were of the view that “Vidyasagar used the authoritative treatises in an instrumental fashion to garner support for his views” (Hatcher 2014, 31–32). Others, such as Partha Chatterjee, have argued that “Vidyasagar, despite his professed disregard for the sanctity or reasonableness of the śāstra, felt compelled to look for scriptural support for his programmes,” although Chatterjee’s statement that follows immediately afterwards, namely that “he did not think it feasible to try creating a ‘nonconformism outside the bond of canonical orthodoxy’ ” (2010, 96; emphasis mine), also suggests that the reasons behind Vidyasagar’s dependence on scriptures might have had a firmly pragmatic, rather than philosophical or ideological, basis. Hatcher, in turn, has argued that Vidyasagar “simply sought some way to deploy his mastery of the authoritative treatises within a changed religious and social context” (Hatcher 2014, 32). Whatever position one might take regarding Vidyasagar’s handling of canonical texts, it can be argued that

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  167 the changes Vidyasagar tacitly made to Errors in Bhrāntivilās are more in line with the first position taken by Haldar and others. In nineteenth-century Bengal, a strategy for reform that Rammohun Roy had to adopt for pragmatic reasons was to make an intervention in current social mores by disguising it partially “behind the pretext of returning to earlier (and therefore more binding) textual authority” (Hatcher 2012, 17). Vidyasagar, it could be argued, was adopting a similar method, making instrumental use of a past canonical text—a play by Shakespeare, albeit a minor one—and using it strategically for his own reformist agenda. In setting Bhrāntivilās in ancient India, he was presenting his retelling in a cultural context that could suggest to the reader that marital problems existed in the ancient past as well, but without all women having to agree with Vilāsinī that a woman’s subjugation to her husband’s will was in the order of nature. To have Lāvanyamayī, Vidyasagar’s Abbess figure, repeat what Shakespeare’s Abbess says in Errors (5.1.68–86) would have not only tilted the argument in favour of the “natural” inferiority of women; it would have also carried the authority of the past. (And need it be pointed out that, through the sleight of hand of adaptation, Vidyasagar was able to evoke an ancient Indian world— albeit fictional—where women were more free to express themselves, relatively speaking, than were their counterparts in nineteenth-century Bengal?) It is conceivable that by highlighting Errors as an entertaining and humorous play and by making a Bengali prose adaptation of it, Vidyasagar was attempting to reach out to that part of the readership that had no access to Shakespeare in English, and which would warm up to a play that was not known for its difficulty. Errors was, thus, well-suited for an protofeminist reinterpretation in Bengali, especially at a time when, as Tripathi points out, educated Bengali women had very few opportunities to study English language and literature (2004, 65, 68). It would be interesting to know whether this feminist angle was retained in other Indian adaptations of Errors that were explicitly indebted to Vidyasagar, such as the one, also titled Bhrāntivilās, by B. Venkatacharya, a translator of Bengali novels into Kannada (Das 2005, 48),13 which appeared after the publication of the first Kannada translation of Errors in 1871 (Guttal 2005, 96). Certainly the film adaptation of Bhrāntivilās by Manu Sen (1963), which mentions only Vidyasagar as its source and does not mention Shakespeare, rejects this radical edge in favour of a Chandraprabhā who veers between shrewishness and submissiveness, while Vilāsinī becomes a sprightly, witty girl with whom the Calcutta-based Chiranjīva readily falls in love.14 However, since the film is set in modern times, there is no Duke, while Egeon/Somadatta is omitted as well. There is also an attempt at a certain degree of psychological verisimilitude: Chiranjīva and his twin suspect quite early on that the confusion in identities must be due to the appearance of some twin whose existence they are not aware of. The most interesting of the changes in

168  Part 2 the film, however, is its allusion to an intertext that Shakespearean scholars have long noted in the context of Errors, in addition to Plautus’s Menaechmi (Shakespeare’s principal source)—Plautus’s own Amphitruo. In Plautus’s latter play, Jupiter turns himself into Amphitruo in order to have an adulterous relationship with Alcumena, the wife of the Theban general Amphitryon, while Mercury, disguised as Amphitruo’s slave Sosio, guards the door (Cartwright 2019, 81–82). In the film Bhrāntivilās, Vilasinī finds her brother-in-law Chiranjīva at a fair, where both watch a puppet show before she notices him and drags him home. The puppet show narrates the mythical tale of Ahalyā, wife of the poet-sage Gautama, whom Indra, an important god in the Hindu pantheon, seduces by appearing in the form of her husband. This intertextual allusion suggests that Manu Sen and his adapters not only knew their Shakespeare but had also done their research when creating their adaptation. If, as Singh argues, “the passage of the Shakespearean text from the British Raj to postcolonial education in India has been a relatively smooth one” (1996, 133), it is unclear, then, as to why Manu Sen left out Shakespeare’s name from among the acknowledgements. An explanation that accounts for both the continuing study of Shakespeare in post-independence Indian classrooms and the lack of acknowledgement of Shakespeare in films like Manu Sen’s Bhrāntivilās and Angoor (angūr, “grapes”), Gulzar’s 1981 Hindi adaptation of Errors,15 is that the study and appreciation of Shakespeare, in the context of both colonial and independent India till the early 2000s, has generally been a culturally elitist activity. Consequently, in not acknowledging their indebtedness to Shakespeare, filmmakers like Manu Sen and Gulzar were possibly trying to ensure that the general audiences for whom the films were meant did not feel alienated by the name of Shakespeare. It is all the more strange, then, that in the last twenty years or so, Shakespeare’s works have become increasingly popular with mainstream filmgoers in India, especially due to the Hindi-Urdu Shakespearean adaptations by Vishal Bhardwaj (2003, 2006, 2014) and the Malayalam adaptations by Jayaraaj (1997, 2002, 2017), while the study of Shakespeare in classrooms and academia has become more hotly contested, as a result of the contributions of postcolonial theorists to the classroom teaching of Shakespeare. To imply, however, that the colonial cultural elite wholeheartedly endorsed interpretations of Shakespeare as they received them from their British masters and strove to imitate them would be completely mistaken, as I hope my analyses of the responses to The Tempest by Bankim and Tagore and to Errors by Vidyasagar demonstrate. Vidyasagar was not only not imitating English models, as Singh has argued (1996, 132), but was rewriting even Shakespeare in the “fight against obscurantist traditionalism” (Bagchi 1991, 151), and that, too, more than fifty years before the first feminist critics of Errors started emerging in the UK and the US. For this reason, it is necessary to treat with caution Richard

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  169 Allen’s assertion that Tagore and Vidyasagar “sought to draw upon the example of the English literary tradition that they perceived to represent the embodiment of civilised values in order to create an indigenous literary culture that might equal or surpass it” (2014, 169; emphasis mine). While Tagore, Vidyasagar, and Bankim did admire Shakespeare, they also did not hesitate to challenge received readings of the plays or to find some of the ideological content of his plays as being in need of rewriting. The kind of cultural thrall that the majority of postcolonial critics all too readily assume as characterising the responses to Shakespeare by readers and intellectuals in colonial India could not have coexisted with the rise of an emergent nationalism, and it is nearly impossible to find nineteenth-century Bengali translations or adaptations that incorporate Shakespeare without changes of any kind. There is, however, one exception that nearly fits the bill—Girishchandra Ghosh’s “faithful” translation of Macbeth for the Bengali stage. Ghosh’s translation and its compositional and reception histories, therefore, form the last of the case studies of this book. PART II: GIRISHCHANDRA GHOSH’S MACBETH

The Life and Career of Girishchandra Ghosh Girishchandra Ghosh, born on 28 February  1844, was the most critically acclaimed among nineteenth-century Bengali actors and theatre directors, having been associated from 1869 onwards with practically every significant professional theatre in Bengal. He was the mentor of several other actors and of the first generation of professional Bengali actresses, and was also the author of over seventy original plays and of several adaptations of works by others.16 Unlike Bankim, a writer trained in the Western curriculum of the Hindoo College, or Vidyasagar, a scholar more rooted than Bankim in Indian disciplines due to his studies at Sanskrit College, Girishchandra was, by profession, an accountant between 1864 and 1879, and an amateur actor between 1867 and 1879, before he became associated wholly with the theatre (Swami Chetanananda 2009, 34–49). Because of his association with the Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna [Ramakrishna Chattopadhyay], who turned Girishchandra, an atheist and alcoholic as a young man, towards spiritualism, Girishchandra’s biographies, both in Bengali and English, are of an older hagiographic kind that was still prevalent in Bengal in the early twentieth century.17 On the other hand, specialist criticism on his works by scholars like Ashutosh Bhattacharya (2002) and Sanat Kumar Mitra (1983), while meticulously detailed, also needs to be updated in light of newer theoretical approaches towards the study of theatre and of adaptations. Girishchandra’s life and works, in fact, call for a book-length re-evaluation.

170  Part 2 That said, quite a number of inferences can be made about his works and working methods, based on biographical accounts available; Girishchandra’s own writings, ranging from original plays and adaptations to translations; and paratextual materials pertaining to the performances and reception histories of his works. Girishchandra is known to have dictated his plays to assistants, a fact that accounts for the extreme rapidity with which he produced his works. An examination of the available texts of Girishchandra’s plays, when seen in light of this method of work, the theatrical conventions they used, their popularity in Girishchandra’s times, and their later oblivion suggests that he was, by and large, a playwright who wrote with popular tastes and theatrical conventions in mind, and that his greatest claim to posthumous fame is as an actor and for his influence on Bengali theatre as a whole. In addition, in his book on Bengali theatre, originally published in 1975, Ashutosh Bhattacharya has suggested that Girishchandra synthesised performance-related elements from popular Bengali theatre, such as the use of songs, with European influences that characterised the plays of Michael Madhusudan Datta and others, but in terms of artistic sensibility Girishchandra stayed closer to indigenous popular traditions and did not question aesthetic or ideational mores (2002, 379–83). Such a view was challenged by the Marxist actor, director, and playwright Utpal Dutt, who argued that, by reaching out to non-elite audiences, Girishchandra “destroyed the parochial rich man’s club that the Calcutta theatre had been reduced to,” since Girishchandra’s “early apprenticeship in Shakespeare showed him [that] the world’s greatest dramatist was not averse to packing his plays with towering violence, with witches and ghosts, with duel and battles precisely to hold the attention of the prentices who crowded into his theatre” (1992, 14–15). (Both accounts prove to be problematic when we consider Girishchandra’s Macbeth, as we shall see later.) Girishchandra also adapted the amitrākshar chhanda—a Bengali “counterpart” to blank verse as developed by Madhusudan—for his plays and, influenced by Shakespeare, departed from Indian theatrical conventions and wrote several plays with tragic endings (Ashutosh Bhattacharya 2002, 389, 501). For a number of reasons, Girishchandra’s translation of Macbeth can be said to be different from his other adaptations and original works. Unlike his adaptation of Kapālakunḍalā, whose failure I  have already noted, Girishchandra prepared his adaptation of Macbeth with fastidious care. It was clearly a labour of love, since Girishchandra had first translated the play in the 1860s while working as an accountant for the Atkinson Tilton Company and prepared a fresh translation that was first performed on 28 January 1893 after his original translation was accidentally lost (Swami Chetanananda 2009, 34–35, 64–65). The latter (extant) translation has been described as one “so brilliant that it has not been equalled yet” (Dutt 1992, 15; see also Ashutosh Bhattacharya 2002, 501– 2); even ­critics who have found fault with it have, nevertheless, accorded

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  171 it pride of place among Bengali translations of Shakespeare. It is also unique among Girishchandra’s adaptations because he, the central figure in Bengali theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century, could not but have been aware of several of the Shakespeare plays that were thoroughly transculturated in the process of being adapted into Bengali.18 Yet, he chose to avoid changing the names of the characters and of the setting and, indeed, stayed as close as he could to Shakespeare’s original. Abhishek Sarkar is right in stating that Girishchandra’s Macbeth “is unique for it is the only nineteenth-century Bengali translation of the Bard that was custom-made for the commercial stage, that retains the original location and dramatis personae, and that pursues the original action and locution almost to the level of individual sentences” (2011–12, 271). Like Madhusudan’s Meghanādavadha-kāvya, Girishchandra’s Macbeth was of a “foreignising” kind, one that sought to bring Bengali theatre closer to Anglophone Shakespeare instead of the other way round. How radical and risky Girishchandra’s approach was can be gleaned from an observation made two years after Girishchandra’s adaptation was first performed. Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, who translated Romeo and Juliet into Bengali, clarified in the introduction to his translation why transculturation was necessary: I have tried to present the story of the play of Shakespeare and the essential features of the characters in a native mould to suit the taste of the readers of my country. I  cannot say how successful I  have been. But I believe that without adopting such a method no foreign play will ever find a place in Bengali literature, which will be denied nourishment and advancement. After a period of such exercises, faithful translations of foreign plays and poems will find acceptance in Bengali literature. But for now, for some time to come, I believe, this method is indispensable. (Translated by, and quoted in Das 2005, 58) Since accounts from around the time of Girishchandra’s Macbeth suggest that thoroughgoing transculturation of Shakespeare was deemed essential in order to make his work accessible to Bengali audiences, it is not surprising that Girishchandra’s Macbeth was a succès d’estime and a failure with the general public.19 Disheartened by the failure of his one production of Shakespeare, whom he venerated and whose Macbeth he translated with lavish care, Girishchandra decided not to translate any more of Shakespeare’s plays, as he had originally intended. Instead, some of Girishchandra’s later plays, such as Janā (1893), based on an episode from the Mahābhārata, and Sirāj-ud-Daulāh (1905), the first of a series of anti-British nationalist history plays, which Girishchandra began writing from the time of Bengal’s first partition in 1905, reveal a more pronounced Shakespearean

172  Part 2 influence (Ashutosh Bhattacharya 2002, 428; A. Bandyopadhyay 2018, 309). And although Ghosh had paid his homage to Queen Victoria, Empress of India, in the form of two short allegorical pièces d’occasion (1897, 1901), the British administration promptly banned these nationalist history plays from being performed or published on account of their seditious content (Ashutosh Bhattacharya 2002, 532). Girishchandra died on 8 February 1912, having been one of the towering influences of his generation on Bengali theatre in various ways—as an actor, theatre director, composer of song lyrics, acting coach and mentor, translator, and dramatist.

Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth: A Case of Colonial Mimicry?20 Girishchandra’s translation of Macbeth does not fit easily into either of the two interpretive traditions represented by Ashutosh Bhattacharya and Utpal Dutt, and it raises several questions. On the one hand, it is a “faithful” translation of Shakespeare: not only is there critical agreement over it, but the review of the première on 28 January 1893, published in the Amritabazar patrika (30 January 1893), states that “many among the audience were at once put in mind of several well-known passages in Shakespeare’s Macbeth while listening to their Bengali versions.” In the advertisement published on the day of the première in the Amritabazar patrika, Girishchandra had declared, “I have got the piece mounted by European artists and dressed it under European supervision, [with] ‘make up’ by Mr. J. Pimm.” The stage paintings by a Mr. Willard, the leading exponent in Calcutta in those times, were highly praised not only by the reviewer of the Amritabazar patrika, but also by another contemporary commentator, Byomkesh Mustafi. A second review, that of the second performance on 29 January 1893, published in The Englishman (8 February 1893), stated that the performance was given “before a large audience, including several European gentlemen,” and added that, while “a Bengali Thane of Cawdor is a lively suggestion of incongruity, . . . the reality is an astonishing reproduction of the standard conventions of the English stage.” The opinion expressed in the review for The Englishman, namely that “the play as a whole was well rendered,” was corroborated by a third, that of the Indian Nation (20 February 1893), which declared that the play “was acted very well at the Minerva [Theatre],” and singled out for praise the performances of the roles of Macbeth (Girish Ghosh), Lady Macbeth (Ghosh’s protégée, the actress Tarasundari), who had a “Mrs. Siddons-like appearance,” and the Porter (Ardendhusekhar Mustafi, one of the leading actors of the times). The reviewer of the première also noted that “the house was literally full, many having had to go away disappointed.”

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  173 We learn, therefore, that for the better part of a month, reviews of Girishchandra’s production were positive and that Girishchandra’s popularity had drawn large crowds on the day of the première. We also learn that the performance was as close to Shakespeare’s original text as it could be, and was close to British theatrical conventions of the time in terms of the make-up of the actors and mise en scène: only the language and the ethnicity of the actors were different. We can be fairly certain that the reproduction of the “standard conventions of the English stage” extended to acting as well, since Girishchandra’s own critical writings on theatre show a thorough awareness of English performance conventions, and his essay “Puruṣ angshe narī abhinetrī” (Women in men’s roles) involves an extensive discussion of Sarah Bernhardt’s portrayal of Hamlet (G. Ghosh 1978, 62–66). Part of this awareness came undoubtedly from written accounts, since Girishchandra did not see Bernhardt perform.21 But Binodini Dasi, the greatest among Girishchandra’s female acting students, notes in her autobiography how he would tell stories from Shakespeare, Byron, Milton, and Pope to her and other young actors and actresses for whom he was a mentor, and ensured that the theatre management made arrangements for her to attend performances of English-language plays by famous British actors and actresses, which would be followed by post-performance discussions between her and Girishchandra (Dasi 2019, 83–84). Binodini’s account suggests that Girishchandra and his fellow actors knew British acting at first hand as well. It follows, then, that the discourse of fidelity may account for the succès d’estime that Girishchandra’s Macbeth enjoyed, but not for its failure with the public. On the other hand, Utpal Dutt’s account also fails to appreciate the extent to which Girishchandra sought, at least in the case of his Macbeth, to incorporate many a detail from English performance conventions. For the reasons mentioned earlier, Girishchandra’s version was not as populist in scope as Dutt suggests and explains the presence of European gentlemen among the audience. Dennis Bartholomeusz has suggested that the reason behind the failure of Girishchandra’s Macbeth was that the “localization of Macbeth had stopped at translation” and that “it had not gone far enough” (2005, 205), while Poonam Trivedi has suggested that, like John Russell Brown’s unsuccessful production of King Lear at the National School of Drama in Delhi in 1997, “it had not run the risk of adaptive intervention” (2005, 154). Bartholomesuz and Trivedi draw attention to the fact that, without transculturation through adaptation, Shakespeare usually does not reach out to Indian audiences. Their argument is relevant for my analysis of the failure of Girishchandra’s Macbeth, since his addition of several songs in the tradition of Bengali popular theatre or his textual echoes of Nagendranath Bose’s earlier adaptation in the Witches’ scenes (Chaudhury and Sengupta 2013, 22n18) did not amount to full-scale transculturation.22 Consequently, while one could regard Girishchandra’s

174  Part 2 Macbeth in positive terms as a very early example of colour-blind casting, one could also read the production, with its minimal attempt at transculturation and the “lively suggestion of incongruity” it caused in the mind of the reviewer of The Englishman by “a Bengali Thane of Cawdor,” as providing a rare example of colonial mimicry at work, an attempt by a Bengali director to be as English as possible without being fully so— an attempt at being almost the same, but not quite. Homi Bhabha has famously written that “the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (1994, 86; emphasis in the original). Ironically for a book termed The Location of Culture, but in keeping with much of the poststructuralist appropriation of the “linguistic turn” in criticism, Bhabha leaves it unclear as to where this slippage generated by mimicry may be situated. Whether or not this slippage may be sought in the intentions of the mimic, or in the interpretive possibilities opened up by the act of mimicry (the latter making “slippage” a phenomenon that is located mainly in the domain of reception), or both is a question that I will return to in a moment. I would like to note first that there are indications that Girishchandra may have wanted the moral ambivalence of the world of Macbeth in the Witches’ statement, “fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.9), to be evident visually. Consider the extant cast list for the première (Shankar Bhattacharya 1982, 435–36): MACBETH:  Girishchandra Ghosh LADY MACBETH:  Teenkari Dasi DUNCAN:  Haribhushan Bhattacharya MALCOLM:  Surendranath Ghosh DONALBAIN:  Nikhilendrakrishna Dev BANQUO:  Kumudnath Sarkar MACDUFF AND HECATE:  Aghornath Pathak ROSS:  Krishnalal Chakraborty LENNOX:  Vinodvihari Som ANGUS:  Anukulchandra Batabyal FLEANCE: Kusumkumari OLD SIWARD:  Thakurdas Chattopadhyay SETON:  Nandahari Bhattacharya MACDUFF’S SON: Chayankumari MENTEITH, THIRD MURDERER, AND THIRD WITCH: Nibaranchandra

Mukhopadhyay

YOUNG SIWARD AND SECOND WITCH:  Neelmoni Ghosh CAITHNESS, SECOND MURDERER, AND SOLDIER:  Chunilal Deb MESSENGERS:  Maniklal Bhattacharya and Tituram Das PORTER, FIRST WITCH, OLD MAN, FIRST MURDERER, AND DOCTOR: Ard-

hendusekhar Mustafi

LADY MACDUFF: Pramadasundari WAITING GENTLEWOMAN: Harimati

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  175 What this cast list reveals is that all the three witches were played by men, with Ghosh perhaps picking up on a cue from Banquo’s speech in Macbeth regarding their androgynous nature: BANQUO:  “You

   

should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so” (1.3.45–46).

