18. Sukanta Chaudhuri On 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' - in India.

 Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri talks to Paul Edmondson about Shakespeare in India and about editing A Midsummer Night's Dream .

Transcript

Paul Edmondson:

Hello everybody and welcome to Shakespeare Alive, a podcast of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Paul Edmondson:

My name's Paul Edmonson. Shakespeare Alive hosts conversations with people who work with Shakespeare throughout the world. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri to Shakespeare Alive. He is Professor Emeritus at Jadavpor University, Kolkata and a distinguished international Shakespearian. His publications include Infirm Glory: Shakespeare and the Renaissance Image of Man, Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments and the Metaphysics of Text.

Paul Edmondson:

He coordinated a major online variorum edition of the works of the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and in 2017 was published his truly splendid Arden edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Paul Edmondson:

Sukanta, welcome to Shakespeare Alive.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Thank you for having me, Paul. It's a very great pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. I look forward to our conversation.

Paul Edmondson:

Thank you. Thank you for joining us. When did you first become interested in Shakespeare?

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Well, I think it's a process than a particular movement that I can pinpoint. Like most Indians who've had the benefit and the privilege of receiving a full education, I belong to almost completely bilingual culture. My parents both happened to be professors of English literature. Since my early childhood, I've seen a house full of English books and I've heard the name of Shakespeare constantly being mentioned of course. I've read some of his stories, retold, both in English and in Bengali, but my first direct encounter with Shakespeare as it were ... and that interestingly on the stage, rather than for the most part, subsequently as you'd expect it to be on the page ... but the first encounter was actually the year 1964, when I was 14 years old. The New Shakespeare Company visited India and among other places, my home city, Kolkata, to stage a number of plays, of which Richard II was one. My parents took me to see the play.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

My first acquaintance with Shakespeare was through Richard II. I actually ... maybe a little prematurely ... read the original text, which of course we had at home, in my parents' library. That was the first Shakespeare I read, I read some more Shakespeare at school. First Julius Caesar and then more interestingly, in my final year at school, Twelfth Night, but my real chance to get interested in Shakespeare, to read in him at into him widely came at college. I went to what was at that time Presidency College, which is now Presidency University, which is in fact, the history of a different name goes back to the early 19th century. Among my professors were at least three persons, who's chief interest was in Shakespeare. That I suppose is where I really got interested.

Paul Edmondson:

Do you remember performing or seeing performances of the plays at school?

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Not that many. Not that many at that stage. Until the age of 20, I've seen only one performance by British or indeed any other company from abroad. I have seen some performances, not very many actually ... it could have been more ... of that remarkable company Shakespeareana run by Geoffrey Kendal, as it describes in that magnificent autobiography there, is called Shakespeare Wallah. He had this little shoe, but you'd act Shakespeare around Indian, chiefly in the schools and colleges.

Paul Edmondson:

This is the troupe that was led by the father of the British actor, Felicity Kendal, isn't it?

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

That's right. That's right. As you say it, later on, in England I did see a performance of Shakespeare at the RSC in fact - seeing her name in the program and then seeing her on stage. It took me back all those years. To tell you the truth, my experience of Shakespeare has been much more through the page than ... as with so many Indians. There is in fact a certain tradition of Shakespeare productions in various Indian languages of course, including my own language of Bengali. The strongest in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but there were some very distinguished productions in the later 20th century and indeed the early 21st century, some of which I hadn't seen and then in more recent times, there have been some stage productions and there have been some films. The best known examples of course would be the films of Vishal Bharadwaj in Hindi. About 80% of my experience of Shakespeare, my interactions with Shakespeare has really been through the page.

Paul Edmondson:

A really supreme example of your engagement with Shakespeare on the page Sukanta is your wonderful Arden three edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was published in 2017. In 2018, the following winter, I was involved with a Shakespeare retreat for an organization based in Windsor Great Park called Cumberland Lodge. I was co-leading that retreat with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and Professor Sir Stanley Wells. Stanley and I had to select an edition for the participants of the retreat to have when they arrived. We surveyed the current critical editions. Two of which, Stanley himself had been involved with, the Penguin edition, which he edited and the Oxford edition edited by Peter Holland, but we alight it on yours, especially because of the breadth of its introduction and its international focus in the range of productions that it commented on. Indeed, the notes at the foot of the page, which we just really admired.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Deeply gratified. I'm also touched, a little embarrassed in particular, at Stanley’s generosity. I think the rest of you should probably be insistent that you take his edition. Paul, I learned so much [crosstalk 00:06:44].

Paul Edmondson:

Well, it's a wonderful edition, is Stanley’s, for Penguin, definitely.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Yes indeed.

