By Dr Satish C Aikant
Every year on April 23 the English Language Day is celebrated at the United Nations. The day is believed to be the birthday, as well as the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, popularly known as the Bard of Avon, after Stratford-upon-Avon, the place of his birth in England.
The story of the English language began in the fifth century when Germanic tribes invaded Celtic-speaking Britain and brought their languages with them. Later, Scandinavian Vikings invaded and settled there bringing their languages. In 1066, William I of Normandy, became king, and Norman-French became the language of the courts and official work. While the upper classes spoke French, the lower classes used English. Gradually French began to increasingly influence English. An estimated 45 per cent of all English words have a French origin.
As a globally recognised language for effective communication, English is now widely accepted and used in various fields, including business, academia and foreign relations across different countries and ethnicities. More than 1.75 billion people speak English worldwide – that’s around 1 in 4 people around the world. This has made it possible for people from different linguistic backgrounds to connect and collaborate on a global level. The iconic figure of western culture, William Shakespeare, had a significant impact on modern-day English by enriching and popularising it. Of course, by Shakespeare’s time, printing had been invented which led to the emergence of a new and enthusiastic reading public.
Comparisons are not always appropriate. In literary circles one often comes across a statement like ‘Kalidasa is the Shakespeare of India’, which in my view is fair neither to Kalidasa nor to Shakespeare, besides that the statement is anachronistic since Kalidasa predates Shakespeare by full twelve centuries. The colonial hangover is so strong on us that it never occurred to us to fancy Shakespeare as ‘the Kalidasa of England’. Students of Sanskrit and English drama will hardly recognise similarities in the two playwrights though both are great in their own ways. To the western world Kalidasa is known mainly through the translations of Meghdootam and Abhigyanshakuntalam into German and English in the 18th Century. Abhigyanshakuntalam in particular impressed Goethe, the pre-eminent German poet and playwright.
With no offence to our nativist sentiments, it can be said without any prejudice that it is Shakespeare who is certainly more versatile than Kalidasa when it comes to depicting variegated human emotions and situations. There is no tradition of tragedy in Indian classical drama, and Kalidasa’s plays always have happy endings. Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, treat human life in all possible predicaments not avoiding the tragic aspects of life along with portraying the sunny and the comic aspects.
Shakespeare is understood far better in India than in his homeland and, according to a survey commissioned by the British Council, the iconic playwright is more popular in India than in the UK. The survey of 18,000 people undertaken in 15 countries indicates that Shakespeare’s plays are better appreciated and are more popular in Brazil, India, China, Mexico, Turkey and the US than in Britain. It has been demonstrated that Shakespeare’s works continue to play a vital role in educating and entertaining people around the world.
It is remarkable that even after more than four hundred years of Shakespeare’s death, he strikes us as being our contemporary, a mark of his universal appeal. He catered to all kinds of people and wrote for different audiences. The Globe Theatre, host to many of his plays, would invariably have the ‘uneducated penny groundlings’, and the well-educated cultured nobility sharing and enjoying the same play. The language, plot and sub-plots and the characters were crafted in such a manner that the play as a whole functioned on two levels – high and low, reaching two different audiences simultaneously.
It is interesting to note that Shakespeare’s works, which have become the cornerstone of classical education in English literature, are the products of a natural genius who had hardly any formal education. A young man from a small provincial town, a man without substantial wealth, without powerful family connections and without a university education – moved to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, became the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. His works appeal to the learned and the unlettered, to urban sophisticates and provincial theatre goers. With his ‘small Latin and less Greek’, as Ben Jonson remarked, he created 38 comedies, tragedies and historical plays, 154 sonnets and two long poems, displaying an unusual ability to play with words that have left readers enthralled for centuries. He has enriched the English language with memorable phrases and expressions giving us many of the now familiar everyday sayings: ‘what’s in a name?’, ‘laughing stock’, ‘one may smile and smile and be a villain’, ‘though this be madness, yet there is method in it’, ‘to thine own self be true’, ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’, and ‘age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety’. His penetrating insight into the human mind created situations that speak directly to us: the filial ingratitude in King Lear, jealousy ‘the green- eyed monster’ in Othello, overweening ambition in Macbeth. Above all, Shakespeare managed to portray the human condition. Harold Bloom in fact credits him with having ‘invented the human’. In Bloom’s view, Shakespeare articulated human character with such authenticity and passion that no other man of letters has ever attempted. Rosalind, Falstaff, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Iago and Cleopatra: these characters are so developed and probable that they appear to leap from the plays virtually in flesh and blood teeming with human emotions joining our world.
Shakespeare makes his audiences laugh and cry and ruminate, mingling with reckless abandon the vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. He grasps with equal penetration the intimate lives of kings and of beggars and a close reading of his plays reveals that he seems amazingly knowledgeable about all the subjects under the sun, be it law, statecraft, theology, ancient history, medicine and what have you.
Shakespeare is not an original writer in the sense that he freely borrowed his plots from extant writings, notably from Plutarch’s Lives and other classical literature. But his creative touch transformed his sources to extraordinary works of literary imagination. They continue to circulate precisely because they are so amenable to adaptation. They have left his world, passed into ours, and become part of us. His plays have the power to grapple with the real in an all too human way whether it is the brooding Hamlet vacillating between thinking and action, or an Othello wracked with jealousy at the supposed infidelity of his wife. Look at how a wronged Shylock in Merchant of Venice speaks with pathos seething with anger even as he takes on a vengeful attitude: ‘I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’
Shakespeare pervades collective consciousness across languages and cultures throughout the world through his plays, poems, re-workings and adaptations, with translations and cultural appropriations via literature, films and of course theatre. His narratives are continually being re-written, reconceptualised through the lens of our own societal values and co-opted to re-affirm, re-invent or contest contemporary social and political narratives.
Bharatendu Harishchandra, one of the leading figures of Hindi theatre, who had formed his troupe in Banaras in 1868, staged, along with several Hindi plays written by him and his contemporaries, translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, employing Shakespearean themes for expressing nationalistic ideas. Utpal Dutt staged indigenised productions of Macbeth in the 1950s in the style of jatra performances taking the productions to the villages where he found ready and receptive audiences. The people could easily identify with Macbeth’s perverse behaviour and Lady Macbeth’s demonic ambition. Vishal Bhardwaj has presented cinematic adaptations of Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet in Hindi which have been very popular. The Bard’s plays have been adapted to indigenous folk theatre forms such as kathakali (from Kerala), nautanki (from Uttar Pradesh), yakshagana (from Karnataka) and jatra (from Bengal) steeped in local customs and incorporating elements of vernacular idiom, dance, song and vibrant costumes.
You just have to pick up your Shakespeare to experience the pleasure and be sure to agree with Ben Jonson’s verdict on the Bard of Avon: ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’
(The author is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, HNBGarhwal University and former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla)