Consider also how each of actors playing the witches is assigned other roles. The first witch is also one of the murderers working for Macbeth (a negative character), a doctor, and an old man (both benign persons), and the porter. Since Ardhendusekhar Mustafi, one of the leading actors of the times, played all these roles, contemporary audiences could not have failed to notice his doubling of various roles of varying moral shades. Similarly, the actors playing the second and third witches also double as good characters fighting against Macbeth’s misrule (Menteith and Caithness) and as evil ones conspiring to help Macbeth destroy his opponents (second and third murderers). From a visual point of view, then, Girishchandra’s three witches were also his three murderers, with two of them also fighting on the side of the good forces, and the third doubling as porter and doctor. One can say, therefore, that by means of a “faithful” translation and well-planned casting choices, Girishchandra presented Macbeth as a play that is “multi-vocal and open to a range of interpretations—some contradictory—and that an important part of its overall significance is generated by paradoxes and discordances within its overall unity of atmosphere and emotional register” (White 2018, 34). Furthermore, Girishchandra retains many of the original place names but omits Scotland entirely (A. Sarkar 2011–12, 272), replacing it occasionally with the term janam-bhūmi (“motherland”), as for example in his translation of Macduff’s exclamation, “O Scotland, Scotland” (Macbeth 4.3.100; G. Ghosh 1947, 484). Girishchandra also translates Macduff’s phrase, “the rich East” (4.3.37) as Bhārater aiśwarya (“the riches of India”; G. Ghosh 1947, 483). Macduff’s laments for a janambhūmi under misrule that is never explicitly identified as Scotland, and the association of India with the riches of the East implicitly point to the colonial context in which the play was being performed. Girishchandra’s creation of the possibilities of interpretive slippages, achieved through a combination of a carefully chosen Shakespearean play, translational decisions, and meticulously worked-out doublings of roles at the level of performance by an experienced theatre director steeped in Shakespeare, points more towards a carefully engineered subversion than the one purportedly done by a group of villagers against an Indian catechist’s bid to convert them outside of Delhi in the early nineteenth century. The villagers’ lack of knowledge of English or of Christianity could never have prepared them to comprehend colonial discourse, let alone subvert it; yet, as anyone familiar with postcolonial theory knows, Bhabha’s reading of

176  Part 2 that otherwise insignificant moment of colonial encounter has become foundational to the understanding of “the powers of hybridity to resist baptism” (Bhabha 1994, 118) and “in so doing [to] undermine colonial authority” (Kapoor 2003, 564). Why did Girishchandra adopt such a roundabout route towards subversion when even straightforward alterations, as done by Vidyasagar, went uncommented upon? And what impact did such an approach have on audiences and critics? For an answer to the first question, we need to consider censorship laws that were introduced by the British colonial administration in the 1870s. Soon after the inauguration of what was effectively the first Bengali public theatre in 1872 (Sarottama Majumdar 2005, 236), a series of plays attacking discriminatory colonial policies, of which the most influential was Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nīl darpan (published 1860),23 was performed. As has been stated earlier in this book, the stage was a much more powerful means of reaching out to the masses than the medium of print. Not surprisingly, therefore, in light of performances of plays that were critical of aspects of British colonial rule, the administration passed the Dramatic Performances Control Act of 1876, prohibiting “dramatic performances which [were] scandalous, defamatory, seditious, obscene or otherwise prejudicial to the public interest”24 (Bhatia 2004, 19). The effects of this act were felt not only in Bengali-language drama but also in theatrical works from elsewhere in India, such as in the Hindilanguage play Durlabh bandhu (The priceless friend; 1880), an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice by the pioneering dramatist Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–85), which was written in the wake of both this act and of the short-lived Vernacular Press Act of 1878, which sought to censor the material produced by the Indian-language press as well. Harishchandra’s play has been read as “a parable for a strategy for independence from the growing encroachment of British authority” (Bhatia 2004, 63–65), and in light of the censorship of overt criticisms of British colonial rule, covertly subversive adaptations of Shakespeare began to gain ground. Such a context may well explain why Girishchandra, a careful reader of Shakespeare, may have wished to capitalise on the ambivalence that he possibly found in Macbeth, making as “faithful” and as “English” an adaptation as one could expect a non-European colonial subject to do, while using the play’s text and strategic casting choices to highlight the misrule of Scotland under Macbeth, and, by implication, of colonial India by the British. And yet, Girishchandra’s production of Macbeth neither stoked the fires of anticolonial resistance, nor did it arouse the ire of the British colonial administration. It is in this lack of any recorded “political” response that one can locate the limitations of Bhabha’s theorising of hybridity generated by mimicry as having any subversive potential in the colonial context. This is because, as Marwan M. Kraidy has observed, hybridity needs to be understood as a communicative practice constitutive of, and constituted by, sociopolitical and economic arrangements.

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  177 Understanding hybridity as a practice marks the recognition that transcultural relations are complex, processual, and dynamic. In addition to failing to grasp the ontological complexity of cultural interactions, a merely descriptive use of hybridity also poses the risk of undermining the political potential that hybridity might or might not have. (2002, 317) The project of the location of culture must necessarily involve situating “subversive” readings in the contexts in which they are supposed to take place, failing which the task of “location” makes way for interpretations that may demonstrate the analyst’s ingenuity, but does so at the cost of obliterating the historical situatedness—the location—of any act of reading and reinterpretation, processes that lie at the heart of cross-cultural receptions of Shakespeare. I suggested earlier that Vidyasagar’s overtly feminist reading of Errors went unnoticed by contemporary reviewers because feminist reading as an interpretive practice had not gained sufficient ground in Bengal in the 1860s. Nor was ambivalence a widely understood tool for generating political or cultural resistance in Bengal in the 1890s, even though Girishchandra was not alone in grasping its potential in the case of Macbeth. In 1895, two years after his Bengali Macbeth had been shelved for good, Purna Chandra Bose departed from then-common readings of Macbeth as a play about retribution for evil deeds by reading it as a graphic illustration of what Bose regarded as the savage and aggressive nature of Europeans (Chaudhury and Sengupta 2013, 16). Not surprisingly, after the failure of his Macbeth, Girishchandra went to a much more overt form of critique of colonial rule in his plays from 1905, plays that were promptly banned from being either performed or circulated in print despite his placatory panegyrics to Queen Victoria in 1897 and 1901. Indeed, only with performances of Macbeth in 1975 by Girishchandra’s biographer Utpal Dutt would the political content of the play be used successfully in India against authoritarian rule, namely, the Emergency imposed by the then-prime minister Indira Gandhi (Bhatia 2004, 68). Even in Dutt’s production, “slippages” in interpretive possibilities were not explored, for such “slippages” would only imply that the opponents of Mrs. Gandhi were no better than she, when the message that Dutt and other politically committed theatre directors wanted to send to their audience was that authoritarianism needed to be fought tooth and nail.

Conclusion We have seen how Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā and Tagore’s essay “Śakuntalā” critique the civilising mission and, in the process, offer unusually insightful readings of The Tempest that anticipate Anglophone critical readings made between fifty to a hundred years later. These and other works of “modern” Bengali literature—i.e., from the period

178  Part 2 following the Revolt of 1857—also lead us to question the value of the concept of colonial hegemony as an overarching framework in which the cultural dimension of the colonial encounter almost always gets situated. With Vidyasagar, we find a prescient reading of Errors made well in advance of Anglophone feminist criticism, one that reveals the extent to which even minor adapters of Shakespeare revealed their agency in their responses to, and subversions of, the ideological content of Shakespeare’s plays as and when they deemed fit. And with the failure of the subversive elements in Girishchandra’s Macbeth to leave their mark on either Indian audiences or the British colonial administration, we realise the limits of standard readings of the purportedly destabilising power of colonial mimicry.25 We also need to examine the scope of individual agency, even when we realise that such agency, especially in the arts, is constrained by the social and cultural forces which shape it and where it seeks to make interventions. The Bengali case studies, taken together, make us revisit some of the fundamental assumptions of postcolonial theory, since they demonstrate how an adaptation-based approach that begins by situating works in their cultural and historical contexts has the potential to yield radically new perspectives on Shakespeare’s place in a modern Indian language such as Bengali, which was, for historical reasons, more profoundly shaped by European literatures than other Indianlanguage literatures in the colonial era. For this reason, and because of the fact that a number of influential postcolonial theorists have usually claimed to find in Bengali literature illustrations of concepts of postcolonial theory—claims that do not stand up to close reading or historicist interpretations—I felt it necessary to examine some historically significant Bengali adaptations at length, even if such a focus has led to the neglect of Shakespeare reception in other Indian languages. But diversity of linguistic representation is not the aim of this book, and there are several books, most notably Trivedi and Bartholomeusz (2005), that admirably fulfil such a need. My goal here is to argue for a theoretical overhaul of the way in which cross-cultural receptions of Shakespeare have been examined, especially in the age of Empire. In this regard, the insights offered by the Bengali case studies should be placed side by side with those offered by the European ones, since they demonstrate that the focus on textual and contextual detail that characterises the scholarship on European receptions of Shakespeare, when extended to the literature of “marginal” cultures, can be just as revealing and insightful.

Notes 1. In the preface to Bhrāntivilās, for instance, Vidyasagar writes that Errors is inferior to many other plays by Shakespeare on several counts, but that it is also undeniably humorous (2006, 2:903). 2. This section is based on the standard modern biographies of Vidyasagar by Indramitra (2016, in Bengali), Tripathi (2004), and Hatcher (2014).

Two Contrasting Cases of Transculturation  179 3. Basu was a grandson of Raja Radhakanta Deb, a champion of English education, one of the founders of Hindoo College, a patron of the Calcutta School Book Society, and a contributor to the cause of female education in Bengal. Nevertheless, Radhakanta was a social conservative, supporting satī (“suttee”) and opposing its abolition in 1829. 4. For an overview of Indian cinematic adaptations of Errors, see Amrita Sen (2019), whose survey reveals that none of them can be said to be feminist in any way. 5. The first, Anandibai Joshi, from Bombay, earned her medical degree from the US in 1886, but died the following year of tuberculosis contracted during her student days in the US. Joshi was twenty-two years old and working as a physician at a hospital in India at the time of her death. 6. For English translations, see Vidyasagar (1864) and Hatcher (2012). 7. On this bitter spat, see Hatcher (2014, 130–55). 8. This was a translation from the Hindi Betāl pachchīsī, a collection of twentyfour tales contained within a frame narrative—the twenty-fifth tale—and of which the earliest recension can be traced back to the eleventh century. 9. See, for example, stories numbers 8 and 9 (Vidyasagar 2006, 1:91, 93). The name Jayasthala occurs in the Seventh Story of the Betāl panchaviṃśati, adapted by Sir Richard F. Burton as Vikram and the Vampire (1893:169), and first published in 1870. Since Burton’s adaptations are much longer, it is likely that, for the sake of abridgement, Vidyasagar dropped the name Jayasthala (retained by Burton), in his retelling of the Seventh Story, only to reuse in Bhrāntivilās. 10. Although he supported a campaign initiated against obscenities and sexual content in Bengali literature initially spearheaded by the Rev. James Long and taken up by many Bengalis of the time, Vidyasagar was more open-minded by the standards of his time, and some of his own translations were charged with retaining some of the “obscene” content of the originals. One such translation in which Vidyasagar included erotic verses is his Ślokamanjarī (1890); he justified their presence by arguing that it was not intended as a textbook (S. Basu 1993, 101–3). Moreover, in his quotidian conversations, Vidyasagar departed from the Sanskritic register of Bengali prose that he used in his writings and was known to use the latest colloquial slang when he so wished (A. Bandyopadhyay 1970, 97n78). 11. See longer notes for l. 1.2.102 and ll. 2.1.15–25 of Errors (Cartwright 2019, 304–5) and Baldwin (1962). 12. For the corresponding section in Bhrāntivilās, with the Abbess’s remonstrances omitted, see Vidyasagar (2006, 2:938–39). 13. A. N. Moorthy Rao dates the publication of Venkatacharya’s translation to 1911 (1964, 70); but Sisir Kumar Das (2015, 230, 389n18, 585) and S. Jayasrinivasa Rao (2007, 8–9) have dated the translation to as early as 1876. Unfortunately, A. N. Moorthy Rao does not provide any contextual information, while Das’s and Jayasrinivasa Rao’s accounts vary considerably. Only Kannada-language scholarship may provide some clarity in this regard. 14. In the film, the two brothers are actually given slightly different names, Chiranjīva [pronounced Chiranjīb] and Chiranjīt, which sound very similar when spoken in Bengali. 15. Poonam Trivedi observes that a bearded figure who winks at the camera at the end of that film is to be understood as representing Shakespeare, in what she rightly terms as “an ironic, self-reflexive gesture” (2007, 151). Gulzar is the nom de plume of the poet and film director Sampooran Singh Kalra. 16. For an English-language study that provides a comprehensive list of Girishchandra’s original plays, adaptations, and other writings, see Swami Chetanananda (2009, 82–86). One needs to be careful when consulting the list,

180  Part 2 however, since Macbeth is listed as an original play when, in fact, it is a translation. See also Sudipto Chatterjee (2007). 17. See, for example, the Bengali-language biographies by Abinashchandra Gangopadhyay (1927) and Hemendranath Dasgupta (1928), and Swami Chetanananda’s English-language biography (2009), which relies heavily on the first two books for primary data on Girishchandra. 18. Sanat Kumar Mitra lists the publication of one Bengali adaptation of Shakespeare each from 1809 and 1853, three from the 1860s, ten from the 1870s, five from the 1880s, seven from the 1890s, and five from the 1900s (1983, 196–97). 19. Indeed, two adaptations of Macbeth preceding Girishchandra’s, Haralal Ray’s Rudrapāl Nāṭak (published 1874) and Nagendranath Bose’s Karṇabīr (published 1885), were fully transculturated versions. On Haralal Ray’s adaptation, see A. Sarkar (2016); on Nagendranath Bose’s, see Sarbani Chaudhury and Bhaskar Sengupta (2013). 20. All details regarding the casting, playbill, and contemporary reviews of Girishchandra’s Macbeth are taken from Shankar Bhattacharya (1982, 435–39). 21. Christopher Isherwood reports that Girishchandra’s fellow devotee of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, met Sarah Bernhardt in Paris in 1900, i.e., after the ill-fated production of Macbeth (1945, 24). 22. For a detailed examination of Girishchandra’s translation strategies, especially for Christian terms and of place names, see A. Sarkar (2011–12, 272). 23. This was the play with which the National Theatre in Calcutta opened on 7 December 1872. 24. The text of this act is reproduced in A. Dharwadker (2019, 30–33). On this controversial act, see Bhatia (2004, 19–50). 25. For a succinct summary of this position, see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2001, 12–14, 139–42).

Conclusion

Adaptation Studies: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches As this survey of individual adaptations of and works influenced by Shakespeare demonstrates, Shakespeare’s adapters, whether from Europe or from colonial India, admired his works, learnt from them, reworked the content as and when they felt necessary, and made other kinds of adaptive alterations in order to make his plays part of their own cultural traditions; admiration for Shakespeare did not stifle their freedom to reinterpret Shakespeare as they deemed fit. It is perhaps a sign of the “nationalist” dimension of colonial cosmopolitanism in Bengal that a novelist like Bankim wove Shakespeare into a web of intertexts in English, Sanskrit, and Bengali, instead of adapting a single Shakespearean text, while other Bengali adapters like Vidyasagar generally changed the names of the Shakespearean “source” texts—indeed, as we have seen, Vidyasagar adapted the Shakespearean text even more tellingly in other ways. Those facts, however, do not imply that Indian adapters alone were appropriative (in the positive sense of that term), while European ones, staying closer to Shakespeare’s names and titles, produced adaptations that were derivative. While the operas of Thomas and Verdi retain the names found in Shakespeare, we have also seen how radical the alterations were in Verdi’s Otello, and in French operatic and theatrical adaptations of Hamlet. The phenomenon of transculturation can be discerned in all these examples because a number of historical and cultural factors were common to nineteenth-century France, Italy, and colonial Bengal. All these regions had interpretive communities in sizeable numbers—people who read in their own languages and were, therefore, in a position to get to know Shakespeare through printed translations; there were also smaller segments of the population that could read Shakespeare in the original English. Even in colonial Bengal, where the percentage of literacy levels in the nineteenth century was extremely low, there was still a sizeable non-elite group which formed a readership base exclusively in Bengali,

182  Part 2 and writers like Bankim self-consciously wrote for these people. Those who had no access to education could still have access to Shakespeare’s plays through performance-based media such as theatre, opera, or various forms of nāṭakas, for which Shakespeare’s plays inevitably underwent “performative transculturation” in varying degrees. Such transculturations were necessary when an interpretive community had strength in numbers and had a strong sense of cultural identity. And when some of the members of any such community felt that some non-autochthonous influences were being uncritically incorporated, they adopted various means for registering their anxieties or asserting their resistance. To make this point, I have drawn parallels between Verdi’s Otello and Bankim’s Kapālakunḍalā, in both of which the protagonist gets caught between the opposing pulls of tradition and modernity. That this parallel has as much to do with the sociopolitical impact of cross-cultural encounters taking place across various parts of the world in the second half of the nineteenth century as it has to do with Shakespeare can be ascertained from another notable example, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), a novel that has no Shakespearean intertext. Published in its initial serial form in the same year as Bankim’s novel, its protagonist, Raskolnikov, his name tellingly derived from a Russian word for “schism” (a word that is also connected with a group of believers who broke away from the Orthodox Church), is fatally attracted to a set of ideas propounded by Russian radicals of the 1860s, who themselves derived their ideas from a host of Western European political thinkers (Offord 2006, 119–47). At the same time, Raskolnikov is also reminded of his own past, of the times in which he was a kinder and happier human being grounded in a traditional system of values derived from the teachings of the Orthodox Church. In Dostoevsky’s novel, too, traditional values are embodied in varying degrees in some of the women figures, not just Sonya, Raskolnikov’s lover, but also in even a minor character such as Lizaveta Ivanovna, the long-suffering sister of the moneylender Alyona Ivanovna. Many of the women in Crime and Punishment, like Verdi’s Desdemona, are firm believers (their Christian denominations being, of course, different), while the men are at different degrees of remove from religious beliefs. And as I  mentioned earlier, Bankim, too, would symbolise the nation as a Hindu mother goddess, most notably in his novel Ānandamaṭh, and in Egypt, the figuration of the nation as woman would occur from around 1900 onwards (Baron 2005, 1). There are, of course, telling differences between the examples. Russia and, by the1860s, Italy were both self-governing countries, and in Dostoevsky and Verdi, women embody traditional values while men are conflicted between the opposing pulls of tradition and modernity. In contrast, in Bankim, a writer from a colonised country, the woman figure symbolises the nation and, at the same time, becomes the site for the contest between tradition and modernity. That said, the parallels between the