Paul Edmondson:

Your edition – one of the things that makes it distinctive it seemed to us was its international focus and also its concision. We just find it entirely, entirely helpful with the participants of this retreat, but I wonder for you. Obviously, there have been many editions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and when you were asked and commissioned to produce another edition of this remarkable play, I wonder what your first thoughts were, in terms of how can I make it distinctive? What's going to be special about my edition of this play?

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Well, when I was first asked to edit this play, I felt somewhat overwhelmed, really. My first fear was that I may not be able to do justice to the performative dimension publicly. By performative, I mean not just the play as acted on stage or even just edit into film, but also its wider presence, it's afterlife in opera, in music, in the visual arts. A Midsummer Night's Dream has been an unusually fertile inseminating so much more art. One thing I tried to do, which to the best of my knowledge has not been covered in that way in any previous edition, was to deal with those aspects of that, because only that could bring out the full imaginative sweep.

Paul Edmondson:

I like what you say in your introduction. A Midsummer Night's Dream maybe the Shakespeare play most widely circulated across the globe, not only in direct translations, but in cultural translation into many social contexts and theatrical idioms. That's a wonderful proposition, isn't it? The afterlife is so especially rich of this play.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Again, it's something I knew from the start, but then while researching and spending quite some time in Stratford and going in particular over the shelves which dealt with Shakespeare across the world, the international reception of Shakespeare, and taking down book after book relating to country after country and the extraordinary range – Well, I have a theory, really, which might help me explain why A Midsummer Night's Dream has been so extraordinarily fertile in its range of adaptive performances across the world, which is that the play has these three very distinctive groups of characters, three strands to its action. One concerning the upper-class characters, the ruling class elite, the second of the artisans, the mechanicals, and the third are the fairies. Shakespeare is playing off these three groups of characters against each other.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

It is therefore possible for any interpreter of the play ... I'm taking the word "interpreter" in the widest possible sense – it can be the director of a performance or a film, or it can mean somebody doing a verbal interpretation – they can play around with these elements as they choose for grounding anyone, in order to give the play a distinctive orientation in one direction. Depending on which elements you choose to foreground or to stress, you can work an infinite range of variations, really a whole set of changes, huge range of changes with the play. That I think is what has been happening, especially over the last 150 years.

Paul Edmondson:

Well, your edition really demonstrates that when you set forth, that ‘Dream has equally infused Western and non-Western dominant and sub-altern cultures across nations and within them. It's productions and interpretations have taken diverse, imaginative, sometimes bizarre forms. Postmodern Shakespeare is a socially complex and multicultural construction. Dream has amply met its demands.’

Paul Edmondson:

You set forth, British productions, European productions, and then beyond Europe, the states, Australia, Brazil, and of course India itself. You also make the point how those three worlds allow for a great scope of localization within the receiving culture of the play so that the producers of the play, the interpreters to use that word in its broadest sense, can very much make this play its own. Partly I suppose, because of that ... well, as Shakespeare phrases it, a local habitation and a name, when he's describing the poetic art ... but the play itself with its interest in theatricality and the imagination allows for troop after troop to make it very much its own, doesn't it?

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. If I could talk a little bit about maybe a few highlights of this very distinguished history, it's ‘afterlife’ to use Walter Benjamin’s term. I'm thinking of one production of which I've only read briefly. I've not been able to find any details of the production. It was apparently an operatic production, which took place in a Cedar Grove, outside Beirut in Lebanon at the height of the disturbances there. The human world were playthings in the hands of the jins, were creating various disturbances there. Another production, which again, I've only read about, which is a South African production done in apartheid times, but there are two other productions.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

One of which is Indian, which I've actually seen on stage. The other is a Korean production, which I've seen in video. The Indian production was one done by a great theater personality of modern Indian theater, Habib Tanvir, who chiefly worked in the Hindi language, but he came from Central India and one of his most remarkable achievements beyond any specific production was that he managed to put together a theatrical group and a whole tradition of modern theatrical performance among the tribal inhabitants of Central India of the stage, which we call [… 00:13:30], now in fact have added it to two states.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Among the most remarkable performances was a version of Midsummer Night's dream. The love of God's very own, A Spring Time Dream. In this play, the role of the mechanicals, the artisans, their place is taken by a group of tribals in the forest. The fairies are the forest gods and the upper-class characters are very much in the background. The whole play is oriented towards the life in the forest, which is the human beings and the supernatural beings who live in the forest and their interaction. The whole play is cost ... but not entirely of course ... but along the lines of the local indigenous theater. This play, it's among the great classics of all modern Indian theater. I don't just mean Indian performance of Shakespeare, but all modern Indian theater. One of the high points in the career of a very distinguished theater practitioner.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

The other is a Korean performance I understand was acted at The Globe, in London, in its time. It again was a remarkable performance, which again, centers around the equivalents of the fairies and the mechanicals, in particular bottom whose ... there is a gender conversion also in some of the open characters. The character representing Bottom is in fact a woman, a woman who goes to the woods to pick medicinal herbs, which she sell for a living. And there, Oberon, who is presented as a good for nothing drawn that is bumming around the forest stream, while the actual person ruling the fairy kingdom is his queen, the Titania equivalent.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Anyways, it's really Oberon who falls in love with this herb gathering woman whose transformed into a pig. It was hilarious and also there were all more thoughtful and more wistful nuances, which were opening up.

