Tuesday,01,2019
Prof. Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita at the Department of English, Jadavpur University .
Interviewed by Arunava Banerjee.
I passed the Higher Secondary examination in 1969 and was enrolled in the first year at Presidency College in the same year. I graduated with the BA (Honours) degree in English in 1972. I did not study for my MA in India. I left for Oxford in 1973. Between 1973 and 1975 I studied for a second BA in English at Oxford. I returned to teach at Presidency College at the end of 1975 and went back to Oxford to do a PhD between 1978 and 1981, after which I returned to my teaching post at Presidency College. Ultimately I joined Jadavpur University as a Reader in English. I served later as a Professor and subsequently as Head of the Department 1985 onwards. So my experience as student and teacher of English has largely been at Presidency College and at Jadavpur University.
However, if we are looking at the history of my acquaintance with Shakespeare and Shakespeare scholarship, I began to read Shakespeare much earlier when I was a child, and I think that I should mention that I was taught Shakespeare in school when I was a student at South Point High School, in south Calcutta. Julius Caesar was prescribed in our syllabus at the higher secondary level for first language English and I think that it was extremely well taught by Indranath Guha, who was our teacher, and he taught not only very interestingly and very seriously in class but also combined this teaching with dramatic performances and an involvement of all the students in acting and presenting Shakespeare on stage. I think, that really was my first introduction to Shakespeare performance, Shakespeare scholarship and a sense of what Shakespeare might mean in an Indian context. I was also very privileged to have had as my teacher in school Kamal Kumar Majumdar who was also particularly interested in drama and in one of the Shakespeare performances, I can’t quite remember which one, he was also very closely associated, it may indeed have been a performance of Julius Caesar, he was very closely associated with the staging and the acting. I think that from these twoteachers, Kamal Kumar Majumdar and Indranath Guha, I learnt something about Shakespeare even before I had entered Presidency College.
I should mention of course that since I had started school abroad, I did actually study Shakespeare even in earlier classes, not just in the Higher Secondary classes but in the lower classes, that I suppose was a little unusual but in fact as a result I had read all of Shakespeare’s plays before I had arrived at University, and I had read them without worrying too much about scholarly apparatus or criticism, I had just read them for pleasure, and I remember that in quite some junior classes that when I was a student abroad, we had read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, As You Like It simply as reading texts, this was at an English school in Austria.
At University, I was a student at Presidency College, I was very unlucky to miss being taught by the two greatest teachers of that generation, Prof Tarak Nath Sen and Prof Amal Bhattacharjee. Prof Tarak Nath Sen had actually taught my father, and I had heard a great deal about him from my father and I remember being very sad at having had to attend a memorial service for him when I was at the end of my first year in college. I don’t quite remember the year, but he died shortly after my first year in college. Somewhere around then. But I had heard a great deal about Prof T.N. Sen’s style of teaching, I had heard many stories or anecdotes about what he had said in class, and I saw the great man himself arriving in college, to teach the third years. Sukanta, my husband, was in the third year, when I was in the first, and I remember that Prof. Sen would come quite late to the college in the evening, and would stay past 7:30 in the college library taking very, very long classes on Shakespeare with the third year students. As first years we were deprived of that contact with a great teacher and a wonderful scholar. Even being in some kind of proximity to those classes was of some importance to us. Another teacher whom we saw but were not taught by was Prof. Amal Bhattacharjee. Prof. Bhattacharjee was ill when I arrived at Presidency College, and he died again sometime during my first year or perhaps just as I was entering my second year, I don’t exactly remember the date. Again, he was a teacher about whom we heard a great deal. I actually did get to meet him because he met all the students when we entered the college, he was a full-time teacher, whereas Prof T.N. Sen had actually retired. Prof. Amal Bhattacharjee was a Professor in the University at that time, we were unlucky not to have been taught by him. His illness progressively got worse. His daughter was then a second year student and I knew her quite well, I have continued a friendship with her, but it was quite tragic that he passed away while we were still quite junior students. However, we did have a fair amount of Shakespeare in the syllabus. We had As You Like It and Macbeth and we read other Shakespeare plays for the Pass course, i.e. the General Englishsyllabus. I forget which play it was, it may have been The Merchant of Venice, I don’t fully remember, we were of course encouraged to read a great deal of Shakespeare around and beyond these texts which were actually prescribed in the course.