Conclusion  183 ways in which the conflict between tradition and modernity was being imagined in Italy, Russia, and Bengal between the 1860s and 1890s are striking, not to say unexpected; and this is because all three places were contending with the forces of modernity being brought from Western Europe. Although the term colonial modernity rightly draws attention to the greater constraints within which colonised peoples from regions such as British India had to operate when compared to their European counterparts, it also risks making us overlook the connections that existed between communities within India and their European counterparts. That is why, although Crime and Punishment has no significant Shakespearean influence (except, perhaps, in the way Dostoevsky connects the world of the imagination with reality: see Frank 2010, 487–88), a contextual explanation of the triangulation of interpersonal relationships in Otello and Kapālakunḍalā can be provided only if one goes beyond connecting diachronically these texts to the Shakespearean plays on which they are based in whole or in part, to examining synchronically the larger forces of Western European modernity that made their presence felt both in eastern and southern European countries such as Russia and Italy, as well as in colonial India. Cultural hybridity as a consequence of cross-cultural encounters did not begin in South Asia with the colonial encounter with Britain: it had existed there for centuries, and with British colonialism entered a new phase. Even then, examples of mimicry in Bhabha’s sense are vanishingly small in the colonial period because of the “nationalist” impetus. (Since Bhabha himself provides no example of mimicry from any literary work in any Indian language, while Viswanathan chooses to avoid examining how the colonised natives responded to the hegemonic aims of British colonial education, the “theoretical” model remains unchallenged.) Bankim’s essay “Anukaraṇ” (Imitation) provides an example of a colonial intellectual theorising cross-cultural encounters along lines of distinction between the self-evolving cultures of Greece, Egypt, and ancient India, on the one hand, and those of classical Rome, early modern Europe, and colonial India, on the other, the latter having developed, in Bankim’s view, by means of imitation. At the heart of such theorising is the impulse to decentre the European coloniser as the sole object of mimicry by the colonised, since Bankim locates the phenomenon across time and space, including in Europe, both ancient (Roman) and modern (England and other modern European states), and counterpoints those instances against times when ancient India, as well as ancient Greece and Egypt, were all purportedly self-evolving. And, as we saw, Tagore went one step further and argued that even Bankim’s “self-evolving” ancient civilisations had also been profoundly interconnected for centuries and learnt from each other without losing their sense of identity. Tagore’s essays from the 1920s, in which he articulated his views on cultural hybridity, did considerably better at locating hybridity in time and space

184  Part 2 than did Bhabha’s seventy years later (1994, 38), with Tagore writing with greater clarity and insight, and a firmer sense of geographical and historical perspectives than are found in Bhabha’s book, paradoxically titled The Location of Culture (see Howell 1996, 117). We therefore have records of highly influential intellectuals from colonial India theorising cultural hybridity and its effects by locating its presence across time and space and in the cultures of both the coloniser and the colonised. Neither hybridity nor mimicry, therefore, needs to be located only in the culture of the colonised in the colonial or post-colonial (in the sense of post-independence) periods. In the case of cross-cultural exchanges that took place when the politically weaker community was small in size or did not have enough institutional support to maintain local traditions of literature and performance, such as, say, in diasporic communities as they first settled in new places, can their responses to foreign cultural influences be theorised along the same lines as those that can be taken in the case of, say, nineteenthcentury Italy or colonial Bengal, where there were large interpretive communities and differing degrees of institutional support? Postcolonial critics have generally foregrounded the asymmetry of power relations between the British colonisers and their colonised subjects, an asymmetry that placed Indians at the receiving end, irrespective of whether they were colonial-era subjects from the subcontinent or were from any diasporic community. Consequently, such critics have been able to foreground certain key terms of postcolonial theory—hybridity, colonial mimicry, and cultural hegemony being among the most relevant—often without drawing important and necessary distinctions between diasporic and non-diasporic contexts, or between colonial and post-colonial contexts. Consequently, postcolonial Shakespeareanists have tended to reaffirm certain received opinions regarding the reception of Shakespeare in colonial India without testing their validity through the examination of Indian-language adaptations, since in-depth studies of the latter would put to test the analytical viability of those terms. Instead, prioritising the cultural capital of Shakespeare has been beneficial to postcolonial theorising, since such a move can then be readily used to connect “Shakespeare” (i.e., the image of the playwright as propounded discursively by British colonisers) with British imperial hegemony and colonial education policy, and the undoubted inequalities of power relations between the coloniser and the colonised can then be used to fit this image of Shakespeare to the Procrustean bed that is needed for teleologically driven, rather than empirically verifiable, theorising. I would like to emphasise here that the distinction between teleologically driven and empirically verifiable theorising depends not on the location of the theorist, but on the theoretical approach taken, and teleologically driven postcolonial theorising has had adherents and opponents in both India and in Britain / North America, as can be seen from the

Conclusion  185 methodological thrust of the following observation by an Indian critic writing from India: “Shakespeare’s texts were part of the British ‘civilizing mission’ and their reception in Bengal throws an interesting light on how Shakespeare and his plays became the ‘colonial book,’ a repository of indestructible moral and cultural values. . . . One of the ways in which the colonised Bengalis could become Macaulay’s ‘anglicized subjects’ was to quote and perform Shakespeare” (Sengupta 2005, 217). Such theorising raises a number of questions. How is Bhabha’s “colonial book,” the Bible, readily replaceable by “Shakespeare and his plays,” unless the different kinds of impact the Bible had vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s plays are of no consequence to the analyst? Is the colonial book’s European (preferably British) provenance all that is required for conclusions to be drawn? In such a theoretical approach, to what extent does the actual content of the “colonial book” or its impact upon colonised communities matter? Those who recognise the telltale moves of teleologically driven postcolonial theorising know that the only point that matters in such an approach is the provenance of the book; its content and impact are immaterial, which is why the term “colonial book” can refer to the Bible or Shakespeare, depending upon which of the texts suits the agenda at hand. Such agenda-driven readings are, in fact, ad hominem attacks that require the foregrounding of the national identity of the author and the text in question to the neglect of close readings and of historicist approaches that Shakespeare and adaptations of his works from anywhere across the length and breadth of Europe are accorded routinely, and rightly so. It seems impossible for such theorists to admit of the possibility that selfsame colonial subject could admire and critique Shakespeare at the same time: for them, to express one’s admiration for Shakespeare was to become “Macaulay’s ‘anglicised subject,’ ” no more and no less. However, as I also indicated earlier, new musicologists who are particularly interested in reading operas in terms of identity politics have subjected composers like Verdi to a similar kind of predetermined analysis, Verdi’s Italian nationality and Italy’s colonial ventures setting the tone for how an opera like Otello is to be interpreted, irrespective of what the score and paratextual information tell us. The result of such theorising is the distortion of the complexity of responses generated by Shakespeare’s plays among adapters, whether European or Indian, who actively engaged with the form, language, and ideational content of the plays, modifying, altering, and even challenging the latter as and when they so required. Even when we focus on the agency of the adapter, we need to remind ourselves of the extent to which the agency of the individual adapter has always been circumscribed by institutional, material, and discursive forces. Because of the inflexibility of the regulations of the Paris Opéra, Thomas’s Hamlet had to adhere to existing operatic conventions which, in the case of the ballet music leading to Ophélie’s mad scene, Thomas

186  Part 2 made use of in imaginative ways that have been underappreciated by critics. On the other hand, the spread of Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff and, indeed, of Giacomo Puccini and the other leading composers of the postVerdi generation, was to a considerable extent facilitated by the backing of Giulio Ricordi as a publisher, while the composers of the St. Petersburg–based Russian nationalist school were similarly supported by the business tycoon and music publisher Mitrofan Belyayev, himself a gifted amateur musician. Among Russian writers, Dostoevsky ran his own journals Vremya and Epokha, while Indians like Bankim and Tagore were both associated with the highly influential journal Bangadarśan, Bankim as the founding editor in 1872 and Tagore as the writer to revive it in 1901. The relationship between literary production and paratextual information provided by such journals is crucial to our understanding of how Shakespeare’s texts were responded to by the intelligentsia of the times, and political scientists, historians, and scholars of religion, for example, regularly draw upon information provided by these journals and other sources.1 And yet, such paratextual information has hardly been used in some of the canonical English-language texts on theoretical or historical accounts of the cultural dimension of the colonial encounter. Neither does Viswanathan (1989), who focuses on Calcutta, the capital of British India till 1905, refer to a single Bengali-language journal or text or to cultural institutions created by the Bengali population; nor does Singh (1996, 2019) make anything more than passing references to individual works of Bengali literature. What we have is, paradoxically, a situation in which more scholarly information about non-Anglophone colonial literature can be obtained from experts in the humanities other than postcolonial literary theorists. (There are, of course, several excellent experts on colonial non-Anglophone Indian literatures working in India, the UK, and North America, but their work is not methodologically postcolonial; they are usually also housed in departments other than English literature.) If we acknowledge the validity of Chinua Achebe’s critique (1977) of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, namely that whatever critique Conrad might have offered of European atrocities in the Congo is severely undermined by his failure to provide anything other than a reductive view of Africans, then, paradoxically, postcolonial Shakespeare scholarship does something strikingly similar by focusing on British/ European prejudice and ignoring, at best, and essentialising, at worst, the responses of critics, commentators, and adapters from colonial India. Such essentialisms are particularly problematic in the colonial context since English-language postcolonial criticism is the window to a wider understanding of the phenomenon of global Shakespeare among former colonies of Europe, and the paucity of readily available English-language scholarly translations of colonial non-Anglophone Shakespearean adaptations and of important contextual data pertaining to such works prevents scholars from having access to the kind of thick cultural description

Conclusion  187 that is necessary for any meaningful analysis of a Shakespeare adaptation in any given culture. Such data, however, is available, in varying degrees, in Western European contexts. In her foreword to Richard Taruskin’s book on the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, Caryl Emerson observes: Until quite recently in Anglophone countries, the objective research base that is presumed for the masters of French, German, and Italian music has not been in place in Russian opera. Arguments in the realm of Russian music are frequently based on conventional truths and falsehoods that have migrated effortlessly from rumour into memoir and from there into academic discourse. For w ­ hatever reason—­ perhaps the language and alphabet barrier, or perhaps Soviet ideological constraints—scholarly discussion has all too often remained at the level of unexamined cliché. (1993, xiii–xiv) With one important caveat, however, her observation holds equally well with regard to the scholarship on nineteenth-century non-­Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare, the caveat being that the firmly established, unexamined clichés and essentialisms regarding the spread of Shakespeare in colonial cultures did not pass from the non-academic domain into the academic, but were produced, upheld, circulated, and canonised within Western academia itself. The salutary egalitarian thrust among sections of the professoriate in British and North American literature departments from the 1970s onwards resulted in the rise of a host of theoretical approaches that included postcolonial studies, feminist studies, and critical race theory, among others, that paid special attention to inequalities of power relations based on the coordinates of race, class, and gender. While such work accomplished the much-needed task of exposing, perhaps for the first time, the politically dubious ends to which Shakespeare and his works were systematically used by British colonisers, the methodology tended to rely heavily on the Foucauldian critique of power relations at the expense of all other factors. Neil Lazarus puts the finger on the problem when he writes that “the French theorist’s name was beginning to be on everybody’s lips at the time: for many theoretically inclined, politically progressive scholars, ‘Foucault’ was fast becoming the gold standard of theoretical currency” (2011b, 190). The approach towards power relations, somewhat deterministic in Foucault, but more so in the work of his disciples, led to an especially skewed theorising, on the part of postcolonial critics, of the work of Europeans who sought to break away from their prejudices against colonised people, or those among the latter who found in Shakespeare a figure of towering stimulus to their own imaginations and, at the same time, had the interests of their communities also among their priorities.

188  Part 2 Let us consider the case of a scholar-cum-social reformer like Vidyasagar. As we have seen, he was an upper-caste Sanskrit pundit who used his knowledge of sacred Hindu texts to challenge deeply entrenched beliefs and practices of the Bengali Hindu orthodoxy, a person from a financially non-elite background who mastered English at a mature age to produce a remarkable adaptation of The Comedy of Errors that anticipated several decades in advance the first Anglophone feminist readings of that play to emerge from the Anglo-American centre, and one who built bridges with the liberal and progressive figures from among the British in nineteenthcentury Calcutta, such as John Eliot Drinkwater Bethune, to carry out his forward-looking program of reforms for women. Neither Vidyasagar nor figures like Bethune or the Scottish watchmaker and philanthropist David Hare, who joined hands with Indians to found some of the first modern colleges and girls’ schools in India, get any mention in Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest. On the other hand, a figure like the missionary Alexander Duff, whose attitude towards Hinduism cannot be upheld as a model of intercultural understanding, is discussed at length (Viswanathan 1989, 48–67). By no means is Viswanathan inaccurate, but hers is a one-sided account, and both the historical and literary dimensions of the colonial encounter in nineteenth-century Bengal get distorted as a result. By essentialising categories such as East and West, European and nonEuropean, coloniser and colonised, and so on, postcolonial theorists and, more generally speaking, scholars adopting approaches grounded entirely in identity formations failed to take into account how counterdiscourses emerged and how, for all the undoubted inequalities of power, there were also individuals who sought to break away from received opinions and attitudes, whether it was a European like Verdi, who was questioning European prejudices against non-Europeans, or an Indian like Bankim, who in the 1860s was seeking to re-examine traditional values without, by any means, endorsing British or “Western” cultural values in toto. As a result, the truly interesting histories of Shakespeare reception and adaptation in the nineteenth century, which firmly belong to such adapters—the ones whose attitudes resist the easy categorisations of identity politics—get fitted forcibly into predictable patterns of “critical” responses in which no nineteenth-century European adaptation of Othello, it seems, can be acknowledged as subverting racial prejudice to any degree, while none from colonial India can be regarded as anything other than products of colonial mimicry generated by colonial hegemony. By reducing the works of those Europeans and Indians who sought to tread a variegated and self-reflexive middle ground in their attitudes towards Shakespeare and his works to those of either the European racist or the culturally colonised “subject of Macaulay,” scholars of identity politics and postcolonial theorists have done the laudably emancipatory goals of postcolonial theory an enormous disservice, since they replaced one set of clichés pertaining to nineteenth-century prejudices with an

Conclusion  189 equally essentialist set of clichés of an oppositional thrust. For this reason, a new methodological approach, that of adaptation theory, is necessary for theorising cross-cultural exchanges, in which nuances and distinctions matter more than essentialisms.

Nationalist Cosmopolitanism and Post-Colonial Mimicry In his bestselling book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the TwentyFirst Century (2007), Thomas L. Friedman asserted that, because of the collapse of communism, greater and quicker global connectivity because of technological developments, and changes in business principles, the world had become a level playing field in terms of commerce, and it was time for individual countries to realise that historical and geographical divisions were becoming more and more irrelevant for global trade to take place. In the fifteen years that passed since the publication of Friedman’s book, the picture looks less rosy, as anti-cosmopolitan nationalist movements are on the rise everywhere in the world, with global leaders drawing on the support of the relatively disenfranchised communities within their own countries to spearhead such movements in ways that, at their worst, seem to recall the early decades of the 1920s. Indeed, Friedman’s thesis was criticised by many prominent academics and nonacademics, from both the first and third worlds, as soon the book was published. But Friedman’s book remains of interest since it tangentially draws attention to an important aspect of the post-independence cultural conditions of an ex-colony like India. Why did earlier waves of globalisation not result in the flattening of cultures in nineteenth-century Europe or India, but instead generate what I have called here “nationalist cosmopolitanisms”? If colonising powers still retained their de facto political, cultural, and economic superiority over their ex-colonies after granting them political independence—the reason why postcolonial theorists can draw a connecting line between the colonial and the post-colonial—what made possible the “flattening” of the world in a cultural sense? An answer may be sought in as early an essay as Arjun Appadurai’s “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” (1990), which anticipated many of the points made a decade later by Friedman, but with none of the latter’s glib ironing out of the complexities involved in the interactions of “a new order and intensity” that characterises the modern world. In that essay, Appadurai argued that “the central problem of today’s global interaction is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization” (1990, 5). In his discussion of Philippine interest in, and mimicry of, American popular music, Appadurai observes that renditions of American popular songs were “both more widespread in the Philippines, and more disturbingly faithful to their originals than they are in the United States today,” a phenomenon taking place in “a nation of make-believe Americans” (1990, 3). Such

190  Part 2 Philippine renditions may be understood as part of the phenomenon of what I  would like to call post-colonial mimicry. The more faithful the mimicry of the original is, the more the listener is reminded that such mimicry is white, but not quite. Such mimicry is, however, not confined to the Philippines alone, since such a phenomenon can be seen in other post-independence third-world countries as well. In his book Friedman had joyfully noted the sprouting of glass-and-steel buildings like weeds each week in Bangalore (2007, 5), which he took as a sign of India as having finally “arrived” in the global economic order. Did he consider how much more power is consumed in the attempt to maintain cool temperatures in such buildings, while the glass is heated for twelve hours or so by the rays of the tropical sun? The cultural double bind in such a case is evident: mimicking Western architecture gives the impression to the myopic foreign traveller that the ex-colony has finally “arrived,” even as it makes evident to the insightful one the independent country’s cultural capitulation to normative values emanating from a Western centre, for no other architectural style could be more inappropriate in the Indian context than modern glass-and-steel buildings that have now sprouted all over the country, notwithstanding Bangalore’s relatively moderate climate on account of its altitude. The irony of the situation was not lost on me, who, at one point of time, used to travel from the more Westernised southern part of Calcutta where I lived, to the older quarter of the city where Presidency University is situated, where I was required to explain to my students the concept of colonial mimicry in a nearly two-hundred-year-old British-era colonial building that, in its architecture, was eminently suited for the climate in which it was situated. Similar instances of post-colonial mimicry, of which Friedman’s beloved glass-and-steel buildings of modern India is but just one example, may be found in countless other domains of Indian quotidian life ranging from music and television shows to food and clothing. By drawing attention to the phenomenon of post-colonial mimicry, I do not intend to join hands with Boito in giving voice to the kind of nostalgia for the past that he expressed in his poem “Case Nuove,” which I have discussed in chapter 2. As some of the world’s problems, especially the environmental crisis, require concerted efforts globally, a certain degree of cultural uniformisation may indeed be unavoidable. Furthermore, if anything worse can happen to a culture than the changes that are brought to it over time by cross-cultural contact, it is its inability to adapt to changes over time—an infallible indicator of its impending demise. The reason why I draw attention to post-colonial mimicry is in order to emphasise the inverse relationship between postcolonial theorising and the lived realities of quotidian life in the third world, such as in the city of Calcutta, where I have largely lived my life and of which, therefore, I can claim to have some first-hand knowledge. At least in the

Conclusion  191 Indian context, in the case of interpretive communities that had numerical strength, a sense of cultural and literary heritage, and a thriving literary, musical, artistic, and critical culture, the canonical concepts of hegemony and mimicry gain in relevance when shifted from the colonial to the post-colonial context, the hyphen firmly in place. If we examine the literature, art, or music from India during the colonial era, what we notice is that nationalist cosmopolitanism created the discursive space in which non-autochthonous ideas could be engaged with and incorporated if deemed useful, or otherwise rejected. When political control openly lay in the hands of colonisers, the value of political and cultural resistance through the arts was clear, and in a country with large communities of native intellectuals, such resistance was also realisable. However, after independence (understood in the limited sense of political decolonisation at an official level), when the inequalities of power, far from ceasing to exist, took on new, covert forms, nationalist cosmopolitanism in an ex-colony like India needed to be replaced by post-colonial mimicry, accompanied by the exoticisation of one’s own traditions. This is because political independence did not shift the real centre of political dominance and cultural capital from the West, the world of ex-colonial and neo-colonial powers. For third-world countries, to engage globally with more powerful countries was to operate under the sign of the centres of political power and cultural capital. What Friedman’s book reveals, therefore, and perhaps unwittingly, are the underlying compulsions that have led to post-colonial mimicry by ex-colonised peoples. To capitulate to Western aesthetic and cultural norms without a semi-permeable filter is to accept and play the game of progress exclusively on the West’s terms. There are no better, culturally egalitarian alternatives available to ex-colonies in the international arena, at least as of now; what is in the ascendant, instead, are increasingly xenophobic nationalisms in countries ranging from the First World to the Third. This is one reason why the centre-periphery model cannot be dismissed as obsolete. An indirect proof of a centre-periphery hierarchy is that the native cultures of European countries have survived better the process of decolonisation, despite the economic losses they have had to suffer after centuries of exploitation, or despite their having to capitulate to the preponderance of English as a linguistic medium when operating at an international level. The model’s relevance is also evident from the differences in standards between European and postcolonial scholarship on Shakespeare adaptations. As Neil Lazarus puts it, the “specific inflections (formal and substantive) of received traditions and idioms of poetry, drama or prose writing” by “postcolonial” writers are too often abstracted from their particular contexts by postcolonialist critics and read as expressions or variants of a (putatively) globally dispersed aesthetic mode, such as “magical realism,” or “the