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Sukanta Chaudhuri:

To me, there are two kinds of association, which are playing around the edges of Midsummer Night’s Dream. One is these wistful, sobering, somewhat melancholy associations. The other are in fact, grim and sinister associations, which obviously they are there in Titania's account of the cataclysm that's taking place in nature itself, because of the quarrel. Although interesting, it's something about which we don't see very much or hear very much in the rest of the play. Nature seems to be perfectly quiet and peaceful for the rest of the play, but you have a sense of its titanic and destructive power that it is unleashed.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Then, the terrible destructive force of love, human and extra human. I'm not just saying that because accidentally I've come to edit A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but even before I had the chance or there was any question of my doing that, I'd long ago felt it, that the most frightening line for me in the whole of Shakespeare is not something out of India. It's not something out of Macbeth or whatever. It is the line spoken by Titania when she wakes up, "Methought I was enamoured of ass," what a realization to draw upon.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

This deconstruction of all human relationships. Here [inaudible 00:17:52] of a character who's not clearly human, you see. I feel her, every time I read that line, I find a shutter going through me.

Paul Edmondson:

Well, I think some productions draw this out. Don't they? With the nightmare qualities, which are possible within the play through such lines as you've just quoted, but elsewhere too. I'm wondering also, you mentioned seeing the productions in India, Tim Supple’s production, which was launched in Delhi in 2006. We were all thrilled to see it over here in the Swan Theatre later that year. It went on an international tour. I remember Tim Supple likes to say that ‘comedy is a very serious business’. I remember him taking the mechanicals play of Pyramus and Thisbe very seriously. He wasn't especially playing it for comedy. I think he was trying to as it were portray the story of the separated lovers and their misfortunes.

Paul Edmondson:

In terms of its Indian qualities, that production featured eight different Indian languages, didn't it? I'm just trying to place from your own Indian perspective, India in the play either on page or on stage. Of course, I'm thinking especially of the Indian boy’s mother and indeed of the Indian boy himself as an editor of the play. Sukanta, what would you want to say about as it were these references to India in Shakespeare's text?

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Well, I'll answer the question, but before that, thank you for providing in a means of point of entry as it were into Tim Supple's production, about which also you've heard me, I'd like to just stop briefly for a while.

Paul Edmondson:

Yes, of course. Thank you. Lovely, thank you.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

[inaudible 00:19:41] a production. All of the actors were Indian and of course, each of them were speaking in a different Indian language, counting English also as one Indian language. In fact, I had the good chance to see one of the earliest productions of the play, the play premiered in Delhi and then it came to Kolkata. I saw it in Kolkata on the grounds of the Tolly Club. It was one of those old relics of the Raj. It was originally a golf club. It still is a golf club, but it is much else besides. It has huge, rolling grounds. inside. It had set up the stage and the stands for the spectators in the open air, in part of the grounds. The dramaturge for that play was my colleague at Jadavpur University, Ananda Lal, a very distinguished scholar of the theatre and very distinguished director of many plays, among them, a number of Shakespeare performances by our students, you see.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

I'm glad that I have this chance of mentioning Ananda Lal’s name. Bengali – the contributions to the script ... it was either Demetrius or Lysander ... I forget which ... who was speaking in Bengal. That part was translated by another colleague of mine, Abhijit Gupta, another of Jadavpur colleagues. I went along with quite a sense of belonging, as it were. I would not say there was anything which I would characterize as being very distinctively Indian about the play, about the languages used and some elements of the costume. The one or two external Indian elements, maybe it didn't really fit in so much I felt and I think many of us felt in India, but the total sheer theatrical energy of the play, the general sweep of the director's vision of the whole play. That was something wonderful. It reminded me, if I can say that of a production, which I've only seen in a very inadequate black and white film version, in the archives in the Stratford Shakespeare Centre, which is Peter Brooks production, but I heard that Tim Supple’s production was maybe capturing something of that same spirit.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

At the end of the performance, Tim Supple himself came on stage with the actor who was playing the part of Bottom and he said, "I would particularly like to thank him. Two days ago this man’s father passed away." He still felt himself so deeply attached to the play, he made the best tribute he could offer to the memory of his father was to carry on with the performance. He said a few words to that effect and then at the end of the performance, he broke down. That memory again, is one of the things that for me, it shows that Midsummer Night's Dream always has this melancholy and wistful air about it.