Despite the fact that I was not taught by Prof T.N. Sen or Prof Amal Bhattacharjee I was taught by two very great Shakespeare scholars, Prof. Sailendra Kumar Sen and Prof. Arun Kumar Dasgupta. Prof. Arun Kumar Dasgupta was my undergraduate tutor, he was an extraordinary teacher who was constantly pushing us to read and learn and think, much beyond the bounds of any kinds of academic syllabus. As a result, my memory of being at Presidency College in those years is certainly not a memory of learning about set texts in a prescribed undergraduate curriculum, but being exposed to the full wealth of Renaissance scholarship. I think that in that respect I was extremely fortunate, because on the one hand Prof. Sailendra Kumar Sen made us aware of Shakespeare and the new bibliography, that is to say the range of textual scholarship and new kinds of scholarly attention to the actual texts of Shakespeare’s plays. He was himself a well-known textual scholar, who understood the minutiae of the actual transmission of the Shakespearean text, and he made us aware as we would never have been in any other context of the materialities of the text, the fact that the text is not some kind of unchanging immaterial eternal substance but closely tied to accidents of transmission, of transcription, of publishing, of printing history, and of preservation which might in fact be accidental, even random.
I think that on the one hand from Prof. S.K. Sen, we learnt a great deal about this aspect of textual scholarship that you might think of as the material history of the text itself, and on the other hand, from Prof. Arun Kumar Dasgupta, we learnt to place Shakespeare in a much wider arena of scholarship. I cannot imagine any other place in the world, and I am not excepting at all my later University, Oxford, where I went on to do a second BA and subsequently a DPhil, I don’t think that there would have been any other place in the world where we as young undergraduate students would have learnt about Erwin Panofsky or Ernst Gombrich or Fritz Saxl and Raymond Klibansky or Edgar Wind. Arun Kumar Dasgupta without making any allowances for our rawness and our lack of prior acquaintance with this field lectured to us on these areas and these great scholars and these subjects, in the most inspiring and illuminating way that we can remember. He remains, I think, the best teacher by whom I have been taught. It is true that at that time it was quite difficult for us to understand what he was saying, very often we had to do a lot of catching up, look up the books in the library, look up the pictures, the sculptures that he was referring to, try to understand, try to make connection between let us say a Shakespeare text and something else, the world of renaissance art, or philosophy that he was referring to, but it was a useful exercise and we learnt a great deal from it.
I remember that it was Prof. Dasgupta who insisted that we should all be consulting a compendium edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Randall called The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, and I remember that this became almost our Bible. It was Prof Dasgupta who made us readPico della Mirandola’s Oratio, the oration, as it is sometimes called, on the dignity of man. He made us do all of this without making any concessions for the fact that we were still undergraduates and we didn’t have a deep knowledge of the area. He just assumed that we were ready to imbibe as much as he could offer of his own very profound knowledge of this area. I think, what he told us about Cassirer or Kristeller or Panofsky influenced us in a way that nothing else has perhaps done subsequently.