192  Part 2 gothic” or “postmodernism.” In such readings there is often a fatal disposition to situate the aesthetic mode of the “postcolonial” work as derivative of that of a categorically prior “Western” instance. Moreover, the internal thrust of the work under review—that is, its engagement with and reciprocal effect on the “local” traditions upon which it is substantially predicated—is typically neglected. (2011b, 73–74) As I hope the case studies in this book demonstrate, adaptation theory offers a much-needed methodological corrective to the problem in postcolonial theory to which Lazarus draws timely attention. But why is it the case that postcolonial theory, seeking to give traditionally oppressed cultures their voices in international academia, failed to foreground the local traditions from which colonial writing emerged?2 If a sign of Western cultural and racial prejudice is the tendency to ignore the languages and cultures of the colonised, then it is perhaps necessary to acknowledge the constraints set by the power structures of Western literature departments within which postcolonial critics have always had to operate. Moreover, the discipline of literature in any given language, say English, is still tethered to diachronically organised, nation-centric models (Hutcheon 2002). European languages come next in importance, while non-European languages, especially those of Britain’s former colonies, occupy the rearguard. As one moves away from the colonial centre, history is replaced by geography, and unexamined clichés pertaining to ex-colonial outposts increasingly take over. These facts, and the sheer logistical challenges involved in teaching culturally “different” texts (i.e., texts lying culturally in the periphery in relation to the Anglo-American centre) in British and North American classrooms, may be among the reasons why it has been more expeditious to analyse non-Anglophone texts and theorise non-Anglophone Shakespeare reception and adaptation in terms of the top-down application of key concepts of postcolonial theory, a theory that brings together several diverse, globally far-flung communities and connects them to each other solely in terms of the shared experience of their colonial subjugation in the not-so-distant past. If these are indeed among the reasons why the study of non-Anglophone literatures generally, and of non-Anglophone Shakespeares, in particular, is likely to continue along postcolonial lines, then the role of postcolonial theory in perpetuating the effacing of non-Anglophone cultural traditions, traditions in which the study of non-Anglophone Shakespeare adaptations ought to have been situated, also needs to be underlined. Alternatives to such essentialising approaches would involve a shift in the ways in which histories of literature are written, one that in its very historiographical approach acknowledges the fact that languages, literatures, and indeed, cultures do not develop diachronically in splendid isolation from other languages, but synchronically through their

Conclusion  193 contact with other cultures, as well as by non-cultural forces that sweep across them; diachronic approaches then help us relate these synchronic developments from another perspective, central to which is the ordering provided by linear time. Walter Cohen has used such an alternative historiographic model in his history of European literature (2017). For reasons that I hope this book illustrates, I think that such an alternative model is immensely useful, since it enables adaptation scholars to connect adaptations of Shakespeare in different languages synchronically, while also situating these synchronic readings within diachronic perspectives as and when necessary. Moreover, as long as the current models of literary history are in place and theories of non-Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare, especially those from non-European communities, still continue to be made in keeping with the older national-historical model, we will remain saddled with one-sided, if not distorted, views regarding how Shakespeare was received and adapted by non-Anglophone artists globally.

Cross-Cultural Shakespeare and New Analytical Frameworks It would be inaccurate, however, to locate the theoretical problems in analysing cross-cultural Shakespeares in postcolonial theory alone. Interdisciplinary scholarship requires engagement with more than one discipline, and when the adaptation is in a different medium, one needs to make a close reading of the work and consult the specialist scholarship on the work and on the medium before one offers an interpretation or situates one’s interpretation in the context of the reception history of the work. Here, too, approaches that move from an individual adaptation to broader theoretical concerns, or admit of the possibility of nuancing one’s a priori theoretical assumptions in light of close reading and paratextual data that help historicise the adaptation, provide far more insightful analyses than do approaches that take the a priori assumptions as inviolable and focus only on those aspects of an adaptation or paratextual data that then “prove” the validity of the initial assumptions. The operatic adaptations analysed here demonstrate how and why the adaptation/appropriation binary cannot be unproblematically mapped across the colonising/colonised or European/non-European divides. The palimpsest of different attitudes towards questions of race in Verdi’s Otello, in particular, demonstrates how audience responses to that opera depend on how knowledgeable audiences are of operatic history and/ or of Shakespeare and Shakespearean criticism, on how invested they are in feminism and/or in theories of racial and religious Othering, and on how responsive they are to the affective power of music. The operas studied in this book, therefore, complement the case studies from Bengal by enabling us to see the drawbacks of the teleologically driven approach

194  Part 2 taken by many scholars working within the framework of identity politics, postcolonial studies, and new musicology. I  would like to reiterate here that it is not the political goals of such scholars that this book seeks to challenge; rather, it seeks to draw attention to the methodological problems that ensue when their readings become deterministic. The egalitarian political goals of such scholars would, indeed, gain in strength if they drew distinctions between the instances in which creative artists from different places and times interrogated the received opinions of their times, and those in which they merely imbibed and recirculated the prejudices of their own cultures. The reasons why the study of cross-cultural, non-Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare offers special challenges, especially when different media are involved, are various. It requires scholars to learn different languages, cultural traditions, and histories of development of different art forms in different media, and, in their capacity as readers, it requires them to go beyond their own zones of expertise or interest in order to come to terms with the complexity and diversity of range of the phenomenon. It also requires us to recognise that cosmopolitanism and nationalism have not always been in an oppositional relationship with each other and that it is beneficial to examine how and why they have sometimes come together and have (admittedly) more often been adversarial. To appreciate what is truly emancipatory in the history of Shakespeare adaptations, one has to embrace—not shun—the Tower of Babel of ­different languages and cultural traditions, and as long as the inherently anti-pluralistic model of diachronic histories of “national” languages provides the framework for our understanding of Shakespeare’s reception across cultures and the spoken or written word is given priority over other media (especially ones that are less popular than film), we will not be able to appreciate the range and diversity of the productive engagement with Shakespeare that some of the finest minds across different cultures have had with his work over the last two centuries and more. For this book, I consulted, at some time or the other, primary and secondary materials in three European and three Indian languages, in addition to English, before selecting my case studies, for reasons discussed in the introduction. But India alone has fourteen official languages, and it became quite clear to me that, without consulting primary and secondary materials in the original languages, what we would get is a distorted picture of the histories of Shakespeare’s reception in non-Anglophone languages and non-Western art forms. That fact alone went a long way in setting the parameters regarding the degree to which this book could be comparatist in scope. The reason why it is difficult to obtain primary texts in translations or in bilingual editions in the case of non-European, non-Anglophone Shakespeare adaptations is the fact that the dominant version of postcolonial theory in Western academia has been insensitive to the cultural

Conclusion  195 contexts as a result of their methodological indifference to historical and geographical specificities, a point Lazarus and others have noted. And as I  have argued, third-world scholars have increasingly toed the line either by choice or by compulsion, for scholars who make the compromise of working within the theoretical premises of postcolonial theory instead of testing them with any empirical evidence are in a better position to reach out to postcolonial scholars elsewhere than are scholars who take the opposite route. The contrast with “theory” in the scientific sense, in which the empirical verifiability of the theoretical assumption is a sine qua non, is as notable as the hegemony of the key concepts of postcolonial theory as it exists in Western academic departments. Scholars working with originallanguage textual sources from outside of India have arrived at strikingly similar conclusions. As Margaret Litvin writes: Our vision has been limited  .  .  . by the binary Prospero-andCaliban emphasis in much postcolonial criticism. In the case of Arab Shakespeare, as ‘Abdu’s example shows, models from the British colonizer’s culture were important but not decisive. Certainly there were British schools with required English classes and schoolboy abridgments such as the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare, available in both English and Arabic by 1900. But in every period there have been other privileged channels from which Arab writers chose sources to influence their views of literature, theatre, and Shakespeare.  .  .  . Shakespeare was nearly always received as a global (‘ālamī) writer, not a particularly English writer or a British colonial export. (2011b, 146) This is one important reason why, for some domains within the humanities, such as world literature and adaptation studies, more collaborative research between scholars with expertise in different media and/or languages, but with shared research methodologies, is necessary, and the study of cross-cultural and intermedial adaptations of Shakespeare will gain immeasurably from such collaborative research.3 The driving force behind this book was, in fact, my love for the plays of Shakespeare and my discovery of the degree to which his reputation as a global writer was, in various parts of the world, accepted by the very people without whom Shakespeare might have been just what influential sections of the British colonial administration in many parts of the empire sought to make of him—a tool for British cultural supremacism. What was particularly interesting were the insights the aesthetic strategies taken by the adapters provided as to how they read their Shakespeare— the discovery of the significance of their processes of adaptation—and the discovery of how these insights could be related, in varying degrees, to other paratextual data pertaining to Shakespeare’s reception in the receiving cultures. The imposition of predetermined theoretical approaches is

196  Part 2 particularly inappropriate in the case of Shakespeare and his adapters, for what the best examples in this field offer are at least two centuries of some of the most remarkable instances of intercultural and/or intermedial adaptation at a transnational level. Shakespeare’s insightful treatment of marginal characters enabled adapters from marginalised groups and communities to read such figures sympathetically and, in some cases, move from interpreting insightfully one kind of marginal character to another, as did Ira Aldridge with the characters of Othello and Shylock. Indeed, the widespread view of Shakespeare as a writer of global appeal for audiences and readerships born centuries after him, one shared by commentators and adapters from across Europe, the Arab lands, and India, among others, requires reconsideration. Brecht’s observation that it is classic plays that stimulate rewriting points towards the symbiotic relationship between Shakespeare and his adapters: only that which stimulates encourages rewriting, thereby ensuring its own survival. In the twentieth century context, Terry Eagleton has observed wittily that “it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida” (1986, ix–x). Eagleton’s comment rightly draws attention to the remarkable fact that Shakespeare remains so thought-provoking despite his having lived five hundred years ago, and it is surprising to find that a similar view of Shakespeare, when articulated by colonial-era Indian writers, critics, and academics, is regarded by several postcolonial critics as signs of the operation of cultural hegemony. If Shakespeare is still our contemporary, as Jan Kott (1964) has stated, then nineteenth-century non-Anglophone adapters like Verdi, Bankim, and Tagore, who brought new perspectives on the plays, deserve more recognition than they have received from Shakespeare scholars. Recuperating the histories of important non-Anglophone adaptations through the lens of adaptation theory can help us understand how creative artists, readerships, and audiences responded to his plays in different global contexts and how adapters themselves reimagined and re-created Shakespeare on their own terms. This is a field in which there are worlds of cross-cultural exchanges to be discovered and theorised afresh, one that shows how creative artists from different cultures responded to arguably the most insightful and challenging writer to have emerged from Europe, and used their own adaptations to respond to the aesthetic and ideological content of Shakespeare’s plays, or to re-examine their own societies and artistic traditions, or both. This is a burgeoning field, to be sure, but one in which scholars have worked in relative methodological isolation with regard to Shakespeare reception in different areas, genres, and languages. Much more will be gained if such scholars come together, using a methodologically open-ended tool such as adaptation theory, to produce collaborative and genuinely interdisciplinary research that reveals patterns in the different traditions

Conclusion  197 of Shakespeare reception through which non-Anglophone performers, adapters, and audiences from all over the world have come to know his works. If the centre cannot, or is unwilling to, bring in its purview the sheer variety and insightfulness of the best of the large body of responses Shakespeare generated, then there is no reason why scholars from the periphery should suffer the essentialising of the histories of responses from their own cultures. Instead, they can join hands to recuperate their own cultures’ histories of cross-cultural engagements and engage in stimulating ways with adaptations from the Western world that focused on Shakespeare with insight. It is time, therefore, to give the contributions of these non-Anglophone and non-European adapters a more central position in Shakespeare scholarship. This book is, at one level, an invitation to scholars the world over to connect with each other in that challenging and rewarding enterprise.

Notes 1. See, for example, Partha Chatterjee (1993), Tanika Sarkar (2006), and Julius Lipner (2006), among others. 2. Ironically, major works of literature in English from colonial India—the purported age of colonial mimicry—were far fewer in quantity than would be the case in the post-independence period. 3. I have made a similar point with regard to world literature elsewhere: see S. Sen (2020, 1972).

Appendix 1 “Imitation”

By the grace of God, the nineteenth century has witnessed the e­ mergence of a strange creature called the Modern Bengali. Zoologists have determined through tests that this creature does indeed have the external ­features of human beings: they have fingers and toes and lack tails, and their skeletons and brains are akin to those of bipeds.1 But there are doubts about their inner nature. Some say that these are human in this regard as well, while others say that these are externally human and internally animal. In order to clear any doubts, Babu Rajnarayan Basu delivered a speech in the month of Chaitra of 1794 Saka era [1874]. He has now published it. In it, he has supported the animal view. What position do we take? We also take the view of Bengalis as animals. We have become familiar with this view from English newspapers. Some red-bearded sages believe that, just as the Divine Creator created Tilottamā by taking the best bits from all the beautiful women from heaven and earth, so did he put together different animal qualities to create the unique character of the New Bengali. The slyness of the fox; the flattery and begging tendency of the dog; the timidity of the sheep; the mimicry of the ape; and the loud braying of the donkey—by combining all of these God has created the horizonilluminating torchbearer of India’s hopes, and the object of the learned Max Müller’s affections, the New Bengali. Just as these learned men place Tilottamā among the world’s beauties, Richardson’s Selections among books, a fakir’s shirt among clothes, punch among hard drinks, and khichri among foods, so do they place the New Bengali among human beings. Just as the churning of the Ocean of Milk resulted in the moon illuminating the world,2 so through the churning of the ocean of animal nature has this moon, the irreproachable Bengali babu, been enlightening Bharatvarsha [India]. Those who, like Rajnarayan Babu, are deprived of the heavenly ambrosia and, like Rahu,3 seek to eclipse this spotless moon—we condemn them. To Rajnarayan Babu himself we pose this question: since in your book you forbid the consumption of beef, why then are you eating the head of the Bengali?4 In what way is the Bengali inferior to the cow? The Bengali is as useful as that

Appendix 1 “Imitation”  199 animal. He is producing enormous quantities of delectable milk in the form of newspapers. By tilling the field of jobs, he is generating profits for the English farmer. By carrying sackfuls of knowledge on his back from the college to the printing press, he is proving himself to be the proverbial beast of burden.5 By loading foreign liquor in the car of social reform, he is brewing things for the alcohol market. And in the mill of national progress he is grinding the seeds of self-interest in order to produce profitable oil. Should such a cow, which possesses so many excellent qualities, be slaughtered? That said, no matter how much one may criticise the Bengali, he is not as worthy of vilification as one may imagine. He is less worthy of censure than even that made by Rajnarayan Babu. The love for one’s own nation, which leads some to criticise Bengalis, is also what has led Rajnarayan Babu to criticise them—it is only for the Bengali’s welfare. He is not concerned with making an impartial comparison of Bengal then and now—his goal instead is to point out the drawbacks of Bengalis at present. He has not drawn attention to the strengths of the modern Bengali. Nor is it necessary, for we are never for a moment in doubt about our strengths. The modern Bengali has many faults. Out of all of them, the love for mimicry is pointed out by all. Whether it is the Englishman or the Bengali, everyone is incessantly condemning the Bengali for this fault. There is no need to repeat what Rajnarayan Babu has said on this matter— nowadays similar criticisms are to be found on everyone’s lips. We accept the general argument, and also admit that much of what Rajnarayan Babu has said is justified. But there are a few common misconceptions about imitation. Is imitation in itself always worthy of censure? That can never be the case. One’s first steps in learning come only through imitation. Just as a child learns to speak by imitating the speech of adults, and act by observing the actions of grown-ups, so do primitive and ignorant nations [jātis] learn from developed and learned ones. Thus, the fact that Bengalis should imitate the English is understandable and logical. It is true that the first civilised nations learnt how to be cultured and knowledgeable without imitation; the ancient civilisations of India and Egypt did not develop through imitation. But what is the source of the current supremacy of modern European culture among all global cultures? That too is the result of the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Roman civilisation itself developed by imitating the Greek. Experts on history know that the Europeans did not imitate ancient Greek and, especially, Roman culture to any lesser extent than what Bengalis are doing with respect to the English. It is because they [the Europeans] imitated initially that they are now at the summit. Children who have not dipped in water holding the hands of others have never learnt swimming, since they have never gone into water. Those who have not seen their teacher write have

200  Appendix 1 “Imitation” never learnt to write. That the Bengali is imitating the English is indeed a sign of hope. Nevertheless, many believe that imitation never results in excellence of the first rank. How do you know? Consider literature first. A number of the poems of the first rank, from all across the world, are imitations of other works. Pope imitated Dryden and Boileau, while Johnson imitated Pope in turn. But we do not wish to prove our point by citing such minor poets. Virgil’s great epic is an imitation of Homer’s. Roman literature in its entirety was modelled on the Greek. Those works of Roman literature that provided the basis for European civilisation were nothing but imitations. But let us keep them at bay. Our own country has two epics—they are not epics, but glorybestowing history—which are the finest epics in the world. They are almost equally excellent, with only minor qualitative differences. One of them is an imitation of the other. Almost no one except Wheeler Sahib6 generally disagrees with the view that the Mahābhārata was composed after the Rāmāyaṇa. The differences between Rāma and Yudhiṣṭhira are not greater than those found between the heroes of a source text and its imitation.7 Lakṣmaṇa, the hero of immeasurable strength and self-control and the epitome of fraternal love in the Rāmāyaṇa, has transformed into Arjuna in the Mahābhārata, while Bharata and Śatrughna have become Nakula and Sahadeva. Bhīma, a new creation, stands a bit in the shadow of Kumbhakarṇa. Rāvaṇa of the Rāmāyaṇa is the Duryodhana of the Mahābhārata; Rāmāyaṇa’s Vibhīṣaṇa, Mahābhārata’s Vidura; while Abhimanyu has grown from the marrow of Indrajīt. On the one hand, Rāma is exiled along with his wife and brother; on the other is Yudhiṣṭhira exiled with his brothers and wife. Both are deprived of their kingdoms. One’s wife is abducted; the other’s wife is publicly insulted in court. At the heart of the two epics is this fire of conflict; in one openly, in the other implicitly. The prefatory material of both epics is the same: a prince, deprived of his kingdom, and sent into exile with his brother and his wife, wins back his kingdom by means of war, and thus re-establishes himself. Parallels can be found even in some of the smallest details—the episode of Lava and Kuśa is played out by Babhruvāhana;8 Dhanurbhanga in Mithilā has become Matsyavindhana in Pānchāl; and there are striking parallels between the sins of Daśaratha and Pāndu. You may be disinclined to call the Mahābhārata an imitation of the Rāmāyaṇa if you so wish; but very few examples reveal such close parallels between source text and imitation. But despite it being an imitation, the Mahābhārata is an incomparable work of poetry, with the Rāmāyaṇa being the only work that can stand beside it. Next, think of society. When Romans came to learn about the Greek civilisation, they engaged in imitating the Greeks wholeheartedly. The result: Cicero’s oratory, Tacitus’s histories, Virgil’s epic, the plays of Plautus and Terence, the lyric poetry of Horace and Ovid, Papinian’s laws, and

