Special Issue, November, 2016
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
http//:daathvoyagejournal.com Editor: Saikat Banerjee Department of English Dr. K.N. Modi University, Newai, Rajasthan, India. : An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in English ISSN 2455-7544 www.daathvoyagejournal.com Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Research Articles Shakespeare and Adaptation in the Seventeenth Century: Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale --- Rita Banerjee 3 A Critical Appraisal Of Hamlet With The Bhagvad Geeta --- Ashish Gupta 12 Hamlet: A Psychoanalytic Point of View --- P. Prayer Elmo Raj 22 Hamlet and Prospero as Philosopher Kings: A Utopian Fallacy --- Atiya Noor 35 The Philosophy of Nothing: A multi theoretical approach to interpret King Lear with a thrust focus on Nothing’--- Sumathi Shivakumar 45 Exploring Aspect of Emotion in Shakespearean Works ---B.Shoba Rao 57 Shakespeare and Death --- Parvaiz Ahmad Bhatt & Dilruba Rasool 65 Macbeth And Caligula As Despots: A Comparative Exegesis --- Aparna Ajith 74 Anti –Semitism in The Merchant of Venice: A Critical Study--- Shivender Rahul 84 Half Way to William Shakespeare --- G. Varalakshmi 93 Feminine Identity and the Woman Question in Selected Plays of Shakespeare --- KshamataChaudhary 103 Assorted Manifestations of the Sentiment of Love in the Select Plays of William Shakespeare --- Mini V.S. 121 Tales from Shakespeare and Lamb(s) --- Deepanjali Sharma 134 Domestication of Shakespeare in Indian cinema: A study of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare Trilogy--- Doyel Dutta 144 Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Page 1 : An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in English ISSN 2455-7544 www.daathvoyagejournal.com Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Studying Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider : A Third World Reading of Shakespeare’s Magnum opus --- Poulomi Modak & Satyajit Roy 158 The Bard In the Bollywood: A Study of Cinematic Adaptation and Appropriation-- Anuradha Tiwari 164 ‘Why, When and How’ to Introduce Shakespeare at the Secondary and Higher Secondary School Level -- Imtiyaz M. Shaikh 178 Imparting Language Skills to ESL Students through the Dramas of Shakespeare --- Chatta Bala Swamy 189 Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Page 2 : An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in English ISSN 2455-7544 www.daathvoyagejournal.com Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Shakespeare and Adaptation in the Seventeenth Century: Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale Dr. Rita Banerjee Associate Professor Centre for English Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi The growing importance of Shakespearean adaptations all over the world today often induces us to overlook the recurrence of adaptations as a phenomenon during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and the extent to which Shakespeare himself adapted from his contemporaries, cutting across genres and languages. This paper looks at The Winter’s Tale (1611) and its adaptation of Robert Greene’s romance Pandosto or The Triumph of Time (1588). Adaptation, as Linda Hutcheon says, “is a form of intertextuality; we experience adaptations as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation”1. Knowledge of the prior text always makes its presence felt as if the latter is “shadowing the one they are experiencing directly.”2 Since Greene’s romance was a very popular one, a sizable section of Shakespeare’s audience would very likely have known it, and John Fletcher, who became the leading playwright of the King’s Men after Shakespeare, would expectedly have assumed his audience’s knowledge of The Winter’s Tale, which was enacted a decade before. Reading them together enables us as Louis A. Montrose says “to reconstruct an intertextual field of representations, resonances, and pressures that constitutes an ideological matrix.”3 Situating the adapted texts in the context of economic mobility in the seventeenth century, this paper seeks to examine the ideologies of the works, especially with reference to the construction of identity and the concept and signification of credit, which recurs as a dominant motif in all three texts. An adaptation generally involves “an extensive Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Page 3 : An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in English ISSN 2455-7544 www.daathvoyagejournal.com Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 transposition of a particular work.” This ‘transcoding’ in The Winter’s Tale entails a shift of medium from narrative to drama, which inevitably involves adjustments of technique in characterization. But, it also includes an ideological change in the creation of self and reality, and I shall try to show how this conception self is closely and vitally associated to the medium of drama. Montrose argues that “the remarkably pervasive and sophisticated reflexivity of Shakespearean drama is not a symptom of aestheticism but the articulation of a dramatistic conception of human life, rooted in the historical circumstances of personal life.”4‘Dramatistic’ would imply an identity characteristic of drama, which gives rise to the consciousness that one’s career involves playing a set of roles. Significantly, this ‘dramatistic’ conception of identity had affinity with the notion of self which emerged in the seventeenth century with the increased circulation of money in the marketplace economy. As Jean-Christophe Agnew argues: “Conventional metaphors and tropes no longer seemed capable of expressing the labile qualities of money or the social relations that money mediated. The formless, qualityless, characterless nature of the money form became a recurrent motif in the prolonged rumination about self and society to which so much Renaissance and Reformation literature contributed.”5 There is a significant difference between the way Greene and Shakespeare shows the development of jealousy for their respective queens, in Pandosto and Leontes. Greene demonstrates the origin and gradual growth of jealousy in Pandosto by narrating how since his queen Bellaria and his friend Egistus spent time together during his absence in state matters, he began to entertain a melancholy passion, which “drove him into sundry and doubtful thoughts. First he called to mind the beauty of his wife Bellaria, the comeliness and bravery of his friend Egistus, thinking that love was above all laws, and therefore to be stayed with no laws.” “These and suchlike doubtful thoughts, a long time smothering in his stomach, began at last to kindle in his mind a secret mistrust, which increased by mistrust grew at last to be a jealousy that so tormented him as he could take no rest.”6Greene takes care to preserve the requirements of verisimilitude in his narrative by rationalizing Pandosto’s jealousy against his friend and the period of time it takes for the jealousy to grow. Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Page 4 : An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in English ISSN 2455-7544 www.daathvoyagejournal.com Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 By contrast, in The Winter’s Tale, the sudden onset of jealousy lacks even the semblance of verisimilitude: “I have tremor cordis on me. My heart dances, / But not for , not joy”.7 The audience is not prepared for these lines for Leontes had before this pressed his childhood friend, Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, to stay longer in his own kingdom of Sicilia. It was Leontes himself who had urged Hermione, his “tongue-tied” queen to persuade Polixenes to stay. When she succeeds where he himself had failed, the sudden change occurs in Leontes. His anxiety induces him to read adultery in Polixenes’s and Hermione’s ‘friendship. Through the maze of labile metaphors that Leontes creates in his effort to understand his wife’s action and his own position, he seems to be awakening to new knowledge and undergoing the process of a cognitive re-discovery of the world.8 His changed perception of the world leads to the creation of a new self. From his conviction of Hermione’s infidelity he progresses rapidly to his belief in his daughter’s (yet to be born) bastardy, for it is nine months that Polixenes was at his court and Perdita’s birth is due after these nine months. Leontes’s sudden, almost inexplicable conviction of his wife’s infidelity and Perdita’s bastardy problematizes the nature of subjectivity in The Winter’s Tale.I would argue that Leontes’s sudden change represents his anxiety, as the patriarchal head of the state, of polluting his lineage with bastardized descent. Lawrence Stone writes that in sixteenth- and seventeenth century- England, “the interests of, and loyalty to this lineage are paramount, and all other interests and loyalties are secondary. It was precisely this relation of the individual to his lineage which provided a man of the upper classes in a traditional society with his identity, without which he was a mere atom floating in a void of social space.”9By inviting the audience’s astonishment at the suddenness of the jealousy, Shakespeare tries to draw attention to the fluidity of identity that Montrose’s essay invokes. The sudden change in Leontes suggests the theatricality of the gesture and produces a sense that identity is constructed. And such a dramatic change can only be enacted on stage as opposed to being narrated as a process. Shakespeare transfers us to a different medium from Greene’s romance with its own distinctive forms. Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Page 5 : An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in English ISSN 2455-7544 www.daathvoyagejournal.com Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 In his paranoia, Leontes abjures the very familial identity on which the perpetuation of his lineage depends. He suspects not only his wife but also his child Mamillius, whom he repeatedly scrutinizes to discover in him the copy of himself. Leontes treads through a maze of metaphors, which progressively denudes Mamillius’s of humanity and ultimately of life, reducing him to animals, “bawcock” (derived from ‘beau coq’) (1.2.122), ‘neat,’ (with the associated significations of bullock or heifer) (1.2.126), “wanton Calfe” (1.2.127), and finally to a piece of meat “collop” (1.2.138).