As to performance, I would say that actually we didn’t very much bother with the performative aspects of Shakespeare. Two of our other teachers, Prof. Ashok Kumar Mukherjee and Prof. Kajal Sengupta did attempt to convey some of that interest and excitement and energy in their classes. They were in many respects very approachable, friendly, accessible teachers and they did do a great deal to make all the texts they taught and Shakespeare too accessible to us in a more interactive way, perhaps by referring to performance. But apart from Tarak-babu’s great essay on Shakespeare’s short lines which of course does refer to performative features of Shakespeare’s plays, which in fact is about Shakespeare in performance, apart from that I don’t think that our other teachers were very much concerned about the performative aspects of Shakespeare and certainly scenes were not enacted in the classroom. But about the pronunciation and accent, yes the teachers were indeed very careful about pronunciation and accent. I think that they were anxious to convey to us, especially Prof. S.K. Sen, but also to some extent Prof. Dasgupta, they were always anxious to point out to us how the word was actually pronounced, and there could be a play on words because modern pronunciation has changed but earlier Elizabethan pronunciation being different… I remember actually Mr. Indranath Guha, who taught us in school, who taught us Julius Caesar, emphasized that in the line in Julius Caesar ‘Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,’ Rome and room would have been pronounced almost exactly similarly, and that there was a play on these words too. So I remember that when we were learning about emendation, and restoration of the Shakespearean text, there was a great deal of speculation based upon pronunciation and accent, and there too Prof. S.K. Sen taught us about pronunciation and accent, just in order to show why we should opt for one word in the case of a dispute about what the word might be in the Shakespearean text. I remember that it was Prof. Sen who pointed out to us the possibility of what was called the minim error
in Hamlet, ‘the mobled queen’, the word ‘mobled’, which is I think the Folio reading and there is another reading which is I think ‘imobled’, which was pointed out to us by one of our teachers, I think it was Prof. S.K. Sen, the letters for ‘inn’ or ‘in’ or ‘n’ were very similar and just a single minim error, that is to say the minimal stroke made by the pen could produce one word or the other, so it was not at all clear whether it should be ‘mobled’ or ‘innobled queen’. I remember we learnt all of this in school or in college, and that is why I’ve remembered it, and I am sure that if I learnt it later, I would never have remembered these examples which still come to my mind. I remember, for example, Prof. Sen holding forth on Falstaff, the scene of the death of Falstaff: ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen and a babbled of green fields’ that whether it should be ‘a table of green fields’ or ‘a babbled of green fields’. There again it was Prof. Sen who pointed out to us the intricacies of speculation on what the word should actually be, and as I had said that if we had not learnt in this way at that time, I am sure I would never have learnt at all.
As to expletives and sexual references, no I don’t think that they were omitted. I think our teachers did not expatiate or develop on these sexual references, but it was not that they did not mention them, again I remember Prof Sen teaching us As You Like It, Charles the wrestler had been defeated by Orlando, or I think it was the other way around, but the line is ‘he lay with his mother earth’ and I remember Prof Sen saying in class that there is a quibble or a play on words in this line, one of the meanings is lewd and the other you can easily understand, obviously one is a sexual reference and the other is not, and it was not that he omitted to mention it, he did mention it, but he didn’t develop it, and indeed, the fact that he mentioned it in that wry non-committal way meant that we noted it which we would not have done if he had simply explained it as one of the meanings.
I think the socio-historical context of the plays were discussed, particularly by these teachers. While New Historicism was not yet invented, the plays were placed in their context, and certainly by Prof. Dasgupta who as I said talked very widely and wide-rangingly about the Renaissance context and especially the context of the History of Ideas. I think we need to remember that at the time I studied, this was the early seventies; there was still a kind of glamour of the geisteswissenschaft, that is to say the history of ideas, a kind of study, and I think that we really learnt about the history of ideas more than about political events and material cultures in that sense. But I think that everything has a period, we learnt a great deal about that kind of history of ideas context, which we would not have done in other ways.
We studied Marlowe as well, and we learnt about other dramatists contemporary to Shakespeare. We had a course which was called History of Literature, which actually was never taught as the standard history of literature course. It was taught in a much more thorough and profound way. We never really understood it as a course for which we would have to write just two exam essays. Nobody had mentioned the exams to us. We thought that this was of earth-shaking importance that we should learn all about Webster and Marlowe and Kyd, and we did learn. We were taught these areas of history of literature again by Prof. Sen and Prof. Dasgupta. Certainly they didn’t figure in the syllabus as much. I think the only contemporary of Shakespeare who was included in the syllabus was Marlowe, we had Marlowe’s Edward II. But we were encouraged to read a great deal more, compelled to read the Duchess of Malfi and many other plays, I don’t think we could have got away without knowing something about all this literary history.