Appendix 1 “Imitation”  201 Seneca’s ethics. European jurisprudence is based on the Roman example; and so is the European mode of governance. You find the Imperator, the Senate, the plebian class, the forum, the municipium. Modern European architecture and painting have emerged from Greek and Roman roots. All these achievements were initially based upon imitation; at present, by abandoning imitation, European culture has achieved individuality and excellence. Provided there is talent, this is how things evolve—first there is imitation; then, with mastery achieved through practice there is, eventually, excellence. When a child starts to write, he has to imitate the handwriting of his teacher; ultimately, his handwriting becomes his own, and if he is gifted he ends up writing better than his teacher. But imitation without innovation is indeed utterly detestable. If one is not naturally gifted in a particular field, then he always remains an imitator; the hallmarks of individuality never emerge. European drama is an important example in this regard. European drama is entirely modelled on the Greek. But because of innate talent, drama in Spain and England soon achieved their own individual characteristics—and indeed England became classical Greece’s equal. On the other hand, lacking natural ability in this regard, Roman, Italian, French, and German drama remained mere imitations. Many have suggested that the reason why plays by these latter people lack excellence is because of their tendency to copy their models. This is a mistaken view. It is the result of a lack of natural ability. The tendency to merely copy is the result of lack of talent. This tendency to copy is the effect, and not the cause. The reason why imitation has such a bad name nowadays is because of the tendency of talentless men to imitate. When engaged in by an incompetent person, nothing is as bad as imitation—their works are both mediocre and derivative. Otherwise, imitation is not in itself worthy of censure; and under current circumstances it is not wrong. Indeed, it is quite natural. It will be difficult to justify the thought that this tendency indicates some peculiar fault in the nature of the Bengali. This is a natural strength or drawback in all human beings. When the superior and the inferior come together, then the inferior naturally wishes to catch up. What can the way be? It is this—do as your superiors do, and you will become better. This is imitation. The Bengali sees that the Englishman is superior to him in all respects—whether it is in knowledge, strength, glory, or happiness. Why would the Bengali not like to be like the English? And how will he become so? The Bengali thinks that if he does things just as the Englishman does, then he too will become as civilised, educated, affluent, and happy. Under similar circumstances, any other people would have acted in a similar way. The tendency to imitate is not the fault of the Bengali. At least the three main castes—Brahmin, Vaidya, and Kāyastha—are descendants of the Aryans; even now Aryan blood is flowing through their veins. Bengalis can never love aping the way simians do. This tendency to imitate is but natural, and it is possible that the

202  Appendix 1 “Imitation” outcome will be beneficial. Those who take offence at our adopting the clothes and the food habits of the English—what will they say about the imitation of French clothing and food habits by the British? In this regard, are the English any less inclined to imitate than the Bengali? We imitate our lords; whom do the English imitate? We admit, however, that the extent to which Bengalis imitate the English may not be desirable. Talentless imitation is more prevalent among Bengalis; and they are more inclined to imitate the negative aspects of the English than their positive ones. This is a matter of great regret. Bengalis are not that good at imitating excellent qualities; in their ability to imitate the bad, they have no equal on earth. For this reason, we curse their tendency to imitate, and for this reason agree that many of Rajnarayan Babu’s criticisms are valid. Even when the imitator is gifted, imitation has two major drawbacks. The first is the hindrance to variety. One of the main joys of this world is caused by variety. If everything on this earth were of the same colour, would it have appeared just as beautiful? If all sounds were of the same kind—imagine if there were no sounds other than that of the cuckoo— would that not sound painful to the ear? Perhaps if our nature were different, we might not have been negatively affected. But right now, with the kind of nature with which we have been born in the world, it is in diversity that we find pleasure. Imitation destroys that pleasure. Macbeth is an outstanding play, but if all plays were written in imitation of it, what pleasure would we have had from them? If all epic poems were written in the style of the Raghuvam . sa, who would have read poetry? Secondly, in all matters carefully considered repetition creates the possibility of excellence. However, if later works still remain mere imitations of previous works, then such efforts cannot ever show new paths; hence there is no improvement. What we get is only continuity. Whether it is in the arts or sciences, social work, or the training of the mind, this observation holds true everywhere. Proper blooming and improvement of the physical and mental faculties is the principal reason for the existence of mankind. However, the development of some faculties at the cost of others is harmful. Human beings are diverse, and every individual’s happiness also has diverse facets. In order to improve one’s strengths one needs to do different kinds of activities. It cannot be the case that different kinds of activities will be performed by different kinds of human beings. One class of people having similar characteristics cannot accomplish a multitude of different tasks. For this reason, variety in character, activity, and temperament is necessary. Without it society cannot improve on all fronts. The propensity for imitation results in the imitator’s character, activity, and temperament developing along the lines of that which he imitates; there cannot be any deflection. When everyone, or most, or the best and most efficient people of a community start imitating the same ideals, then the lack of variety becomes a major problem. All-round

Appendix 1 “Imitation”  203 human development does not occur; the balance between different kinds of mental faculties is lost; different kinds of work do not get accomplished; and people are not fated to be happy. Humanity is left deficient, society is left deficient, human life is left deficient. From what we have written, we can deduce the following: 1. Social development has two paradigmatic forms. Some societies become civilised by themselves, while others learn from already-­ civilised societies. The first kind of development takes time; the other happens quickly. 2. When a relatively underdeveloped society comes into contact with a more developed one, then rapid progress happens by means of the second route. The conditions in the underdeveloped society are such that its members tend to imitate the superior one in all respects. This is a normal tendency. 3. Hence, the evident tendency of the Bengali to imitate is neither unusual, nor is related to any characteristic deficiencies. 4. Imitation is not ab initio harmful; it can have beneficial effects as well. An initial phase of imitation makes way for a later phase of independence on its own. On the basis of Bengali society at present, it cannot be stated incontrovertibly that their tendency to imitate is going to be harmful. There are reasons for hope as well. 5. But imitation can also be harmful. If, after a sufficient period of time, the tendency to imitate still remains powerful or continues to flourish indefinitely, there will be grave danger.

Notes 1. Bankim here uses the unusual term “Bimenā” within quotes in Bengali; the term presumably means “two-handed” (“bi,” two; “manus,” hand), as opposed to being a quadruped. 2. According to Hindu mythology, one of the consequences of the churning of the Cosmic Ocean was the creation of the moon. 3. One of the nine major astronomical bodies in Vedic texts, Rāhu is supposed to cause eclipses. 4. In Hindi and Bengali, “eating the head” is an idiomatic expression for irritating someone. 5. In the original, Bankim uses the proverbial Bengali expression “chinir balad” (the sugar-carrying ox). Just as the ox carries sugar for human beings but cannot enjoy it, so does the “chinir balad” perform labour for others without being able to enjoy its fruits himself. 6. The reference is to James Talboys Wheeler (1824–97). 7. Rāma and Yudhiṣṭhira are the heroes of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata respectively. Bankim uses the words “imitated” and “imitating” works. 8. In some versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, as Rāma performs the horse-sacrifice ceremony, he is interrupted by his sons Lava and Kuśa, who arrive as wandering poet-singers; in some versions, the brothers capture the horse and defeat Rama and his brothers before Rama’s estranged wife Sita intervenes. In the Bengali

204  Appendix 1 “Imitation” original, Bankim uses the name Kuśilava, which is the name given to the two brothers after the names of wandering bards (see Varadpande [1992, 2:295] and Doniger O’Flaherty et al. [1988, 60–61]). Similarly, in the Mahābhārata, Babhruvāhana, the son of Arjuna and the Manipuri princess Chitrāṅgada, defeats Arjuna’s army during a horse-sacrifice ceremony.

Bankimchandra Chatterjee

Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona”

Firstly, Śakuntalā and Miranda Both are daughters of ṛiṣis [sages]; both Prospero and Viśwamitra are kings-turned-sages. Since both are daughters of ṛiṣis, they receive supernatural aid. Miranda is protected by Ariel, Śakuntalā, by the apsarās. Both are raised by ṛiṣis. Both are like sylvan vines—next to them, the vines of a garden pale in comparison. On seeing Śakuntalā, Duṣyanta recalls the inferior beauty of the palace women: If the figure of this person, scarcely to be found in royal apartments, is that of a hermitage-dweller, then indeed the garden vine is outclassed in virtues by the forest creeper. (1.74) Ferdinand thinks likewise on seeing Miranda:    Full many a lady I have eyed with best regard, and many a time The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage Brought my too diligent ear: for several virtues Have I liked several women; ----------------------------------------------------------------------- but you, O you, So perfect and so peerless, are created Of every creature’s best! Both are raised in the forest; they have in them the full measure of the charm of innocence. But living in society results in the deformation of that which is beautiful, innocent, and pure in feminine nature. Who will love me? Who will find me beautiful? Who will marry me? Such desires and delusive amusements taint feminine nature, just as clouds taint the beauty of the moon. Śakuntalā and Miranda are free from this taint, since they have not been raised in society. Śakuntalā, clad

206  Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā” in clothes made from the barks of trees, has lived watering trees from her small earthen water-pot; like the well-watered young jasmine buds, she is herself fair, pure, and cheerful, her charming aroma diffused in all directions. She bestows love on her sisters, the fresh jasmine buds; on her brothers, the mango trees; on her child, a motherless fawn. When she departs for her husband’s home, she is tearful, distressed, and overwhelmed as she bids them goodbye. Śakuntalā’s conversation is with them—she jokes with some trees, caresses others, and is happy to get vines pollinated. However, innocent as Śakuntalā may be, she is not untutored: the evidence of this lies in her modesty. This quality is strongly pronounced in her nature: she is, so often, to be seen with her head bowed in front of Duṣyanta, and her modesty prevents her from expressing herself readily even to her close female friends. Miranda is not like that. She is so innocent that she lacks even this modesty. How could she be modest? She has not seen any male figure other than her father. On seeing Ferdinand for the first time, she is unable to comprehend what she sees: Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir, It carries a brave form. But ’tis a spirit. Śakuntalā fully understands all social norms; Miranda has none. She does not hesitate to praise Ferdinand’s looks to her father; she praises him as if he were an object of art: I might call him A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble. On the other hand, Miranda does not lack at all the innate purity that lies at the heart of feminine nature, the modesty that lies within modesty; for this reason, Miranda’s innocence is more novel and pleasing than Śakuntalā’s. When, on seeing Ferdinand being persecuted by her father, Miranda says, Oh dear father, Make not too rash a trial of him, for He’s gentle and not fearful . . . or, when, on hearing Ferdinand’s looks being disparaged by her father, Miranda says My affections Are then most humble; I have no ambition To see a goodlier man,

Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā”  207 then we realise that Miranda has not been properly socialised, but that she nevertheless has empathy and tenderness; she lacks any sense of shame. But the purity that lies at the core of feminine modesty, that, she definitely has. When Miranda meets the prince, her heart has not known romantic love; this is because, since her infant days, she has seen no male figure save her father and Caliban. When Śakuntalā sees the king, she, too, has not fallen in love; she has not met any males other than sages. Both women, while in hermitages—one in Kaṇva’s, the other in Prospero’s— fall in love with heroes of a similar kind as soon as they see them. Now consider the artistry of both kavis [poets]: they have not created the characters of Śakuntalā and Miranda in consultation with each other, yet the characters are as similar to each other as they would have been if they had been portrayed by the same artist. If the same artist were to depict these two characters, what differences would he have maintained between the two? He would have realised that Śakuntalā is a product of society. She is aware of social norms and is, accordingly, modest; she will, therefore, not articulate her love, but indicate it only indirectly. But Miranda has not been properly socialised; she does not know what it means to be demure in society, hence her expression of her love will be comparatively more direct. This difference is exactly what one finds in the work of the two poets. Śakuntalā is deeply in love with Duṣyanta; but far from disclosing her love to her female companions, Śakuntalā does not speak one word about her emotional transformation until they, perceiving her misery, guess what has transpired and importune her to express her troubles. Until that point, Śakuntalā’s mood is expressed only through hints: That tender look, even when her eyes glanced elsewhere, that gait, slowed by the heaviness of her buttocks, as if deliberately teasing, that angry outburst at her friend who had detained her, saying: “You may not leave!” —All this was really aimed at me! Ah! Love perceives all as its own. (2.7) When Śakuntalā attempts to leave Duṣyanta, her bark-made dress gets stuck to trees; blades of sharp grass get stuck in her feet. But [the depiction of] Miranda needs nothing of this sort:1 on first seeing her love, she unhesitatingly speaks her mind to her father: This Is the third man that e’er I saw, the first That e’er I sigh’d for.

208  Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā” Furthermore, on seeing her father preparing to torment Ferdinand, she declares her love for him and endeavours to arouse her father’s pity. She devotes herself to Ferdinand at her first opportunity. The first love address between Duṣyanta and Śakuntalā is a hide-andseek game of sorts. “Friend, why do you not let the king go? . . . Let me go, then! . . . Let me hide behind the tree!” Śakuntalā uses such excuses; Miranda has none of them. These [Śakuntalā’s excuses] are prescribed for chaste women from well-born families, but Miranda is not such a girl. She is a sylvan bird that does not shy away from singing joyfully at sunrise; she is a flower that does not hesitate to bloom when the evening breeze blows. On meeting the hero, she does not hesitate to state: But my modesty, The Jewel in my dower, I would not wish Any companion in the world but you; Nor can imagination form a shape, Besides yourself, to like of. Furthermore: Hence, bashful cunning! And prompt me, plain holy innocence! I am your wife, if you will marry me; If not, I’ll die your maid; to be your fellow You may deny me; but I’ll be your servant, Whether you will or no. We wished to quote the first love meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda in its entirety, but it is unnecessary. Everyone has a copy of Shakespeare at home and can read the relevant passages from the original. They will see that, compared to the world-famous scene depicting the love tryst between Romeo and Juliet in the garden, which all former college students know by heart, this scene is by no means lacking in invention. In this scene, Miranda is as much saturated by the feeling as is Juliet when she says, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep.” In the analogous situation in which Duṣyanta and Śakuntalā meet under the bower—as a result of which Śakuntalā makes the first stirrings of her hitherto shut heart-bud bloom with joy in front of the sun—there is no comparable excellence; one does not observe in her heart that restless succession of waves that break upon the shore of human nature. As I said before, one finds only expressions of abashment, of reticence, of ­hide-and-seek—even a hint of slyness: “When I was halfway, I remembered that this fibre bracelet had fallen from my hand and I returned. It was as if my heart was telling me that you had taken it” (3.139).2 And so on. There is a certain forwardness of manner here, as for example in these words of Duṣyanta: “But the bee is not content just with the scent of the

Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā”  209 lotus” (3.168). To which Śakuntalā replies: “If not content, what will you do?” (3.169).3 There is not much more than this. Such a depiction, however, does not reveal the poet’s fault; rather, it reveals his artistry. The grandness of Duṣyanta’s character has put Śakuntalā in the shade. Ferdinand and Romeo are insignificant personalities, almost as young as the heroines, almost comparable in their lack of significant achievements, their reputation yet to spread anywhere. In comparison, who is Śakuntalā when compared to the friend of the god Indra and the ruler of the world and its seas, Duṣyanta? The great tree of Duṣyanta has completely overshadowed the bud of Śakuntalā—the latter is unable to bloom fully. What the scene presents is not a love address, but rather, king’s play. The ruler of the world, resting in a bower, has fancied playing the game of love; his behaviour with Śakuntalā is like that of an intoxicated elephant that picks up a lotus bud in its trunk for sport. How will the lotus bloom? Those who will not keep these words in mind will fail to understand the character of Śakuntalā. The water in which Miranda and Juliet bloomed did not let Śakuntalā do so. In the love-smitten Śakuntalā, we saw a young girl’s restlessness, a young girl’s anxiety, a young girl’s sense of modesty; but where is the dignity of the mature woman or her affection? Some would say that the differences in characterisation arise from differences in social norms, i.e., national differences. In fact, that is not the case. To say that Śakuntalā is bashful because she is a girl from a good family from our country, and that Juliet and Miranda lack a sense of modesty because they are girls from a foreign culture would be utterly wrong. Only narrow-minded critics fail to understand that differences between different times or periods are only superficial: human nature remains human nature across different climes and times. If indeed someone has to be described as being relatively brazen, it must be Śakuntalā, as her question “If not content, what will you do?” reveals. That Śakuntalā, who after a few months would rebuke Duṣyanta in the Paurava court4 by asking, “You Anārya (dishonourable man), do you view everyone by the measure of your own heart?”5 remained a girl in the bower is not because of any sense of modesty that a well-born girl is supposed to display. That was because of the breadth of Duṣyanta’s character. When Śakuntalā appears in court as an abandoned woman, she is a wife, a queen, a mother-to-be— hence she is at this point a mature woman. In contrast, at the hermitage, she is a sage’s daughter, an aspirant, beyond the norms of her kind, to the king’s palace—who is she at this stage? Merely a lotus in an elephant’s trunk. I have taken the trouble to write this in order to demonstrate that the creator of Śakuntalā is no less than that of The Tempest.

Secondly, Śakuntalā and Desdemona While it could be demonstrated that Śakuntalā and Miranda are comparable in many respects, it could also be seen that Śakuntalā is not quite Miranda. Comparing her with Miranda reveals one side of Śakuntalā’s

210  Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā” character. The other side remains to be understood. I wish to do so by comparing her with Desdemona. Śakuntalā and Desdemona are both comparable with each other and, at the same time, incomparable. They are comparable, since both gave their love without taking permission from their elders. Keeping in mind Othello, what Gautami tells Duṣyanta about Śakuntalā could also be attributed to Desdemona: She did not consult her elders, You did not ask her kinsfolk. Since you chose one another, What will you now say to each other? (5.78) They are comparable, since both have fallen in love with men of heroic stature—the “tendrils of their hopes” climbed high by twining around great trees. But women’s fascination with heroism is more pronounced in the case of Desdemona than it is in the case of Śakuntalā. Othello is dark, hence not handsome to an Italian woman; but the appeal of the heroic is stronger on a woman’s mind than that of good looks. The great poet [Vyāsa], who made Draupadī feel more attracted to Arjuna than to any of her other four husbands, which in turn prevented her from entering heaven in person, knew this fact, and the poet who created Desdemona revealed this fundamental truth in all its depth. They are comparable because the “tendrils of their hopes” were ultimately broken—both were abandoned by their husbands. The world is unkind and cruel. It often happens that those who are worthy of affection are the ones who are especially subjected to the world’s unkindness and cruelty. This is not entirely harmful for humankind, since all that is pure and noble in human nature expresses itself in the best possible way especially in such cases. This can be the basis for cultivating the right values in human beings6—the main ingredient of poetry. The excellent qualities in Desdemona’s character that her fate leads her to reveal are paralleled in the case of Śakuntalā. Hence, the requirements for the comparison of the two characters are fully present. And they are comparable because both are capable of infinite kindness—both are satī [women who are intently devoted to their husbands]. There is, of course, no dearth of kind and devoted women in fiction. Nowadays, every Tom, Dick, and Harry, churning out plays, novels, and doggerel by the dozen have for their heroines kind and devoted women. But send a pet cat to such women, and they will forget their husbands, while Śakuntalā, absorbed in thoughts of her husband, failed to hear the curse of the irascible sage Durvāsas! All women may be chaste, but who can explain the essence of the mind that thinks, as does Desdemona, that since there are none in the world who are unfaithful [sic], women cannot

Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā”  211 be so either? If unwavering devotion to one’s husband, whether under torture, abandonment, or slander defines a woman who is truly a satī, then Desdemona is a more honorable embodiment than is Śakuntalā. When she was abandoned by her husband, Śakuntalā rebuked him, her head held high like that of a serpent showing its fangs. When the king derided her by saying that she is clever despite being uneducated, Śakuntalā, in her anger and pride, abandoned her docile, bashful, and sorrowful countenance and asked him, “You dishonourable man, do you view everyone by the measure of your own heart?” When the king replies by stating that everyone knew his character, Śakuntalā sarcastically states: You alone are the authority And you know the ways of the world, What possibly can timid women know? (5.122) This sense of outrage, this sarcastic tone—these are not to be found in Desdemona. When Othello slaps and dismisses her in front of everyone, Desdemona only states that she will not disturb him any more. And as soon as she is called, she calls him “My Lord” and comes to her husband. When Othello wrongly subjects Desdemona to the gravest insult, Desdemona states nothing other than the fact that she was innocent, and that heaven knows it. And even after that, after being completely deprived of her husband’s love, on seeing only a great void in the world, Desdemona calls Iago and asks him: Oh good Iago, What shall I do to win my lord again? Good friend, go to him; for, by this light of heaven, I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel. . . . When Othello, like a terrible monster, appears in front of the sleeping Desdemona and tells her, “Thou art to die,” she shows no anger, no sense of hurt dignity, no lack of respectfulness or kindness, but merely states, “Then Lord have mercy on me!” When Desdemona, afraid of the sheer possibility of dying, begs to live for a day, a night, an instant, the Moor does not listen to her. Even then she does not get angry, or become disrespectful, or show any lack of kindness. When Emilia sees the dying Desdemona and asks her who murdered her, even at that moment she only states, “Nobody; I myself. Farewell / Commend me to my kind lord: O, farewell!” Even then does she not reveal that it was her husband who killed her, despite her being innocent. For these reasons Śakuntalā is both similar to and different from Desdemona. They cannot be compared, because things from different cultures cannot be compared. Shakespeare’s play is like a vast ocean, while

