Citation

Sarkar A. Lit. Compass 2018; 15(4).

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/lic3.12458

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

My essay will examine how two nineteenth-century Bengali adaptations of Hamlet negotiate the Shakespearean text and try to re-configure its approach towards politics and the private mind. The two Bengali plays in question are (i) Nanda-bangshochchhed ("The Destruction of the Nanda Dynasty"; published 1873) by Lakshminarayan Chakraborty, a text that was sparingly staged and is yet to gain adequate recognition as a case of Shakespearean appropriation; and (ii) Hariraj by Nagendranath Chaudhury (first staged in 1897), commercially the most successful adaptation of any Shakespeare play in the nineteenth-century Bengali theatre. The major point of departure for the first play is the question of political intrigue - which is to a large extent upstaged in the Shakespearean original by the focus on Hamlet's subjectivity. The first play curiously amalgamates the mythos of Hamlet with suggestions of a semi-legendary past, especially as derivable from the classical Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa (4th-8th century CE). Accordingly, the Fortinbras-equivalent of the play is Nanda's half-brother Chandragupta (identifiable as the historical Chandragupta Maurya, 340-298 BCE), and it has references to the historical figures of Rakshasa, Chanakya and even Alexander the Great. Similarly, the second play, which is set in a pseudo-historical Hindu state, greatly emphasizes elements of political and sexual conspiracy. It shows the Gertrude-equivalent as a Lady Macbeth-like figure who conspires with her lover to kill her husband, later plans against her son Hariraj, and commits suicide when the monstrosity of the crime dawns on her. Thus, the plays revise the dominant reading of Hamlet as a tragedy of deeply interiorized suffering, and alert one to the political catastrophe attendant upon the extinction of Hamlet's family line. These two Bengali adaptations choose to show the Hamlet-figure as subject to the contingencies of a communal existence, which are not always filtered through his consciousness. However, these two plays, which incidentally embody early attempts in Bengali at adapting the tragic to the received aesthetic repertoire of India, also evoke at key moments Hamlet's celebrated contemplativeness and engage on indigenous terms with a Western model of staging interiority. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Language: en