Paul Edmondson:

I'm reminded the line of Caliban much later of course, in Shakespeare's career, when we hear, "I cried to dream again," maybe that has something to do with the melancholy aspects of Midsummer Night's Dream.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Yes, that's a thought. I hadn't actually associated that line with Midsummer Night's Dream earlier, but now that you've done it, I quite see. Sorry, you were asking me a question about something that's about the Indian….

Paul Edmondson:

Yes. How do you place India in the play? We have the Indian boy and we have the Indian boy's mother, who was a great friend of Titania, and she's brought up the child and now Oberon's taken the child.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

I've actually talked about this, not so much in my edition of the play, though, of course, it occurs there, as in an article I once wrote called Shakespeare's India, a published article. Obviously, there's nothing specifically or distinctively Indian about this account of India and the Indian boy. If India has any meaning at all, it is of something exotic. It gives a different dimension to what might otherwise have been the very English nature of the fairy land in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it isn't English. It has much wider dimensions.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Oberon to Titania, the range across the world. India could be anywhere that is not England, as it were. There's been some very perceptive analysis of these parts of the play. I'm thinking of Shankar Raman’s analysis in particular about Britain's colonial relationship with India. That colonial relationship had not yet started. The East India Company was in fact set up in the year 1600, it was almost certainly later than the data of Midsummer Night’s Dream. I wouldn't overdo that element of colonial trade and that kind of thing. In the impossible event of my having the opportunity to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I don't think I would bring in the Indian boy. I think Shakespeare left him out for a good reason. He wanted the Indian boy to be something absent, something which is in dispute, which is longed for, which is swapped for, but which is never really quite there. You see? Again, I think to give the Indian boy some specific shape as has been done in a number of performances, I think disperse effect.

Paul Edmondson: 

I'd like to bring you back to a local habitation and a name, Sukanta, by bringing the conversation from forests and international productions and the placing of India or not in the play to Stratford-upon-Avon. I'd like to close, just ask you two questions specifically about Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespearian. As you know that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust looks after five Shakespeare houses, which you've visited over the years. If you were to choose one of those houses to live in, which one would you choose and why?

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

That's quite a question really! Well, I have of course had the chance to visit all these five places during my visits to England. If it's not blasphemous to say so, I think I wouldn't really choose of my own free will to live in any of them, because I think in the 21st century, I think they would all be considerably less comfortable than maybe my own very cozy house in Kolkata or the various more modern houses that I've inhabited when I was living in England off and on, stages. But if I had choose, well seeing that the reasons for choosing any of them would be ... should I say sentimental or to have a better word, the reason of the association ... well, in that case, the Birthplace obviously, or New Place would have been a close contestant, had it existed, which it no longer does. Yes, maybe the Birthplace, where it all began.

Paul Edmondson:

Thank you. Anyone is able to deposit things of relevance and of interest into the collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, our library archive or museum's collection, if you were to deposit something, what would you choose to deposit and why?

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

Oh, well this is something which I've been trying to track down for quite some time in Kolkata. Unfortunately, I don't think it exists anymore. It's probably been lost for good. See, I told you at the start of our conversation about the very distinguished tradition of Shakespearean teaching at the college where I studied and then later on, I taught for nearly 20 years, Presidency College. Well, around the middle of the 20th century, there was a person teaching there called Praphulla Chandra Ghosh

He taught my parents actually, and he was one of the great Shakespearean teachers of all time in India and I suspect to ... had the rest of the world have a chance to attend his classes, maybe he'd have ranked as one of the all-time greats of the world. Now, he took his teaching very seriously as they did in those days, because they were not so much a handwritten by the need to keep on publishing.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

He had interleaved editions of several of Shakespeare’s plays, the ones that he used to teach us. He would have them specially bound with the sheets of blank paper in between the pages. He would fill in those sheets, as well as the margins of the actual printed pages with all kinds of notes. Notes in different colors, maybe one colour for notes of the text and other for explanations of the words and other for maybe theatrical observations, another for critical observations. All I have seen are a few black and white photographs of some pages of his own teaching copy of Hamlet. If that copy could be recovered from somewhere, this very deep and serious edition of Shakespearian study in India, I would like to see deposited at the Shakespeare Centre.

Paul Edmondson:

Sukanta, thank you. We would love to receive that copy, if ever it turned up and of course we've talked hypothetically.

Sukanta Chaudhuri:

I haven't come across it. It seems almost impossible, I'll tell you about it, we'll see where it goes, but thank you so much also Paul. It was a very great pleasure and a very good privilege to have us on this.

Paul Edmondson:

And a great privilege to have your verbal annotations for this remarkable play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thank you ever so much Sukanta for taking part in Shakespeare Alive. We send you greetings from Stratford-upon-Avon.

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