212  Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā” Kālidāsa’s is like a heavenly garden. A garden cannot be compared with an ocean. Whatever is pleasant, beautiful, fragrant, melodious, and captivating is abundantly present in this garden. And whatever is profound, restless, terrifying, and impassable is to be found in this ocean. Shakespeare’s ocean is full of waves of great grief that arise from the heart; restless anger, jealousy, and other such feelings hit in waves of gusty winds. On the one hand, it offers quickly moving waves of this tremendous sense of motion and uproar; on the other, it offers a calming blue, endless flashes of brilliance and illumination, a wealth of jewels, a calming music—which makes the play rare and precious in the world of literature. That is why I  say that Śakuntalā and Desdemona cannot be really compared. Different jatīs (nations) cannot be compared. There is a reason why I am invoking differences between nations here. What we call a nāṭak is somewhat different from what Europeans call a play. In both cultures, plays are poems that are enjoyed as dṛiśya-kāvya (poems that are presented in visual forms);7 but European critics expect their plays to be something more. They say that there are many poems that are written as dṛiśya-kāvyas but are not true plays. That these are not true plays do not make such works inferior—there are, in fact, some supremely excellent works of this kind, such as Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred. Works in such a form may be of superior or inferior quality, but they are poems, not plays. Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā are supreme examples of upākhyān-kāvya (narrative poems)8 in dramatic form; but they are not true plays. To say so is not to denigrate them, since narrative poems of such quality are rarely to be found anywhere in the world—indeed, they could be even called unique. We in India can call both works plays (nāṭaks), since they display all the features that a nāṭak should have according to Indian rhetoricians. But they do not have all the features that European critics expect in a play. Othello, on the other hand, has these additional qualities in full measure. Othello is a play; Śakuntalā is, by the same standards, an upākhyān-kāvya. As a result, Desdemona has been more sharply etched than Śakuntalā or Miranda. Desdemona is alive and vivid as a character; Śakuntalā and Miranda are characters worthy of contemplation. From Desdemona’s words alone can we hear her distressed, shaking voice, the large teardrops that fall from her cheeks to her bosom; the beautiful lady’s eyes, quivering like the strings of a musical instrument as she kneels on the ground immediately find their place in our hearts. We do not get to visualise Śakuntalā’s reddened eyes unless Duṣyanta mentions them specifically: Her eye casts no side glances, But just glares very red, Her voice is harsh and does not slur its words, Her whole bimba-red lower lip shivers As if pained by the cold,

Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā”  213 Her naturally curved brows Have at once knitted together. (5.118–19) We do not get to see any elaboration of Śakuntalā’s sorrow, or any sense of motion; these qualities are abundantly present in Desdemona’s sorrow. Śakuntalā is the work of a painter; Desdemona is the nearly lifelike creation of a sculptor. Desdemona’s feelings are made clear and are fully developed in front of us; Śakuntalā’s, on the other hand, are only hinted at. Because Desdemona’s portrait is brighter, Śakuntalā cannot stand beside her. Otherwise they are the same at their core. Śakuntalā is part Miranda, part Desdemona. Śakuntalā the girl is analogous to Miranda; Śakuntalā the mature woman is analogous to Desdemona. Bankimchandra Chatterjee All citations from Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā are from the translation by Somadeva Vasudeva (2006).

Notes 1. The original passage here is somewhat confusing. Literally, the first phrase of the line reads as follows: “But Miranda requires none of those—she knows none of those things,” etc. 2. The last Sanskrit word in Bankim’s quotation does not match that of the standard text; the translation quoted here is from the standard text. 3. Here, too, Bankim’s quotation from the Sanskrit is slightly different from that found in the standard edition, which is what I have followed here. 4. The court of the ancient Indian king Puru (Porus) and his successors. 5. 5.118. Bankim makes an approximate translation of this phrase in his Bengali translation. The word Anārya, which can mean both “non-Aryan” and “dishonourable,” is not used by Kālidāsa. 6. Bankim’s phrase here literally begins thus: “This is the seed for a good education. . . .” 7. Dṛiśya = vision; kāvya = poem. 8. Upākhyān = tale, story, or narrative.

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Index

Abbate, C. 51, 55, 214 ‘Abdu, T. 54n2, 195 Accinni, A. 77, 214 Achebe, C. 186, 214 Achter, M. J. 45, 50, 57 – 8, 214 Ackerman, B. 25n11, 214 Adam, A. 49 – 50, 58, 73 adaptation 2, 5, 7, 9 – 14, 17 – 24, 25n12, 26n13, 30 – 7, 39 – 41, 44 – 6, 48, 52, 54 – 7, 59 – 61, 74 – 5, 97, 100, 112 – 13, 118, 120, 142 – 3, 145n18, 151 – 2, 154, 156 – 8, 161 – 2, 165, 167 – 8, 170 – 1, 173, 176, 178, 180n19, 181 – 2, 187 – 9, 192 – 3, 195 – 6, 223, 225, 227, 230 – 2; see also appropriation; diachronic analysis; postcolonial theory; relational approach; Shakespeare, W.; synchronic analysis; translation; transculturation Adriana 158 – 65 Africanus, L. 8, 13, 73, 214 Agawu, K. 25n6, 214 Aida (Verdi) 53, 82, 84, 87, 94, 99, 101 – 2, 106 – 8, 216, 226, 230 Ālāler ghare dulāl (Thakur) 114 Albright, D. 8, 13, 73, 214 Aldridge, I. 11, 67 – 8, 102, 196, 225, 234 alfier nero, L’ (Boito) 65 Ali-Baba (Cherubini) 106 All’arte italiana (“Sapphic Ode”) (Boito) 105 Allen, R. 156, 169, 214 All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare) 44 Amleto (Faccio) 44, 57, 82, 227 Amphitruo (Plautus) 168 Amritabazar patrika 149n52, 172

Amrith, S. S. 147n33, 214 Ānandamaṭh (Bankim) 115, 118, 132, 135 – 9, 142, 149, 182, 226, 230 Anatomy of Melancholy (Robert Burton) 65, 213 André, N. 24, 100, 214 Angoor (Gulzar) 168 Anthias, F. 80, 214 anti-Semitism 61 – 2, 70 – 1, 74 – 5, 89 Appadurai, A. 189, 214 Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe (Voltaire) 36 Appiah, K. A. 25n11, 215 appropriation 10, 21, 36, 55, 61, 101, 174, 193, 219 – 20, 230 Arblaster, A. 13, 215 Arouet, F-M see Voltaire Ashcroft, B. 6, 180, 215 Austin, J. L. 21 Azmi, A. 17, 215 Bagchi, J. 5 – 6, 142, 149, 168, 215 “Bahubibāha” (Polygamy) (Bankim) 129 Bailey, H. P. 38 – 9, 44, 48, 55 – 6, 215 Bakhtin, M. M. 95, 97, 215, 221 Baldwin, T. W. 179n11, 215 Balibar, É. 70, 215 Ballantyne, J. R. 165 Balthazar, S. L. 105n24, 215 Bandyopadhyay, A. 153 – 4, 162, 163, 215 Bandyopadhyay, H. 10, 35, 114, 153, 171, 218 Bandyopadhyay, I. see Vidyasagar Bandyopadhyay, L. 146n28, 215 “Bangabhūmir prati” (To Bengal) (Madhusudan) 132 Bangadarśan 118, 125, 142, 144 – 9, 186, 215

236 Index Bānglā nāṭyasāhityer itihās (The history of Bengali theatrical works) (Ashutosh Bhattacharya) 142, 216 “Bankimchandra” (essay) (Tagore) 138 – 9 Bankim see Chatterjee, Bankimchandra Barber, C. L. 163 – 4, 215 Barbier, J. 25, 30, 34, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 56 – 7, 215 Bardoni, A. xv, 48, 57, 65, 103, 215 – 16 Barker, F. 144n1, 215 Baron, B. 132, 148, 182, 215 Bartholomeusz, D. 13, 16, 173, 178, 215, 218 Basini, L. 72 – 3, 83 – 4, 215 Bassi, S. 13, 66, 215 Basu, A. K. 118, 216 Basu, Anandakrishna 153, 179 Basu, C. 153, 154 Basu, R. 198 – 9, 202 Basu, S. 157, 163, 179, 216 Bate, J. 13, 34, 64, 70, 141, 216 Béatrice et Bénédict (Berlioz) 56 Beethoven, L. van 85, 88 Behn, A. 63 Beitz, C. R. 25n11, 216 Bellaigue, C. 98, 108 Bell, B. 7, 216 Belleforest, F. de 33 Bellini, V. 93 “Bengali Literature” (Bankim) 119, 122, 146 – 7, 156 Berlioz, H. 30, 38 – 9, 55 – 6, 214 – 15, 226, 229; see also Béatrice et Bénédict; Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet; “mort d’Ophélie, La”; Roméo et Juliette (Berlioz) Bernard, P. 51 Bernhardt, S. 173, 180, 216 Berry, R. 164, 216 Betāl panchaviṃśati (Twenty-five tales of Betāl) (Vidyasagar) 155 Bethune, J. D. 188 Bhabha, H. 3, 6 – 8, 16, 22, 24 – 5, 139, 151, 174 – 6, 183 – 5, 216 Bhārateshwari Mahāranī Victoriar jubilī utsav (H. Bandyopadhyay) 114 Bhāratmāta (Mother India) (painting) (A. Tagore) 132 Bhāratmāta (Mother India) (play) (anonymous) 132 Bhārat sangīt (H. Bandyopadhyay) 114

“Bhāratvarsher swādhinatā ebong parādhīnatā” (India’s independence and subjugation) (Bankim)147 Bhardwaj, V. 168 Bhatia, N. 13, 17, 176 – 7, 180, 216 Bhattacharji, S. 125 – 6, 141, 216 Bhattacharya, Amitrasudan 118, 121, 123 – 4, 145, 216 Bhattacharya, Ashutosh 142, 169 – 70, 172, 216 Bhattacharya, F. 118, 216 Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi 131, 136, 148 – 9 Bhattacharya, Shankar 174, 180, 216 Bhavabhūti xiv, 120, 124, 133, 145; see also Mālatīmādhava; Uttararāmacharit Bhrāntivilās (M. Sen) 167 – 8 Bhrāntivilās (Vidyasagar) 9, 22, 151, 153 – 5, 178 – 9; and feminist scholarship on The Comedy of Errors 162 – 5; and later Indian adaptations of The Comedy of Errors 167 – 8; list of changes of names and places 158 – 9; as protofeminist adaptation of The Comedy of Errors 159 – 65, 167; reception history of 156, 163, 165, 167 – 9; Vidyasagar’s underplaying of the extent of transformation of Shakespeare in 156 – 7; and the “woman question” 151, 166; see also patriarchy; Vidyasagar; woman question Biangini, E. 103 Bible 3, 7, 25, 73, 185 Bird, W. W. 150n56 Bizet, G. 42, 105 Boccaccio, G. 97 Bodin, J. 65, 216 Boileau, N. 200 Boito, A. xv, 1, 12, 25, 44, 52, 57, 59 – 65, 68, 72 – 6, 79 – 84, 86, 92, 97 – 8, 100, 103 – 8, 127, 134, 149, 190, 216, 222, 227 – 8, 234; see also alfier nero, L’; All’arte italiana (“Sapphic Ode”); Amleto (Faccio); “Case nuove”; “Dualismo”; Falstaff (Verdi); “Lezione d’anatomia”; Mefistofele; Otello (Verdi) Boito, C. 104n17 Born, G. 9, 216 Borutta, M. 72 Bose, N. 173, 180 Bose, P. C. 177

Index  237 Bourdieu, P. 101, 216 Bourgault-Ducoudray, L-A. 106 Bowden, B. 14 – 15, 217 Bradshaw, D. 13, 225 Brathwaite, E. K. 141 Brecht, B. 101, 177, 216 Bristol, M. 13, 217 Brockbank, P. 141, 217 Brown, J. R. 13, 173, 217 Brown, P. 144n1, 217 Budden, J. 79 – 80, 82, 84, 86 – 7, 97, 105 – 8, 217 Burbage, R. 33, 63 Burnett, M. T. 13, 217 Burton, Richard F. 179n9, 217 Burton, Robert 65 – 6, 217 Burt, R. 13, 217 Busch, H. 84, 103, 217 Butler, J. 21, 217 Byron, G. G. 2, 146 – 7, 173, 212, 229; see also Don Juan; Manfred Caliban 11, 22, 111, 113, 124, 127 – 8, 133 – 7, 140 – 1, 195, 207, 219, 227, 230 “Caliban” (essay) (Retamar) 141, 230 “Caliban” (poem) (Brathwaite) 141 Caliban, suite de la tempête (Renan) 141 Callaghan, D. 63, 67, 217 Calvani, A. 105n21, 217 Campana, A. 65, 108, 217 Carcano, G. 105n21, 217 Carlson, M. 13, 55, 66, 67, 218 Carmen (Bizet) 42, 105n29 Carré, M. 25, 30, 34, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 56 – 7, 215 Cartelli, T. 13, 144, 218 Cartwright, K. 168, 179, 218 “Case nuove” (Boito) 73, 190 Castells, R. 111, 144, 218 Catalani, A. 57n37 Catholic Church 72 – 5, 81, 83 Catholicism 61, 71 – 3, 99 censorship 10, 33, 57, 176 Césaire, A. 141 Cetshwayo 68 Chabrier, E. 57n29 Chakraborty, S. 145n12, 218 Chandraprabhā 158 – 63, 167 Charcot, J-M. 58n47 Charlton, D. 58n48, 218 Charlton, H. B. 164, 218 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra xiv – xv, 4, 6, 9, 11, 15, 19, 22 – 4, 25, 38,

54, 80 – 1, 85, 111 – 12, 126, 141, 144 – 50, 151, 152, 155 – 6, 166, 168 – 9, 177, 181 – 3, 186, 188, 196, 203 – 4, 213, 216, 218 – 19, 224, 226 – 7, 230 – 2; and Aryanism/ caste bias 201, 213; draws parallels between Śakuntalā and Othello 209 – 13; draws parallels between Śakuntalā and The Tempest 127 – 8, 133 – 7, 205 – 9; and modern Bengali literature 113 – 16; on imitation/mimicry 119 – 22, 198 – 204; life and literary career 116 – 22; and scholarship on Shakespeare reception in India 142 – 4; on Shakespeare 121, 211 – 13; see also Ānandamaṭh; “Bahubibāha”; “Bengali Literature”; “Bhāratvarsher swādhinatā ebong parādhīnatā”; Dharmatattwa; Durgeśnandinī; “Imitation”; Kamalākānter daftar; Kapālakunḍalā; kulīn polygamy; mimicry; patriarchy; “Popular Literature for Bengal, A”; “Prāchīna ebong navīnā”; “Prāchīn o ādhunik Bhāratvarsha”; Rajmohan’s Wife; “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona”; “Sāmya”; woman question Chatterjee, M. R. 136, 218 Chatterjee, Partha 7, 112, 132, 138, 145, 166, 197n1, 218 Chatterjee, Purnachandra 123 Chatterjee, S. 2, 5, 180, 218 Chatterton (Vigny) 39 Chattopadhyay, R. see Ramakrishna, Sri Chattopadhyay, S. 123, 127, 145n27 Chaturdaśpadī kavitāvalī (Madhusudan) 114 Chaudhuri, R. 4, 6, 7, 114–15, 150, 218 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 140, 142, 218 Chaudhuri, Supriya 118, 127, 142 – 3, 219 Chaudhury, S. 173, 177, 180, 219 chaumière indienne, La (Saint-Pierre) 147 Chausson, E. 57n29 Cherubini, L. 106n30, 106n35 Chetanananda, Swami 169 – 70, 179, 219 Choquet, G. 57n28 Cicero 200 Cinthio, G. 64 – 5, 76, 78, 219

238 Index Citron, M. 13, 219 Clarke, H. A. 162 Clausen, C. 46, 50 – 1, 55, 218 Cohen, W. 193, 219 Cohn, R. 2, 219 Coleridge, S. T. 34, 64, 70, 103, 141, 229 Collins, M. 25, 135, 139, 149, 219 colonialism 5, 60 – 1, 71, 98 – 103, 116, 131, 135 – 9, 144, 183, 217 – 20, 222, 224 – 32, 234 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare) viii, xiv, 8 – 9, 11, 22, 151, 154, 188, 215, 218, 223 – 4, 227, 231, 234; ambivalence in 162 – 4; feminist scholarship on 162 – 5; Vidyasagar’s protofeminist adaptation of 159 – 65, 167 Comte, A. 134 Conati, M. 84, 105, 219, 234 Connell, W. J. 104n14, 219 Conrad, J. 99, 125, 186, 214 Corelli, A. 106n31 Corneille, P. 37 Corse, S. 13, 219 cosmopolitanism vii, ix, 14, 16, 25, 61, 85, 95, 97, 122, 137 – 42, 149, 155, 181, 189, 191, 194, 214, 215, 217, 223, 225, 227 – 8; see also nationalist cosmopolitanism couleur locale see exoticism Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) 11, 23, 182 – 3, 228 Cruz, R. de la 29 cuckoldry 62, 77, 78 Curtiss, M. 67, 219 Danse de devadasis (F. Schmitt) 50 Dante [D. Alighieri] 44, 97 Darío, R. 111 – 13, 141, 144n2, 214 Darwin, C. 73 – 4, 219 Das Gupta, A. K. 128, 136, 219 Dasgupta, H. 180n17, 219 Dasi, B. 173, 219 Das, S. K. 145, 167, 171, 179, 219 Datta, M. M. xiv, 10, 114, 116, 119 – 21, 131, 138, 144 – 5, 151, 155, 170, 230 – 1; see also “Bangabhūmir prati”; Chaturdaśpadī kavitāvalī; Meghanādavadha-kāvya David, F. 44 – 5, 87, 214 Dean, W. 8, 49, 220 Deb, R. 179n3 Debussy, C. 53 Decameron (Boccaccio) 97, 108

Degenhardt, J. H. 70, 220 De Giorgio, M. 73, 220 DeJean, J. 55n11, 220 Delabastita, D. 11, 13, 29, 214 Delacroix, E. 39, 48, 56 – 7, 221, 238 Delage, M. 50 Delibes, L. 50 Delle descrittione dell’Africa (Leo Africanus) 65–6, 103, 217 Derozio, H. L. V. 115 Desdemona ix – x, 22, 62, 64, 67, 70, 73 – 81, 86 – 93, 100, 107, 112, 124, 127 – 8, 135, 182, 205, 209 – 13 désert, Le (David) 87 Desmet, C. 13, 220 Dessay, N. 50 Destouches 35 Destranges, É. 53, 220 Dharmatattwa (The essence of religion) (Bankim) 130 Dharwadker, A. 180, 219 – 20 Dharwadker, V. 114, 145, 220 D’Hulst, L. 13, 220 – 1 diachronic analysis ix, 11 – 12, 16, 18 – 19, 21, 31, 35, 41, 52, 60 – 1, 69 – 70, 181 – 3, 192 – 4 D’Indy, V. 57n29 Dionne, C. 16, 214, 220 Don Giovanni (Mozart) 47, 57 Doniger O’Flaherty, W. 204 Donizetti, G. 49 – 50, 93, 106 Don Juan (Byron) 147 Dostoevsky, F. 11, 23, 182 – 3, 186, 221, 228 Drabkin, W. 106n33, 220 Dramatic Performances Control Act (1876) 176 Dryden, J. 63, 121, 200 “Dualismo” (Dualism) (Boito) 73 Dube, S. 9, 220 Ducis, J-F. 21, 29 – 30, 32, 35 – 8, 41, 46, 54 – 6, 214, 218, 227 Duff, A. 188 Dumas, A. père 21, 29, 32, 35, 38 – 41, 46, 54, 56 – 7, 220, 224, 227 Durgeśnandinī (Bankim) 117, 145 Durlabh bandhu (The priceless friend) (Harishchandra) 176 Dusinberre, J. 164, 220 Dutta, A. 157 Dutt, K. C. 114 Dutt, U. 170, 172 – 3, 177, 220 Eagleton, T. 196, 220 Edenbaum, R. I. 56n22, 221

