Shakespeare in the World

Cross-Cultural Adaptation in Europe and Colonial India, 1850-1900

Suddhaseel Sen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000206067
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare in the World traces the reception histories and adaptations of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, when his works became well-known to non-Anglophone communities in both Europe and colonial India. Sen provides thorough and searching examinations of nineteenth-century theatrical, operatic, novelistic, and prose adaptations that are still read and performed, in order to argue that, crucial to the transmission and appeal of Shakespeare's plays were the adaptations they generated in a wide range of media. These adaptations, in turn, made the absorption of the plays into different "national" cultural traditions possible, contributing to the development of "nationalist cosmopolitanisms" in the receiving cultures. Sen challenges the customary reading of Shakespeare reception in terms of "hegemony" and "mimicry," showing instead important parallels in the practices of Shakespeare adaptation in Europe and colonial India. Shakespeare in the World strikes a fine balance between the Bard's iconicity and his colonial and post-colonial afterlives, and is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies.

Part 1

1 Shakespeare Reception in France

Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet and Its Intertexts¹

Introduction

The reception of Shakespeare in Europe is intimately tied up with translations, adaptations, and criticism of his play Hamlet, whose protagonist, by the mid-nineteenth century, “had begun his ascent to the pantheon of cultural icons … like Don Quixote and Faust” (Hapgood 1999, 22). What were the channels through which Shakespeare’s play reached other countries in Europe, and in what forms did it reach these countries? How did his play alter, or how was it altered by, theatrical traditions in European countries in which it was performed for the first time? What adaptations of Hamlet were created as a consequence, and what was their long-term impact?

While German commentators produced a valuable body of translations of and criticism on Shakespeare, in general, and Hamlet, in particular, it was a French version that provided the basis for subsequent first translations of Hamlet into European languages such as Italian (1774) by Franceso Gritti (Fresco 1993, 111), Spanish (1772) by Ramón de la Cruz (Zaro 1998, 125), and Dutch (1777) by M. G. Cambon van der Werken (Delabastita 2004, 107). This was the Hamlet (first performed on 30 September 1769, and published the following year) by Jean-François Ducis (1733–1816). The word “version” needs to be used with caution here, for Ducis, in an attempt to make Hamlet performable at the Comédie-Française, made radical changes to Shakespeare’s plot and language so that his text conformed to the strict neoclassical rules of the Académie Française. Ducis’s Hamlet was last performed in 1851 at the Comédie-Française, and although it is not performed any more, it generated a number of other French translations (some of them much closer to Shakespeare) as well as adaptations. Of particular importance is the Hamlet (1847) by Alexandre Dumas père (1802–70) and Paul Meurice (1818–1905), which, like the version by Ducis, also underwent continual revision, and was last performed in 1932 (Heylen 1993, 60). Both the Ducis and (especially) the Dumas-Meurice versions went into the making of the operatic Hamlet (first performed on 9 March 1868 at the Paris Opéra) by the composer Ambroise Thomas (1811–96) and his librettists Jules Barbier (1825–1901) and Michel Carré (1822–72).² One of the very few nineteenth-century adaptations of Hamlet in any form that is still performed, Thomas’s opera maintains a foothold in the operatic repertoire, its history of performance and reception having had its own ups and downs.

The various interpretive communities that translated, adapted, and produced critical commentaries on Shakespeare in Europe from the second half of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the nineteenth can be broadly divided into two schools. Those belonging to the first school attempted to adapt Shakespeare so as to ensure that his works conformed to French neoclassical aesthetics, while those belonging to the other—the Romantics—used Shakespeare as a means to move away from neoclassicism. Among the neoclassicists were not only Frenchmen like Ducis but also eighteenth-century Russian adapters like Alexander Sumarokov, whose Gamlet (first published in 1748), the first Russian adaptation of Hamlet, had a happy ending, as did Ducis’s (Levitt 1994, 319–22). Among the Romantics, too, we find commentators and adapters of different nationalities; for example, there are composers like Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi, and writers like Victor Hugo and Alessandro Manzoni. The Romantics were more influential in the long run, but in their day, they defined the exception rather than the norm when it came to Shakespeare: their readiness to celebrate Shakespeare’s mixing of different generic elements was by no means shared by all adapters in nineteenth-century Europe. Understandably, critical attention has generally focused on the Romantics, but it was the neoclassicists who defined the norm for Shakespeare adaptation in the initial stages. Thomas’s Hamlet is one of those Shakespeare adaptations that attempted to combine the neoclassical tenets popular in France with a more Romantic conception of the play, and its significance for the purposes of this study arises from the fact that the opera reflects the tendency of the composer and his librettists to work with/in the limits imposed by contemporary generic, aesthetic, and critical paradigms. In this regard, Thomas’s Hamlet is closer to Rossini’s Otello (1816) than to, say, Verdi’s extraordinarily inventive Otello, Rossini’s Otello being another work based on a Ducis version of Shakespeare. Stylistically, however, Thomas’s work belongs firmly to the mid-nineteenth, rather than the early nineteenth, century. Works like Thomas’s Hamlet, therefore, define the norm against which we can measure exceptional adaptations like the ones by Verdi, discussed in the following chapter. That said, the operas of Thomas and Rossini have their own strengths, too, as the successful revival of these works in recent years indicates.

