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Bollywood Shakespeares. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, eds. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Pp. xi + 208. $95 (Hardcover and eBook).
Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Centre. Kate Flaherty, Penny Gay, and L E. Semler, eds. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Pp. xii + 259. $95 (Hardcover and eBook).
The two edited collections under review make an interesting pairing, both exploring, from different perspectives, the purposes Shakespeare serves in contexts that do not inherently require his presence. While neither wholly explains quite why Shakespeare should be present in these contexts, both provide rich descriptions of the functions that his works serve in cultures not his own.
The essays in Bollywood Shakespeares "analyze the historical and cultural assumptions behind Bollywood's appropriation of the Bard, asking whether or not Shakespeare's plays serve merely as [. . . an] exotic [space] through which Bollywood film directors 'whisk' their audience, or if there are not deeper valences between early modern perspectives and poetics and twenty-first century global cinema" (11). The majority of the essays, whether historical or analytical, answer this query affirmatively. Bollywood Shakespeares describes how Shakespeare has been recast and repackaged as a cultural and commercial entity in the "global context" of the burgeoning Bollywood film industry, arguing that "Bollywood is not only a style that mirrors the production and commercial techniques of Western filmmaking [. . .] but also a convergent and competing global phase of Indian cinema" (9).
The book is divided into three sections: "Bollywood's Debt to the Theater: Aesthetic and Cultural Multivalence," "Shakespeare's Local Face: Using Shakespeare to Rearticulate Indian Identities," and "Bollywood's Cultural Capital: Bollywood Sells Shakespeare." Vikram Singh Thakur's opening chapter, "Parsi Shakespeare: The Precursor to 'Bollywood Shakespeare,'" traces the origins of Parsi theater in India to the opening of the Grant Road Theatre in 1846. This theater "succeeded in [. . .] broadening the audience base, which was hitherto the educated elite of Bombay, by including the working classes" (25). Thakur explains that "the greatest influence on Parsi theater was Shakespeare, who offered theatermakers the "necessary material to cater to the needs of this audience in terms of action, spectacle, rhetoric, declamation," while in exchange the "thrill of Parsi theater in turn popularized Shakespeare among the masses" (27). As Thakur explains, the translation of...