Index  239 Egan, G. 127, 221 Elektra (R. Strauss) 50 Eliot, T. S. 12, 131, 221 Emanuel, G. 68 – 9 Emerson, C. 19, 187, 220 Engler, B. 13, 225 Englishman, The 172, 174 epistemic decolonisation 12, 24, 26, 219 Epokha 186 Essai sur la poésie épique (Voltaire) 37 Euridice (Peri) 42 Euripides 36 Evans, B. 164, 221 exoticism 49, 58n42, 68, 75, 88 – 9 Faccio, F. 44, 57, 82, 105 Falstaff (Salieri) 96 – 7, 231 Falstaff (Verdi) 1, 12, 21, 31, 52, 53, 59, 61, 62, 88, 95 – 7, 108nn48 – 9, 143, 186, 216, 223, 228, 233 Farrell, J. 13, 221 Faure, J. B. 33 Faust (Goethe) 29, 44, 212 Faust (Gounod) 44, 73 Felice, P. di 77, 214 feminism/feminist scholarship 22, 31, 51, 81, 112, 113, 135, 154, 161 – 5, 167 – 8, 177 – 9, 187 – 8, 193, 220, 232; see also Bhrāntivilās; Chatterjee, Bankimchandra; Comedy of Errors, The; Falstaff; jealousy; Hamlet; Kapālakunḍalā; kulīn polygamy; Ophélie; Otello; Othello; patriarchy; Verdi, G.; Vidyasagar; woman question Fifth Piano Concerto, “Egyptian” (Saint-Saëns) 87 Fifth Symphony (Beethoven) 85, 88 Figueira, D. 125, 221 Fiorentino, Ser G. 108n48 Fischer-Lichte, E. 13, 221, 234 Fischlin, D. 13, 221 Fish, S. 26n14, 221 Fisk, J. 85, 106, 221 Flaubert, G. 147n31 Forbes-Robertson, J. 33 Fortier, M. 13, 221 Foscolo, U. 97 Fotheringham, R. 13, 219, 221 Foucault, M. 4, 187, 220 Foyster, E. A. 62, 77 – 8, 220 Françoise di Rimini (Thomas) 44 Freischütz, Der (Weber) 97, 108n47 French, M. 162, 221

Fresco, G. B. 29, 221 Friedman, T. L. 189 – 91, 220 “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” (Bakhtin) 95 Fuchs, B. 144n1, 221 Gamlet (Sumarokov) 30, 36 Gandhi, I. 177 Gandhi, M. K. 119 Gangopadhyay, A. 180n17, 221 Ganguly, K. 154 Gardalphé, F. 104n14 Garrick, D. 36, 38, 55, 145 Gaudon, J. 55n11, 221 Gazzetta musicale di Milano 72, 82 Geertz, C. 19, 26, 222 Gerber, M. 56n22, 221 Gervais, D. 57n35, 222 Gesualdo, C. 77 Ghirardini, G. 105n20, 222 Ghosh, A. 147n31 Ghosh, G. 10, 15, 22, 24 – 5, 54, 118, 151 – 2, 177 – 80, 219 – 22, 230; and censorship 175 – 6; and colonial mimicry 172 – 7; contemporary reviews of first performances of Girishchandra’s Macbeth 172 – 3; creates ambivalence through casting choices 174 – 5; on English and European theatre 173; and Indian anticolonial drama 175 – 7; life, career, and reception 169 – 72; see also Janā; Macbeth (Ghosh); “Puruṣ angshe narī abhinetrī”; Sirāj-udDaulāh Gill, R. 25n4, 222 Girishchandra see Ghosh, G. Giselle (Adam) 49 – 50, 58, 232 Goethe, J. W. von 31, 34, 44, 73, 125, 212, 222; see also Faust; “Shakespeare und kein Ende”; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Gooch, B. N. S. 13, 222 Gordon, L. R. 24, 222 Götterdämmerung (Wagner) 93 Gounod, C-F. 42, 44 – 5, 52, 53, 55, 222; see also Faust; Roméo et Juliette Graff, G. 144n1, 222 Gramsci, A. 6 Greenblatt, S. 70, 144n2, 222 Griffiths, G. 6, 180, 215 Gritti, F. 29 Guha, A. see Indramitra Guha, R. 5 – 6, 148, 222

240 Index Gulzar [S. S. Kalra] 152, 179 Gupt, S. 16, 222 Guttal, V. 167, 222 Habib, I. 144n5, 222 Haldar, G. 166 – 7, 222 Halévy, F. 45, 56 Hamlet (Ducis) 21, 29 – 30, 32, 36 – 8, 41, 46, 55n14, 56n17, 218, 233 Hamlet (Dumas and Meurice) 21, 29, 38 – 41, 46; 54n2, 56n22, 57n27, 220, 224, 227; Meurice’s own revisions 40 – 1 Hamlet (Le Tourneur) 38 Hamlet (Shakespeare) xiv, 10, 21, 24n1, 32, 35, 39, 47, 55nn7 – 9, 57n31, 60, 66, 173, 181, 215, 222 – 7, 231 – 4; adapted by Boito 57n27; compared with adaptations by Ducis, Dumas and Meurice, and Thomas 39 – 41, 46 – 7; Ducis’s adaptation of 36 – 7; first Arabic adaptation by ‘Abdu 55n2; first European translations and adaptations of 29 – 30; first Russian adaptation by Sumarokov 30, 36; and French exoticism 49; and nineteenth-century Italian actors 66 – 7; representations of Ophelia 32, 48; and surveillance 46; transmission and performance history in England up to the nineteenth century 32 – 4, 56n16 Hamlet (Thomas) 10, 21, 23, 25n12, 34, 61, 84, 92 – 3, 97, 185 – 6, 215, 222; and ballet 45 – 6, 48 – 50; compared with versions by Ducis, Dumas and Meurice, and Shakespeare 39 – 41, 46 – 7; compositional history 44; and musical exoticism 49 – 50, 58n42; and operatic conventions 41 – 7, 51 – 2, 57n28; reception history 30 – 1, 52 – 4, 55n4; representation of Ophélie 31 – 2, 48 – 52 Hannoosh, M. 55n11, 222 Hanslick, E. 67, 94, 188, 222 Hapgood, R. 29, 33 – 4, 55, 222 Hare, D. 188 Harishchandra, B. 176, 222 Hatcher, B. 155, 163, 166 – 7, 178 – 9, 222 Hawkes, T. 47, 57, 144, 223 Haydn, J. 56, 85 – 6, 106

Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 99, 125, 186, 214, 219 Hennings, T. P. 164, 223 Henry IV (Shakespeare) 97 Henson, K. 68 – 9, 223 Hepokoski, J. 8, 64 – 5, 68, 71, 74, 79 – 83, 87 – 8, 91 – 2, 97 – 8, 105, 223 Hérodiade (Massenet) 87 Heylen, R. 29, 35, 39 – 41, 49, 55 – 6, 223 Hibbard, G. R. 55n9, 223 Hiller, J. R. 65, 103, 223 Hints for Self-Culture (Mathur)15 Histoires tragiques (Belleforest) 33 Historiae Danicae (Saxo Grammaticus) 33 Hobsbawm, E. 116, 223 Hodgdon, B. 13, 223 Hoenselaars, T. 13, 229 Holderness, G. 2 – 3, 13, 47, 223 Holland, P. 13, 231 Hollinger, D. A. 25n11, 223 Homer 145, 200 honour 77 – 8, 81, 95, 155, 221 Hooper, G. 25n6, 223 Horace 97, 200 Hudson, H. D., Jr 145n8, 223 Hugo, F-V. 41, 44, 57, 64 – 5, 223 Hugo, V-M. 30, 38, 41, 44, 57, 65 Hume, P. 144n1, 215 Hutcheon, L. 13, 18 – 20, 25, 35, 58, 108, 192, 223 Hutcheon, M. 20, 108n48, 223 Iago xv, 64 – 7, 70, 78 – 80, 87, 92, 97, 104 “Imitation” (Anukaraṇ) (Bankim) 6, 33, 117, 120, 124, 132, 135, 138 – 9, 142, 183 Indian Nation 172 indigenisation see transculturation Indramitra [A. Guha] 165, 178, 224 Iphigénie (Racine) 36 Isabella, M. 104n13, 224 Isherwood, C. 180n21, 219, 224 Islamophobia 21, 61 – 3, 69 – 71, 74 – 5, 89, 100, 102, 104n13, 128 – 9, 138, 147n34 Jackson, R. 13, 34, 223 Jago xv, 73 – 5, 79 – 80, 86, 88 – 92, 103, 107, 134 James, H. 67, 215, 224 Janā (Girishchandra) 171

Index  241 Janin, J. 48 Jansohn, C. 13, 219, 221 Jayaraaj [Nair, J. R.] 168 jealousy 11, 21, 59 – 62, 64 – 6, 69 – 70, 75 – 6, 78 – 81, 86, 88, 90 – 2, 94 – 6, 98 – 100, 102, 104n8, 106n38, 108n50, 123 – 4, 128, 160, 212 Jīvancharit (Vidyasagar) 157 Johnson, L. 56n22, 224 Johnson, S. 76, 115, 121, 200 Jones, W. 137 Joshi, A. 179n5 Joshi, P. 144n5, 224 Joshi, S. 5, 6, 215, 224 Joughin, J. H. 83, 224, 226 Kālidāsa xiv, 125, 133, 137, 139, 145, 153, 205 – 13, 213n5, 233; see also Kumārasambhavam; Raghuvaṃsa; Śakuntalā Kalra, S. S. see Gulzar Kamalākānter daftar (Kamalākānta’s records) (Bankim) 136, 218 Kapadia, P. 16, 214, 220 Kapālakunḍalā viii, 80, 113, 122 – 36, 146, 148, 227 Kapālakunḍalā (Bankim) 7, 9, 11, 15, 22 – 3, 80 – 1, 112 – 13, 138 – 9, 142, 146 – 8, 170, 177, 182 – 3, 215 – 16, 218, 227; compositional history 117 – 18, 123 – 4; plot 122 – 3; and early Bengali novel 125 – 6; intertexts 19, 26n12, 120, 123 – 5; multiple temporal frameworks 130 – 1; reception history, translations, and film adaptations 118; and The Tempest 126 – 8, 133 – 7, 141 – 4; theatrical adaptation by Atul Krishna Mitra 118; theatrical adaptation by Girishchandra 118, 170; woman as symbol of nation in 131 – 7; and the “woman question” 113, 131, 135, 148n41, 166; and women in nineteenth-century Bengal 129 – 30; see also “Imitation”; “Miranda and Kapālakunḍalā”; and “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona” Kapoor, I. 176, 224 Kapur, A. 16, 224 Karlekar, M. 148n36, 224 Karṇabīr (N. Bose) 180n19 Kashmiri, A. H. 17, 215, 224 Kastan, D. S. 144n1, 147n32, 224

Kathāmālā (Garland of stories) (Vidyasagar) 155 Kean, E. 34 Kehler, D. 163 – 4, 224 Kennedy, D. 2, 13, 24, 224 Kerman, J. 93, 105, 226 Kermode, F. 81, 127, 221, 225 Kerrigan, J. 47, 225 Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin) 6, 215 Kidnie, M. J. 18, 225 King Lear (Shakespeare) 173 Kirsch, A. 141, 225 Kishi, T. 13, 225 Klemm, C. 118 Körner, A. 82, 225 Kott, J. 196, 225 Kraidy, M. M. 176, 225 Kramer, L. 8, 225 Kuddus, Abdul see Nairang Kujawinska-Courtney, K. 13, 63, 225 kulīn polygamy 129, 148, 155, 162, 224 Kumārasambhavam (Kālidāsa) 148 Kyd, T. 32 Lacombe, H. 43, 45, 49, 52, 57, 97, 225 Lakmé (Delibes) 50 Lal, A. 13, 224 – 5 Lamb, C. 158, 160 – 1, 225 Lambert, L. B. 13, 225 Lamb, M. 158, 160 – 1, 225 Lamming, G. 141 Lang, D. M. 36, 225 La Place, P-A. de 35 – 6 Lazarus, N. 4, 14, 25, 187, 191 – 2, 195, 225 Le Blanc, J. B., abbé 35 Leitch, T. 13, 17 – 18, 26, 224 Leitmotiv see motif Leoni, M. 65 Le Tourneur, P. 36 – 8 Levitt, M. 30, 36 – 7, 226 “Lezione d’anatomia” (Boito) 73 – 4 Lim, C. S. 13, 218 Lipner, J. 121, 136, 197n1, 226 Liszt, F. 43 Littlejohn, D. 53, 226 Litvin, M. 54, 195, 226 Locatelli, A. 13, 226 Location of Culture, The (Bhabha) 174, 184, 216, 223, 229 Locke, R. P. 51, 106, 226 Lombroso, C. 81, 226

242 Index Loomba, A. 13, 15, 25, 62, 65, 70, 76, 143, 226 Lorenzaccio (Musset) 39 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti) 49 – 50 Luciana 158 – 63 Luisa Miller (Verdi) 86 Lupton, J. 62, 69 – 70, 226 lustigen Weiber von Windsor, Die (Nicolai) 44, 96 – 7, 231 Macaulay, T. B. 125, 153, 185, 188, 226 Macbeth (Ghosh) xiv, 8, 10, 22, 54, 151 – 2, 169 – 72, 178, 219, 230; and anticolonialism 175 – 6; casting choices and ambivalence in 174 – 5; and censorship 176; and colonial mimicry 172 – 7; contemporary reviews of first performances 172 – 3; and Indian transculturations of Shakespeare 171 – 3 Macbeth (Shakespeare) xiv, 8, 10, 152, 170, 173, 176 – 7, 202, 219, 234; ambivalence in 174 – 5 Macbeth (Verdi) 31, 44, 52, 55n3, 97, 229 Macdonald, H. 56n19, 57n25, 226 MacIntyre, A. 14, 226 Mackenzie, A. 162, 164, 226 Macready, C. 39 Madhusudan see Datta, M. M. Maffei, A. 65 Maffei, C. 82 Magnin, C. 39 Maguire, L. 39, 227 Mahābhārata (Vyāsa) 171, 200, 203 – 4 Majumdar, R. 148n36, 227 Majumdar, Saikat 25, 227 Majumdar, Sarottama 176, 227 Majumdar, Srischandra 123, 125 – 6, 145, 227 Malagi, R. A. 137, 227 Mālatīmādhava (Bhavabhūti) 120, 124, 145n18 Malick, J. 145n9, 227 Malik, S. 17, 227 Manfred (Byron) 212 Mannoni, O. 111, 141, 226 Manzoni, A. 30 Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet (Berlioz) 56n19 Marcus, L. 150n55, 227 Marschner, H. 43 Marsden, J. 13, 18, 55, 227

Marshall, G. T. 153 Marshall, T. 144n1, 227 Martin, G. 98, 227 Masks of Conquest (Viswanathan) 4, 116, 188, 233 Massai, S. 13, 101, 227 Massenet, J. 87 Mathur, L. H. S. 15 Mazzini, G. 71 – 2, 95, 101 – 3, 231 McCormick, J. 57n34, 227 McMahon, J. H. 56, 227 Mefistofele (Boito) 59, 73, 107n44 Meghanādavadha-kāvya (Madhusudan) 114, 120, 131, 138, 145, 148, 171, 231 Melchiori, G. 13, 227 Menaechmi (Plautus) 168 Mendelssohn, F. 97 Mercer, J. M. 13, 225 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) 14, 64, 69, 104, 176, 220 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare) xiv, 12, 59, 61, 78, 96, 142, 227 – 8, 231 Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Bodin) 65 Meurice, P. 21, 29, 32, 35, 38 – 41, 44, 46, 54, 56 – 7, 220 Meyerbeer, G. 45 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Mendelssohn) 97 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 44, 97 Mignon (Thomas) 31, 44 Millais, J. E. 57n35 Milton, J. 121, 145, 173 mimicry: colonial viii, 2, 6 – 8, 15 – 17, 22 – 4, 139, 144, 152, 172 – 8, 183 – 4, 188, 197 – 9, 234; postcolonial ix, 16, 183 – 4, 189 – 91; see also “Imitation” “Minute on Indian Education (1835)” (Macaulay) 125, 153 Miola, R. S. 162, 220 Miranda 11, 22, 105, 112 – 13, 122, 124 – 37, 141, 205 – 13 “Miranda and Kapālakunḍalā” (Miranda o Kapālakunḍalā) (Srishchandra Majumdar) 125, 227 Mitchell, J. 146n20, 228 Mitra, A. K. 118 Mitra, D. 123, 142, 146 Mitra, P. C. see Thakur, T. Mitra, S. K. 142, 169, 180n18, 228 Mohan, A. 7, 25

Index  243 Monaco, M. 24, 37, 55, 228 Moors 62, 65 Morris, W. 104n17 “mort d’Ophélie, La” (Berlioz) 56n19 motif (music) 85, 88 – 93, 100, 106n33, 107n40, 220; Erinnerungsmotiv 93; Leitmotiv (leitmotif) 92 – 4, 234; Reminiszenzmotiv 93 Mounet-Sully, J. 41 Mozart, W. A. 47, 56 – 7, 85, 106, 228 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare) 56 Mukherjee, M. 130 Mukherjee, R. 147n33, 228 Mukhopadhyay, B. 157, 163, 165 Müller, M. 198 Mungwini, P. 24, 219 Musset, A. de 39 Mussorgsky, M. 187 Mustafi, A. 172, 174 – 5 Mustafi, B. 172 Nabucco (Verdi) 53, 81 – 2 Nairang [Kuddus, A.] 17, 228 Nardi, P. 73, 228 Nationalism (Tagore) 139 nationalist cosmopolitanism vii, ix, 14, 61, 85, 95, 122, 137 – 9, 142, 155, 189, 191 Navīn tapaswinī (The young female ascetic) (D. Mitra) 142 Neely, C. T. 48, 228 Nehru, J. 119 neoclassical aesthetics 1, 22, 29 – 30, 35 – 9, 228 Néricault, P. see Destouches Newman, J. H. 71 new musicology 8, 25, 194 Nicolai, O. 44, 96, 97, 231 Nietzsche, F. 12, 98, 105, 196 Nilsson, C. 33, 51, 58 nineteenth-century Bengal 2, 10, 16, 126, 130 – 5, 146, 148, 151 – 2, 167 – 71, 188, 219 Ninth Symphony (Beethoven) 85 Nixon, R. 144n1, 228 Norland, H. B. 55n11, 228 Noske, F. 8, 90 – 1, 228 number opera 43, 91 – 4, 102 Nussbaum, M. 14, 228 Oberon (Weber) 56, 87, 97 “Of Mimicry and Man” (Bhabha) 6, 24, 174, 183

O’Grady, D. 73, 104, 228 Oliver, H. J. 108n49, 228 Olivier, L. 57n35 opéra comique 43, 45, 232 opéra lyrique 41, 45, 54, 214 Ophélie xv, 21, 32 – 3, 37 – 8, 40, 46, 48 – 51, 54, 56 – 8, 93, 185, 222 Orgel, S. 140, 228 Orientalism (Said) 3 – 5, 98, 106, 230 Orkin, M. 13, 226 Orsini, F. 17, 228 Orwin, D. 25n10, 228 Otello (Rossini) 30, 74 Otello (Verdi) xv, 1, 9, 11, 20, 21, 23, 30 – 1, 43 – 4, 46, 52, 53, 57n24, 95 – 7, 103 – 8, 112, 134 – 5, 143, 181, 185 – 6, 193, 214, 216 – 17, 223 – 4, 229, 233; and anti-Muslim discourse 71, 74, 100; compositional history of 81 – 6; early critical responses to 94; and Italian colonialism 71 – 2, 98 – 103; and musical exoticism 86 – 7, 106n35; musical analysis of 87 – 94; and nineteenth-century Italian actors 66 – 9; and patriarchal discourse 75 – 6, 79 – 81; race-based readings of 68 – 9, 79 – 80, 100 – 1, 107n45; and religion 69 – 75; Verdi’s departures from racebased interpretations in 59 – 61, 68 – 9, 86 – 8, 92, 100; as throughcomposed opera 59 – 61, 92 – 4 Othello xv, 11, 21, 60, 62 – 8, 70, 75 – 80, 58 – 81, 84, 86, 124, 127, 146, 188, 196, 210 – 11 Othello (Shakespeare) xiv – xv, 11, 21, 59 – 62, 84, 86, 96, 103n3, 104nn10 – 12, 111, 120, 122, 124, 127, 146n25, 188, 196, 210 – 13, 222 – 4, 226, 229, 233 – 4; Aldridge’s interpretation of 67 – 8; and anti-Muslim discourse 69 – 71, 104n10; and Catholicism 71; and nineteenth-century Italian actors 66 – 9; nineteeth-century Italian translators of 65, 105n21; and patriarchal discourse 76 – 81; and race 62 – 7, 76; and religion 62 – 3, 69 – 71, 75 Ottomano, V. 97, 228 Ovid 200 Pancaldi, G. 72, 228 Parakilas, J. 73 – 5, 107, 229

