"In, boy; go first."

In fact, the worldwide reception of Shakespeare is so much acknowledged a fact that one has only to turn to books such as The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare to see what a large number to countries is entered therefrom Argnetina to Zambiawhere Shakespeare studies are pursued, performed his plays, formed Shakespeare associations, and translated, adapted, and filmed Shakespeare plays.

The situation in neighbouring countries may be viewed first.

At an international conference on Shakespeare held at Delhi University early this year it was revealed that about 300 degree colleges under Delhi University offer English honours courses of which Shakespeare constitutes 60 percent of the syllabus (Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions: English Literature in India, 1993).

The conference was held for three days, and in each session there were papers read on Shakespeare by scholars from Bangladesh and other countries and from all over India, giving a feeling that in the Indian universities a vibrant kind of dialogue and negotiations on Shakespeare was taking place. One of the prominent participants was Professor Coppelia Kahn from Brown university who in her speech went out of her way to emphasize that it was very invigorating for her to have come all the way from America and have so substantial a feedback on Shakespeare. Among the Indian Shakespeare scholars, there was R.W.Desai of the English department of Delhi University, and also president of the Shakespeare Society of India, who had been editing and publishing a yearly volume of just a single play by Shakespeare, Hamlet, for the last twenty-five years. Incidentally, the year 2003 happened to be the year of retirement for Professor Desai, and so he published the latest volume of the series with an appropriate quote from Hamelt: "The rest is silence."

Dr. Vikram Chopra, founder secretary of the Shakespeare Society of India, was also present. He has edited a book called Shakespeare: Varied Perspectives (1996) and this nearly 500-page volume has a fitting foreword from Kenneth Muir, the distinguished British Shakespeare scholar, who expresses his satisfaction that the volume is an index to judge how Shakespeare has been faring in post-colonial India.

One book that discusses substantially the interaction between English Literature and India is Trivedi's above-mentioned Colonial Transactions, (Trivedi is also a professor of English at Delhi University). Trivedi devotes the entire first chapter of his book, in addition to a discussion of Shakespeare's influence on the curriculum of English departments in Indian universities, to making a preliminary survey of translations done of Shakespeare's works in Indian languages as well as piecing together the evidences testifying to the reconciling efforts put in by the British between ruling India on the one hand and teaching Shakespeare in India on the other. Though Carlyle commented that if a choice had to be made between the two glories of England--India and Shakespeare--the first one could be sacrificed but the second not, Professor Trivedi asserts the fact that colonial rule was strengthened through the popularization of Shakespeare.

Such colonial hangover regarding teaching Shakespeare in a postcolonial subcontinent also became an issue in many of the papers read in another international conference on Shakespeare held in Karachi, Pakistan in 1997. There Stanley Wells, joint editor of the Oxford Shakespeare very sensibly spoke that Shakespeare could be colonized by having editions of his plays annotated in the various languages of the sub-continent. He also suggested that if a colonial reading of Shakespeare was one way of understanding him, then a refusal to do so should also constitute a proper approach for studying him.

Worried that Shakespeare might be thought as becoming an essential part of the neo-imperial pedagogy, Professor Stephen Greenblatt begins his general Introduction, which in itself is a superb example of comprehensive scholarship, to the Norton Shakespeare 1997 edition with the line quoted earlier, that Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time." Positing Shakespeare as a universal phenomenon, Greenblatt writes: "indeed, so absolute is Shakespeare's achievement that he has himself come to seem like great creating nature: the common bond of humankind, the principle of hope, the symbol of the imagination's power to transcend time-bound beliefs and assumptions, peculiar historical circumstances, and specific artistic conventions."

The Shakespeare legacy in pre-1947 India is quite strong. Calcutta, Mumbai, Madras and Delhi were the centres where Shakespeare flourished. The Hindu Theatre of Calcutta, established in 1831, performed some scenes from Julius Caeser, while in 1848, Baisnab Charan Addy, a young Bengali actor, became famous by playing Othello against an Englishwoman, Mrs Anderson, playing Desdemona. Girishchandra Ghosh started the famous National Theatre in 1872, and he become famous by playing the stellar roles-- such as Macbeth. Bhanumatir Chittavilasa, an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, is regarded as one of the earliest adaptations of any foreign play in India.

In modern Shakespeare productions Habib Tanvir's adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream into the Chattisgarhi style of folk theatre has been well praised, while the Kathakoli dance form of the National School of Drama is also mentionable.

After Greenblatt-initiated post-historical studies took roots, Shakespeare criticism in the post-colonial world has become a practice of finding Shakespeare's relevance in a larger socio-political context, and depending on Shakespeare's great accommodative versatility, thought of every kind, social phenomena both regular and bizarre, manners and behaviour of all patterns can be exemplified from his work either to prove or to reject a point. In this way Shakespeare is a very comfortable referent.

For example, these speeches by Lear seem to be most relevant for a Bangladesh kind of society, where unfed, unsheltered man approaches us at every street corner:

You houseless poverty --

Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
Poor, naked wretches, wherese'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take, physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.(3.2.26-36)

Lear's resentment of this situation of the unaccommodated man is perfectly in accord with the inward protest we have about the widespread poverty in our country:

"Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha, here's three on's are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here." (3.2.95-103)

Lear's comments on how law can be abused with money, and thus how the difference between a thief and a judge is tenuous come up in his "handy-dandy speech":

"What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes; look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon you simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?" (4.5.146-51)

And further on, Lear's graphic description of what happens to the law when it is corrupted bespeaks familiar situations:

Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it. (4.5.161-163)

One disclaimer, however, is that as all Shakespearian plays allow for pluralistic readings, they cannot be readily contexualized as having referred to one dominant theme only. Othello may be taken as a case. If it is read as a high-voltage tragedy, which is only just casually racial -- a view upheld by Bradley, we see that the questions about race spring up in our minds to undo our reading. And, again, a reading with a racial thrust also undoes us as the play provides very little support to form an ideological interpretation about race. Othello is portrayed individually as a Moor, but not as a representative of the Moorish race. This demarcating line is crucial to the understanding of the play.

Yet then, we will continue to read Shakespeare with our own bias, and if Shakespeare has to have any relevance for us it is because we find meanings in his texts that are similar to meanings we give to our life and society, that the critic's and reader's own psyches, environments, societies and cultures do modify and determine their response to Shakespeare. That is, the past is reshaped by the present.

Another aspect of the problem of encouraging Shakespeare studies in Bangladesh is the deterioration of the level of English among our students. In spite of efforts by both government and non-government agencies to improve the students' English, it is surprisingly dipping to an all-time low, so much so that English departments in our universities hardly get students who can cope with a standard syllabus in English, let alone Shakespeare. Except for a handful of students in Dhaka and Chittagong, the majority of students pass their intermediate examination having learnt no English at all. English seems to be a compromised subject, which the students manage to pass not because they pass it, but because they are allowed to pass it with substantial boost given by 'grace marks'. The problem, however, is of a grave nature, and more complicated than the present essay has room to address.

Mohit Ul Alam teaches English at Premier University, Chittagong.