Vintage Shakespeare (review)

Vintage Shakespeare is an essay collection arising from an international seminar organized by the Shakespeare Society of India with support from the British Council. A collaboration between Shakespeare scholars from India and elsewhere, the volume provides new perspectives on the plays written in Shakespeare's middle phase. As the editors, Prashant K. Sinha and Mohini S. Khot observe, despite the vast volumes of scholarship on the middle phase of Shakespeare's work, happily there is more to be said and this work contributes to the ongoing dialogue.

Shakespeare is a significant aspect of Indian intellectual and theatrical culture. In the introduction, the editors provide a brief history of Shakespeare in performance in India beginning with William Monckton's production of The Tempest in Calcutta in the 1780s and nineteenth-century school productions of Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice. The plays have been translated into Hindi, Sanskrit, and regional languages; in Bharatendu Harishchandra's Durlabh Bandhu (1888), an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, the Christian-Jewish division was changed to a Hindu-Jain conflict. There have also been various film productions, including Sohrab Modi's Hamlet (Khoon ka Khoon 1935) and A. V. Annadurai's Antony and Cleopatra (Nallathambi 1949).

The essays are written from a variety of theoretical perspectives and grouped loosely by play, concerned predominantly with Troilus and Cressida, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Some of the essays bring new perspectives to well-established ideas. S. Viswanathan revisits the political metaphor of the king's two bodies, first outlined by Ernst Kantorowicz, in looking at Hamlet and Lear, exploring what effect this idea has in the two plays. Dorothea Kehler, adding to feminist perspectives on Shakespeare character studies, brings new insights to the sororicidal rivalry of Regan and Goneril. Another interesting essay is R. W. Desai's tracing of what he perceives to be Shakespeare's ambivalence towards his own profession.

Other essays extend previous research interests in new directions. R. S. White's essay continues his interest in tracing pacifist voices across Shakespeare's genres; here he asks whether some of Shakespeare's plays as a whole can be seen as anti-war and he considers Henry V and Troilus and Cressida. White argues that Troilus and Cressida can be read and performed as an example of Shakespeare's condemnation of the unjust war. He emphasizes the 'polyvocal and radical ambiguity of Shakespeare's dramatic designs' (p. 15), which enable multiple readings and enable pacific arguments to be discerned alongside ideas of 'war as the logical extension of national aspirations'. He firstly considers how Henry V does not condemn war yet manifests a discernible vein of resistance to war; then suggests that in Troilus and Cressida, in depicting the Greek-Trojan conflict, Shakespeare had greater freedom to pitch anti-war material without the political risk, and that the play cannot be easily read as an endorsement of war.

A highlight of the volume is the essay by Professor S. Nagarajan, to whom the volume is dedicated. In a fascinating study he explores the tragic effect in Lear in the light of the Indian theory of rasa, which translates as 'juice' or 'essence', and which emphasizes the renunciation of the ego: 'Rasa is our response to a work of art which is free from the individual and personal dimension. Our response to an experience of life is often characterised by relating it to ourselves. However, our response to a work of art is free from this characteristic' (p. 159). He outlines a history of the theory of rasa, beginning with the basic text of Sanskrit poetics concerning drama and the dance, Satya Sastra of Bharata (3rd century bce). According to the theory there is a rasa corresponding to each of the eight primary emotions: sringara (love or rati); hasya (the humorous or hasya); karuna (the compassionate; grief or soka); raudra (the angry, krodha); veera (heroic or energetic, utsaha); adbhuta (the marvellous, vismaya); bhayanaka (fear or...