In tutorials we were encouraged to speak up and express our views. We were somewhat in awe of our teachers, I think that has to be acknowledged. It was an older pattern, we were not encouraged to hold forth in class on our own views, but certainly the tutorial system did allow us to speak up, and we were allowed to write long well-considered essays, in which we were able to write as we pleased.
Generally we were following the Arden edition, and we were also, and I think that this too is unusual, we were encouraged to use the variorum editions of Shakespeare. Our teachers would bring the variorum to the class, and they would ask us to consult the variorum in case of any doubts and not simply to rely on just simply the Arden edition but to look at other editions.
Critical material, well, we were strongly discouraged from reading any standard critical help that was available in the popular market, we were urged to read major critical works or works of scholarship by major scholars, we were urged to learn about the whole history of Shakespeare scholarship, to read for example Morris Morgan’s essay on Falstaff and Johnson’s preface to Shakespeare, so we certainly were not encouraged to read secondhand standard accounts.
The examination and question pattern was as set by Calcutta University. I can’t say anything very good about it, it was not particularly exciting. The questions set for internal examination by the teachers were much more interesting. The questions set by Calcutta University in those days were largely character studies or studies of genre, ‘examine whether Macbeth is a tragedy or not’, or ‘write an essay on the character of Macbeth’. This was the standard sort of essay.
The teacher did not normally refer to stage and film productions of Shakespeare, but we did happen to go to see these productions when they did come to town. If there was an RSC production which was touring India, we were certainly encouraged to go and see them, or even to go to see stage adaptations by the great masters of Bengali theatre at that time. Shambhu Mitra or the Nandikar group, the Bohurupee group, adaptations of Shakespeare plays by such great artists. We were urged to learn something about Utpal Dutt, who had taught in South Point, but unfortunately before I came there.
Can you recall any significant performances?
I don’t recall any performances from that period, largely because it was a very disturbed period in Calcutta. It was the height of the Naxalite agitation in Calcutta. The first Shakespeare performances that I actually recall belong to the very early years of my teaching life at Presidency College. For example, I recall Richard Shechner’s production of Mother Courage, the Brecht production by Richard Shechner, this very great production of Mother Courage and her Children, this RSC production called The Hollow Crown which was about Shakespearean tragedies. These belonged to a slightly later period when I had already begun to teach at Presidency College.
There was no performance of Shakespeare at Presidency College at that time, but actually that was really because of the Naxalite agitation at that time. I studied at Presidency College between 1969 and 1972 and it was the height of the Naxalite violence, it was impossible to stage Shakespeare at the institution.
Classmates, I don’t think that any classmate of mine became a performer, but as senior students I should imagine Shirshendu Chakraborty, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and to some extent I suppose Kalyan Ray, in one way or another have been working on or thinking about the text of Shakespeare all their lives. Sukanta Chaudhuri would have been the top student of that period, a couple of years senior to me, who became a very, very notable Shakespeare scholar.
Have you noticed any changes in Shakespeare pedagogy?
Yes, I think that rightfully so there is more interest in drama and performance. I think that is a good thing, that this has been good practice for us as teachers to pay more attention to performance and history, I think political history, because New Historicism has come to affect us more and we think and teach more about political history in a way that we didn’t do earlier.
Do you think that Shakespeare is an overrated author?
I do not think that Shakespeare is an overrated author; I think that Shakespeare is a very, very great and unusual genius and we are fortunate to have his works.
Deglamourizing and decanonizing Shakespeare:
I don’t really think that Shakespeare has either been decanonized or deglamourized, I find him extremely powerful, an almost iconic presence in world culture, while adaptation is continuous, I certainly wouldn’t say that he has been decanonized.
I think that the idea of reading Shakespeare in simplified language or in paraphrase is absurd and counterproductive, this loses almost everything that we love or know of Shakespeare and I think that this is a real mistake. I think however that for us as Indian students we should pay particular attention to the ways in which Shakespeare has been adapted, taught, understood, rewritten in India, particularly in Bengal. I think, it is a very important subject, and I think that it is something we can profitably turn our attention to and learn from.