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This article builds on Terence Hawkes' 'jazz' reading of Hamlet to suggest ways in which music can shed light on radical aspects of Shakespeare's theatrical and linguistic craft. Turning specifically to Hindi cinema and the convention of the 'item number', the article considers the latter's translingualism and how it can help us understand the relations between Shakespeare's own polyglot language and the border-crossing nature of desire in Romeo and Juliet.
Terence Hawkes' That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (1986) is many things. It is a fine exercise in literary history, a playful reading of Shakespearean performance, and an exemplary instance of radical political criticism. But it is also the work of someone who loved music.
Throughout That Shakespeherian Rag, Hawkes embraced jazz as a form that has much to teach literary critics. His title - a reference simultaneously to a line from Eliot's 'Waste Land' and a hit jazz song of the same name from 19121 - conflated the literary and the musical. But even as it seemed to pay homage to Shakespeare, the title deliberately and cheekily messed up the playwright's name in the irreverent style characteristic of the jazz 'rag'. Hawkes' critical practice throughout the book did something similar. On the one hand, his reading strategy was recognisably academic: it was poised somewhere between deconstruction and cultural materialism, two of the critical methods - along with feminism - that provided the most significant compass points for radical criticism in the 1980s. On the other hand, Hawkes' style owed just as much to American jazz as it did to high French theory or leftist British literary criticism: he explicitly contrasted the improvisational liberty enjoyed by jazz musicians with the servile devotion to a pre-existing score that characterises European classical performance. For graduate students of that decade who, like me, were inspired by the cultural materialist challenge to mainstream English, That Shakespeherian Rag modelled a 'jazz' literary criticism that, shunning the classicist imperative to recreate the true meaning of a text, assumed a more creative and playful licence to work with, and against, what it reads.
'Telmah' - 'Hamlet' backwards - is the name of the most insistently 'jazz' chapter of the book.2 The chapter harks back to the Jazz Age,...