Thomas’s opera has had a mixed critical reception: praised by some but panned by others adhering to a discourse of fidelity that informed and still informs much adaptation criticism,³ the opera was popular till the end of World War I, after which it almost disappeared from the operatic stage.⁴ However, from the 1980s onwards, it has come to be performed and recorded with increasing frequency in various opera houses in Europe, North America, and Australia. The reasons behind the opera’s mixed reception history shed light on the ways in which music criticism and changing attitudes towards adaptations, especially those of a canonical author such as Shakespeare, directly affect the performance histories of operas based on Shakespeare plays. Verdi’s operas are central to the operatic repertoire, and Otello and Falstaff are among the greatest works belonging to his oeuvre. As a result of the cultural capital of Verdi’s oeuvre as a whole, his operatic Macbeth, a comparatively conventional work, gets regularly performed. In contrast, Thomas left only one other work that is performed with any regularity, the opera Mignon (1866), based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795). The survival of Thomas’s operas in the repertoire has, therefore, been more directly affected than Verdi’s by changes in operatic fashions and critical opinion.

An examination of the texts and intertexts of Thomas’s Hamlet, the cultural context of its genesis, the differences between its various versions, and its reception history provides insights into the mechanisms of Shakespeare’s spread into continental Europe in the nineteenth century. It also demonstrates that the processes and products of Shakespeare reception—adaptations of his works—have striking similarities both in Europe and in India. Firstly, it can be observed that in both regions, adaptations moved gradually over time from being thorough transculturations to ones that came gradually closer to Shakespeare. Consequently, it becomes necessary for the analyst to situate any adaptation not just diachronically but also synchronically in the immediate cultural context in which the adaptation is created. Secondly, the phenomenon of performative transculturation—the changes to the plot brought about by changes in medium (and language)—can be seen in the greater degree of alteration of Shakespeare on stage than on the page in any given period. Thirdly, we see a creative reimagining of the Shakespearean heroine—in the case of Thomas’s Hamlet, as I will show, this occurs by his inventive use of operatic conventions for adaptive ends. In the case of Indian adaptations, we shall see that such foregrounding had feminist and nationalist overtones, while in Verdi’s Otello, this impetus is related to both intermedial change (from spoken play to opera) as well as to considerations of cultural self-assertion. Fourthly, we shall see that the discourse of fidelity, which held sway both in Europe and in India in the nineteenth century, increasingly led critics to treat departures from Shakespeare in negative terms even when it was precisely such departures that ensured the popularity of the adaptations with the general public. Fifthly, we shall see that Thomas provides textual variants related to the intended locations of their performances, revealing the deep imbrications between adaptations and the cultural contexts in which they need to be situated; such connections can be traced in traditions of adaptation outside of Europe as well, and not just with regard to Shakespeare. When taken together, these points all suggest that a sharp distinction between faithful adaptations, assumed to be produced mostly in Europe and to be closer to Shakespeare, on the one hand, and freer appropriations, assumed to be produced mostly in “postcolonial” cultures in a post-colonial phase of development, on the other, does not hold:⁵ the coinciding of Shakespeare’s global spread with the development of national traditions in different cultures in the nineteenth century obfuscates such a neat distinction.

I begin this chapter by tracing the critical and performance traditions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in France, which took to further lengths a tendency present in eighteenth-century England to adapt Shakespeare for performance, focusing on the adaptations by Ducis and the team of Alexandre Dumas père and Paul Meurice. These adaptations left their mark on Thomas’s Hamlet, as a result of which some of the strategies of adaptation taken up in the opera can be understood only in relation to developments in French drama and their impact on Shakespeare adaptations in the French theatre. Next, I will examine how performative transculturation occurs at the intermedial level by analysing how the process of adaptation from spoken drama to sung drama affects the structure and content of Thomas’s Hamlet. In particular, I shall focus on Ophélie’s mad scene from the opera for its gendering of madness, a subject that Elaine Showalter discusses in her study of representations of Ophelia (2005), and I argue that the medium of opera “envoices”⁶ Ophélie in a way that makes Thomas’s Hamlet an important landmark in what Showalter calls Ophelia’s own history, the history of her representation (2005, 79).⁷ Finally, I shall account for the opera’s revival by studying how, in the late 1980s, changing critical approaches towards adaptations, coupled with a spate of adaptations of Shakespeare on film, as well as an increasing number of performances and recordings of operas outside the traditional canon, paved the way for the revival of Thomas’s Hamlet.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Texts and Performances up to the Nineteenth Century⁸

“Since adaptations engage the discursive energies of their time, they become a barometer of the ideological trends circulating during the moment of production,” writes Robert Stam with respect to film adaptations (2005, 45), but the comment holds true for adaptations more generally, including those by Shakespeare himself. Adaptations in media involving performance are also profoundly shaped by the strengths of the performers whom the adapter has in mind, and this observation is valid for both Shakespeare’s play and Thomas’s opera. Shakespeare took up the genre of revenge tragedy, which had been in vogue for some time before the composition of Hamlet, most notably in Thomas Kyd’s A Spanish Tragedy (1587–89), and profoundly enriched it, capitalising on the skill of his leading actor, Richard Burbage, in “transforming himself into his part” (Hapgood 1999, 9), just as Thomas’s Hamlet would be shaped three hundred years later by the strengths of Jean-Baptiste Faure and Christine Nilsson, the singers of the leading roles of Hamlet and Ophelié. Yet another important factor behind the shaping of adaptations is the role played by institutions ranging from the management of theatres and opera houses, to governmental organisations responsible for effecting censorship ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Musical Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Preliminary Notes
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Appendix 1 “Imitation”
• Appendix 2 “Śakuntalā, Miranda, and Desdemona”
• References
• Index