Shakespeare Darshana, the one-day symposium to celebrate the bard’s 450th birthday recently, was a collage of several responses. Filling the canvas with perceptions that were strikingly original, the programme turned out to be in a way, a reversal of what poet and playwright Chandrashekara Kambar said in his inaugural address: “Shakespeare is not as dear to me as Tolstoy and Lorca are.” Every speaker -- through his/her cultural negotiations with Shakespeare, who remains largely ‘English’ – had found their own ways in which the timeless playwright could trickle down into their own personal sensibilities. In doing so, they were not only providing fresh readings to the works of Shakespeare, but also enriching their own local literatures.
“Every state has its own Shakespeare. Kandagalla Hanumantaraya called himself the Shakespeare of Karnataka,” said Kambar, speaking of how Shakespeare became a symbol of tall, literary aspirations. No doubt he is a writer with superlative oratory skills, but he remained distant even when he is translated to Kannada. “Even when I adapted his Macbeth to Kannada as Maarikaadu , I was not completely satisfied,” he explained.
Stand at two ends of a map, and what you have are two different geographic visions. This was exactly how it felt on listening to chairperson of Kuvempu Bhasha Bharathi Dr. K.V. Narayan, who looked at Shakespeare from a view that was different from Kambar’s. “Who is this Shakespeare? To some he is Sheikh Peer and others feel he is Sheshappa Iyer. Shakespeare lore is huge in Kannada and the Kannada consciousness has had a long and continued engagement with this writer. It is a multi-dimensional relationship,” he observed. Much of the credit of deconstructing Shakespeare, which continues even today, goes to a huge brigade of passionate teachers in Mysore, who lived and breathed the playwright. He remembered his teacher Prof. Mylari Rao, who had not only committed Shakespeare to memory, but also infused his own native bit into the bard’s narrative.
Speaking on the lines of Stephen Greenblatt’s influential theory of new historicism that strongly believed that “cultural formations are shaped by the circulation of social energy”, culture critic Prof. Rajendra Chenni argued that there was no “one language” in Shakespeare. “There are many languages from his many worlds of experiences, and that became his language,” he said. Shakespeare didn’t live and write in a period that was free from the interference of the State. “It was a period of great turmoil, and he wrote daringly without the fear of being stifled by royalty.” We, in the present, Prof. Chenni held, have “appropriated” him as per our “yuga dharma”. “After Vyasa, it is Shakespeare who has been such a phenomenal influence on us.” In fact, theatre productions have had a far more meaningful dialogue with this writer, than academics and critics, he remarked.
In a presentation that was meticulous and exhaustive, writer and critic Dr. Tarini Shubhadayini, spoke of how women transcend stereotyped gender roles in Shakespeare. Illustrating elaborately from his works, she said how Lady Macbeth’s ambition to acquire “political power” defied the spirit of her gender. Cross dressing in Shakespeare was also a liberating outlet for many of his characters. “As a playwright, you never see him pressurizing his characters to explain their sexuality choices. He allows them to flower in their natural instinctive selves. Man becoming woman, and woman crossing over to be the man -- this is what forms the spirit of Shakespeare’s world.”
Though playwright K.V. Akshara could clearly locate the position from which Kambar’s differences with Shakespeare came, he said that he had resolved and found his Shakespeare through intense quarrels. “From a position that was ‘I like him, yet I don’t like him’, I have passed through Jan Kott, Stephen Greenblatt and several other Shakespearan scholars and have finally found him as an antithesis of our own reflective Bhavabhuti. The outcome of this search is that Shakespeare is the realisation that Shakespeare is the guiding star of this large universe of theatre. Not just to the likes of me, but even to stalwarts like Brecht, who in times of crisis, have asked, ‘What would William have done?’ and have found their answers.” The first time Shakespeare made his appearance in Kannada was through Yakshagana, “If we do not keep your minds open to such back door appearances, you cannot make him your own,” he said, emphatically. As someone who has translated several Shakespeare’s plays, Akshara observed that if Shakespeare is “translated” he will be killed. “You have to capture him in meaning, the way we hold on to a song. To be able to get him into your language successfully, the contempt of Navya writers for rhetoric has to be abandoned. You must don the playfulness and love of language that the Navodaya writers did.”
Writer and critic Dr. Nataraj Huliyar, also the convenor of the seminar, felt that literature departments have been indifferent to Shakespeare. Identifying the ‘to be or not to be’ monologue from the play Hamlet as central to every human discourse, he said that Shakespeare has haunted people from all walks of life – common man, doctors, lawyers etc. “Every language writer has sought him for archetypes. He is the most contemporary writer, constantly throwing up new meanings,” he said.
Going back to where Tarini Shubhadayini stopped, Prof. G.K. Govinda Rao said that every character in Shakespeare is a celebration of the integration of male and female principles. “He never created black and white characters,” Prof. G.K. Govinda Rao in his valedictory address.
One of the early translators of Shakespeare Bhagwan and theatre director Nataraj Honnavalli were the other speakers.