244 Index Parker, R. 82, 106, 229 Parry, B. 25n6, 229 Parsifal (Wagner) 108 Parsi theatre 16 – 17, 145, 215, 222, 224 patriarchy 62, 69, 75 – 81, 96, 99 – 100, 128, 130, 154, 161 – 4, 166; see also Bhrāntivilās; Chatterjee, Bankimchandra; Comedy of Errors, The; Falstaff; jealousy; Hamlet; Kapālakunḍalā; kulīn polygamy; Ophélie; Otello; Othello; Verdi, G.; Vidyasagar; woman question Pascall, R. 146n20, 229 Pati, B. 144n5, 229 Patriarca, S. 224 Paul-Emile, B. T. 103n2, 229 Paul et Virginie (Saint-Pierre) 146 Pearson, M. 147n33, 229 Pechter, E. 2, 229 Pecorone, Il (Ser Giovanni Fiorentino) 108n49 Pemble, J. 13, 229 performative transculturation 21, 23, 31 – 2, 38, 182; see also transculturation Peri, J. 42 Phelan, J. 144n1, 222 Phillips, H. A. D. 118, 131 Pierce, R. B. 144n1, 229 Pimm, J. 172 Pizzi, I. 98, 229 Plautus 164, 168, 200; see also Amphitruo; Menaechmi Pleasures of Exile, The (Lamming) 141 Pope, A. 121, 173, 200 “Popular Literature for Bengal, A” (Bankim) 119, 149 Porter, C. 162, 172 Portia 64, 70, 104 Pory, J. 65, 217 postcolonial theory 1, 2, 3 – 8, 13, 15, 17, 32, 55n5, 111 – 12, 115 – 16, 140 – 4, 168 – 9, 175 – 8, 216, 218, 220, 224 – 5, 232; and counterdiscursive formations 187 – 9; neglect of traditions of colonial cultures 191 – 2; and post-colonial mimicry 189 – 91; teleological vis-à-vis empirical approaches 183 – 7, 193 – 7; see also adaptation; appropriation; epistemic decolonization; exoticism; mimicry; nationalist cosmopolitanism;

performative transculturation; relational approach Powers, H. 52, 225, 229 “Prāchīna ebong navīnā” (The traditional and the modern woman) (Bankim) 130, 135, 148 “Prāchīn o ādhunik Bhāratvarsha” (Ancient and modern India) (Bankim) 147 “Principles of International Politics” (Mazzini) 72 Pringle, R. 13, 225 profughi fiammianghi, I (Faccio) 105n28 Prospero and Caliban (Psychologie de la colonisation) (Mannoni) 111, 227 Puccini, G. 57n37, 186 Pujante, A. L. 13, 229 Puppa, P. 13, 221 “Puruṣ angshe narī abhinetrī” (Women in men’s roles) (Girishchandra) 173 Quattro pezzi sacri (Verdi) 104 Raby, P. 48, 55 – 6, 229 Rachel et la tragédie (Janin) 48 Racine, J. 36 – 7 racism 9, 15, 61, 64, 70 – 1, 100, 103, 155, 214 Raengo, A. 13, 232 Raghuvaṃsa (Kālidāsa) 202 Rajmohan’s Wife (Bankim) 117, 125, 130 Ramakrishna, Sri [R. Chattopadhyay] 169, 180, 219 Rāmāyaṇa (Valmiki) 10, 114, 120, 145, 148, 155, 200, 203, 231 Rao, A. N. M. 179n13, 229 Rao, S. J. 179n13, 229 Raponi, D. 71, 229 Ray, A. 125, 229 Raychaudhuri, T. 134, 145, 148, 229 Ray, H. 180n19 Recchia, S. 101, 104, 230 Re, L. 104n13, 230 relational approach 9, 11 – 13, 17, 24, 216, 231; see also synchronic analysis Renan, E. 141 Requiem (Verdi) 82 – 3, 104 Revolt of 1857 12, 103, 113, 116, 125, 135, 138 – 41, 144, 155, 178

Index  245 Riall, L. 224 Ricordi, G. 68, 72, 82, 84, 87, 105 Ricordi, T. 72, 105 Riddiford, A. 10, 121, 230 Rigoletto (Verdi) 81, 93 Ristori, A. 66, 218 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky) 50 Roberts, W. 106, 230 Robinson, P. 99, 106, 230 Rodó, J. E. 111 – 12, 141 Rogeboz-Malfroy, E. 44, 57, 230 Romeo and Juliet (Garrick) 55n13 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 97, 171, 208 Roméo et Juliette (Berlioz) 55n13, 56n20, 214 Roméo et Juliette (Gounod) 44, 52 – 3, 55n13 Rossi, E. 66 – 9, 71, 87, 102, 105, 218 Rossini, G. 30, 74, 85, 106, 215 Rousseau, J. J. 87, 146 Roy, M. 114 – 15, 230 Roy, R. 25, 138, 151 – 2, 167, 219 Rudrapāl Nāṭak (H. Ray) 180n19 Rusconi, C. 65 Ruskin, J. 104n17 Rutter, C. C. 57n35, 230 Sacred Revivalism movement 82, 84, 215 “Sahityarūp” (The form of literature) (Tagore) 138 – 9 Said, E. 3 – 6, 98, 106, 230 Saint-Pierre, B. de 146n28 Saint-Saëns, C. 87, 108n50 Śakuntalā (Kālidāsa) 112, 120, 122, 124 – 5, 127 – 8, 137, 146n28, 155, 205 – 13 “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona” (Śakuntalā, Miranda, ebong Desdemona) (Bankim) 22, 112, 117, 124 – 5, 127, 138, 142, 145n18, 149n54, 205 – 13 “Śakuntalā” (Tagore) 116, 139 – 40, 142, 177 Śakuntalā (Vidyasagar) 155, 163 Salieri, A. 96 Salome (R. Strauss) 49 – 50, 96 Salvini, T. 66 – 9, 71, 87, 102 – 3, 215 “Sāmya” (Equality) (Bankim) 130, 148n41 Sanders, J. 8, 13, 21, 229 saphir, Le (David) 44 Sarkar, A. 171, 175, 180, 230

Sarkar, S. 165, 230 Sarkar, T. 117, 132, 148, 197n1, 230 Sawyer, R. 13, 220 Saxo Grammaticus 33 Scapigliatura 74, 82, 222; see also Boito, A. Schiller, J. C. F. von 61 Schlegel, A. W. 63 – 5, 80, 137 Schleiermacher, F. 10, 231 Schmidgall, G. 8, 45, 51, 57, 231 Schmitt, F. 50 Scolnicov, H. 13, 231 Scott, W. 2, 146, 228 Scruton, R. 14, 231 Seely, C. B. 120, 231 Sen, Amiya 117, 134, 145, 231 Sen, Amrita 179n4, 231 Sen, Asok 166, 231 Seneca 97, 201 Sengupta, B. 173, 177, 180, 219 Sengupta, D. 1, 185, 231 Sen Gupta, S. C. 166, 231 Sen, M. 167 – 8, 231 Sen, S. 11, 116, 120, 138, 197, 219, 231 Severn, J. R. 96, 231 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (A. AshleyCooper) 55n16, 231 Shakespeare o Bānglā nāṭak (Shakespeare and Bengali theatre) (S. K. Mitra) 142 “Shakespeare und kein Ende” (Goethe) 34 Shakespeare, W. xiv – v, 24 – 5, 30 – 4, 42, 45 – 6, 48 – 9, 52, 54 – 9, 61 – 4, 69 – 70, 73, 76, 95, 97, 100 – 1, 103, 104, 107, 115, 121 – 2, 124 – 7, 130, 134, 137, 141, 150 – 4, 156 – 8, 161 – 2, 166 – 9, 179 – 80, 192, 208, 211 – 13; and adaptation studies 2, 13 – 14, 17 – 20, 35, 181 – 2, 193 – 5; and Aldridge 11, 67 – 8; and Anglo-American reception 2, 13; and anti-African racism 62 – 9; and anti-Islamic discourse 69 – 71; and anti-Italian racism 65 – 9; Arabic reception of 54, 195; and Bengali theatre 170 – 5; and colonial Bengali writers 112 – 13, 166, 169, 178 – 9; and cultural studies 2 – 3; diasporic and colonial reception histories compared 184 – 5; and early European translations/adaptations of Hamlet 29 – 30, 35 – 7; and

246 Index feminist criticism on The Comedy of Errors 162 – 5; and film 13, 18, 167 – 8; as global writer 195 – 7; and opera 13, 20 – 1, 44; and patriarchal discourse 75 – 81; and postcolonial theory 3 – 8, 111 – 12, 115 – 16, 140 – 4, 176 – 7, 183 – 9, 191 – 6; and nationalist cosmopolitanism 14 – 16, 23; and the neoclassical-Romantic debate 30, 37 – 41; parallels between European and Indian adaptations of 22 – 4; and reception in colonial India 1 – 2, 11, 13; and reception in Europe 1 – 3, 13, 29 – 30, 35 – 41, 44, 66 – 7; and relational study of global reception histories 9 – 13; and reception in China 11; and theories of translation/transculturation 35; see also adaptation; All’s Well that Ends Well; anti-Semitism; Bhrāntivilās; cosmopolitanism; Chatterjee, Bankimchandra; Comedy of Errors, The; diachronic analysis; Ducis, J-F.; Dumas, A. père; Falstaff; Ghosh, G.; Hamlet; 1 – 2 Henry IV; Islamophobia; jealousy; Kapālakunḍalā; King Lear; Macbeth; Merchant of Venice, The; Merry Wives of Windsor, The; Meurice, P.; Midsummer Night’s Dream, A; Much Ado about Nothing; Otello; Othello; performative transculturation; postcolonial theory; racism; Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare); sonnets; synchronic analysis; Tagore, R.; Tempest, The; Thomas, A.; transculturation; translation; Troilus and Cressida; Vidyasagar; Winter’s Tale, The Shapiro, J. 103n5, 231 Shaw, G. B. 33 Shih, S-M. 9, 12, 231 Showalter, E. 33, 39, 48, 51, 56 – 8, 232 Shylock 11, 14 – 15, 67 – 9, 104, 196, 215 Siegfried (Wagner) 93 Singh, J. 1, 5, 10, 16, 55, 111, 143, 149, 168, 186, 232 Singspiel 42 Sinha, K. 114, 119 Sirāj-ud-Daulāh (Girishchandra) 171 Sītār vanavās (The exile of Sītā) (Vidyasagar) 155

Skura, M. A. 144n1, 232 Slights, J. 134, 232 Ślokamanjarī (Vidyasagar) 179n10 Smith, M. 58n37, 58n44, 232 Smith, P. 56n23, 232 Smithson, H. 48, 56n19, 229 Soldini, E. 58n50, 232 “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author” (Third Earl of Shaftesbury) 56, 231 songe d’une nuit d’été, Le (Thomas) 44 sonnets (Shakespeare) 97 Sousa, G. U. de 13, 232 Spanish Tragedy, A (Kyd) 32 Speare, M-J. 232 Spohr, L. 43 Stam, R. 13, 32, 58, 232 Stanivukovic, G. 144n1, 232 Stewart-Steinberg, S. 104, 232 Strauss, R. 49 – 50, 53, 96, 223 Stravinsky, I. 50, 94, 232 String Quartet in E minor (Verdi) 82 – 3, 85 – 6 Strepponi, G. 72 Stříbrný, Z. 13, 232 Sumarokov, A. 30, 36 – 7, 41, 225 – 6 Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz) 56 synchronic analysis 11 – 12, 16, 18, 31, 35 – 6, 41, 52, 81, 181 – 3, 192 – 3 Tagore, A. 132 Tagore, R. xiv, 14, 16, 22, 24 – 5, 111 – 13, 116, 119, 132, 137 – 44, 147, 149, 151 – 2, 168 – 9, 177, 183 – 6, 196, 219, 232; see also “Bankimchandra” (essay); Nationalism; “Sahityarūp”; “Śakuntalā” (Tagore) Takaki, R. 127, 232 Tales from Shakespeare (C. and M. Lamb) 157 – 62 Tamagno, F. 68, 103 Tambling, J. 98 – 9, 232 Tamir, Y. 25n11, 232 Tannhäuser (Wagner) 43, 46 Tarasundari 172 Tarkavachaspati, T. 155 Taruskin, R. 53, 82, 87, 145, 187, 221 Tatlow, A. 13, 232 Taylor, G. 3, 13, 47, 50, 54 – 5, 57, 233 Taylor, N. 47, 50, 54 – 5, 57, 233 Tchaikovsky, P. I. 49, 58 Tempest, The (La tempesta) (Halévy) 45, 56

Index  247 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) xiv, 8, 11, 14, 19, 22, 56, 80, 105, 122, 144, 146 – 7, 150, 168, 177, 209, 212, 215, 217 – 18, 221 – 2, 225, 227 – 9, 232 – 4; compared with Śakuntalā 137 – 40; history of interpretation of 111 – 12, 144n1; intertextual relationship with Kapālakunḍalā 120, 122 – 8, 134 – 5, 137; and responses from colonial Bengal 112 – 13, 116 – 17, 127 – 8, 134 – 5, 137 – 42; see also Chatterjee, Bankimchandra; Kapālakunḍalā; “Śakuntalā” (Tagore); “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona”; Tagore, R.; woman question tempête, La (Thomas) 44 tempête, Une (Césaire) 141 Terence 200 Thaden E. C. 145n8, 233 Thakur, T. [P. C. Mitra] 114, 119, 145 Thatcher, D. 13, 222 théâtre anglois, Le (La Place) 35 Thiong’o, N. wa 24, 233 Thomas, A. 10, 15, 21, 23 – 5, 33, 36, 38 – 42, 47 – 8, 54 – 8, 61, 84, 92 – 3, 97, 181, 185, 214 – 15, 222, 230 – 1, 233; adapts Hamlet according to requirements of Paris Opéra 45 – 6, 49 – 52; career 43 – 5; place of operas in repertoire 29 – 32, 52 – 4; see also Françoise di Rimini; Mignon; Ophélie; songe d’une nuit d’été, Le; tempête, La Thompson, Ann 47, 50, 54 – 5, 57, 233 Thompson, Ayanna 103n3, 225, 233 through-composed opera 43, 52, 59, 92 – 4 Tiffin, H. 6, 215 Tolstoy, L. 14, 25, 82, 228 Tommaseo, N. 73, 233 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (T. S. Eliot) 12, 131, 221 transculturation 21 – 4, 25n9, 31 – 5, 38, 71, 151, 155 – 61, 163, 171, 173 – 4, 181 – 2; see also adaptation; appropriation translation 7, 10, 22 – 3, 34 – 5, 38, 48 – 9, 53, 55 – 8, 64 – 5, 73, 103 – 5, 108, 118, 125, 131, 137, 142 – 3, 145 – 8, 157, 161 – 2, 164 – 5, 167, 169 – 73, 175, 179 – 80, 213n2, 219, 220, 222, 229 – 31, 233 – 4; see also adaptation

Traub, V. 58n38, 233 traviata, La (Verdi) 81 Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce & d’Orient (BourgaultDucoudray) 106 Tripathi, A. 153, 165, 167, 178, 233 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner) 84, 107 “triunfo de Calibán, El” (Darío) 111 Trivedi, P. xii, 5, 13, 16, 142, 173, 178 – 9, 215, 219, 222, 227, 231, 233 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 145 trovatore, Il (Verdi) 81 Turandot (Weber) 87, 106 Urbinati, N. 101, 104, 230 Uttararāmacharit (Bhavabhūti) 145, 155 Vanderhoof, M. B. 36, 45, 233 Varadapande, M. L. 204, 233 Vasudeva, S. 213, 233 Vaughan, A. T. 111, 126, 141, 233 Vaughan, V. M. 111, 126, 141, 233 Venkatacharya, B. 167, 179, 229 Venuti, L. 10, 231, 233 Verdi, G. xv, 1, 8 – 11, 15, 20 – 4, 30 – 1, 43 – 6, 52 – 4, 57, 59 – 61, 65 – 9, 71 – 2, 74 – 5, 79, 104 – 5, 107 – 8, 122, 134 – 5, 143, 181 – 2, 185 – 6, 188, 193, 196, 213 – 17, 219 – 20, 223 – 5, 227 – 9, 231; and anticolonial politics 9, 21, 60, 88, 94 – 5, 98 – 103; early career and successes 81 – 2; and Falstaff 95 – 8; and German symphonic tradition 85 – 6; and musical exoticism 86 – 8, 106n37; parody of German opera 97, 108n48; and patriarchal discourse 62, 69, 80 – 1, 96, 99 – 100; representation of Desdemona in Otello 80 – 1; use of musical motifs in connection with sexual jealousy 88 – 94; and Wagner 82 – 5, 93 – 4, 107n42, 108n48; see also Aida; Falstaff; Luisa Miller; Macbeth; motif; Nabucco; number opera; Otello; Quattro pezzi sacri; Requiem; Rigoletto; String Quartet in E minor; through-composed opera; traviata, La; trovatore, Il Verma, R. 156, 233 Vidyasagar [I. Bandyopadhyay] xiv, 10 – 11, 15, 22, 24 – 5, 54, 114, 145, 151 – 2, 176 – 9, 181, 188,

248 Index 215 – 16, 222 – 4, 231; as activist for women’s rights 154 – 5, 165 – 7; adapts Shakespeare, and Charles and Mary Lamb 157 – 62; as early protofeminist adapter of The Comedy of Errors 162 – 5, 168 – 9; life and career 152 – 3; on Shakespeare 153 – 4; as translator and adapter 155 – 7; see also Betāl panchaviṃśati; Bhrāntivilās; Jīvancharit; Kathāmālā; kulīn polygamy; Śakuntalā (Vidyasagar); Sītār vanavās; Ślokamanjarī Vigny, A. de 39 Vīravāhu-kāvya (H. Bandyopadhyay) 114 Viswanathan, G. 4 – 6, 16, 116, 143, 149 – 50, 186, 188, 230 – 1 Voltaire [F-M. Arouet] 35 – 7, 56, 121, 215, 231; see also Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe; Essai sur la poésie épique Vremya 186 Wagner, R. 12, 43 – 4, 46, 52 – 3, 57, 60 – 1, 71, 82 – 5, 92 – 8, 105 – 8; see also Götterdämmerung; Parsifal; Siegfried; Tannhäuser; Tristan und Isolde Waters, H. 67, 234 Watson, R. N. 70, 234 Weaver, W. 68, 86, 105, 234

Weber, C. M. von 43, 56, 86 – 7, 93, 97, 106, 217; see also Freischütz, Der; Oberon; Turandot Weijie, Y. 11, 234 Weiss, T. 164, 234 Wells, S. 13, 225, 227 Werken, M. G. C. van der 29 Wheeler, J. T. 200, 203 White, R. S. 13, 175, 221, 234 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Goethe) 31 Willard 172 Williams, G. 162, 217 Williams, L. B. 14, 16, 25, 234 Williams, S. 13, 234 Willis, D. 144n1, 234 Wilson-Okamura, D. S. 147n35, 234 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) 78, 227 Winter, W. 66 woman question 113, 131, 135, 148, 151, 166 Wong, A. S. 71 – 2, 99, 103, 234 World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, The (Friedman) 189, 221 Woudhuysen, H. R. 76, 234 Yeats, W. B. 16, 149, 231 Yuval-Davis, N. 80, 214 Zaro, J. J. 29, 234 Zastoupil, L. 25n8, 234 Zeffirelli, F. 107n45