April 27, 2008

ON this, the 392nd anniversary of Shakespeare’s death — and the 444th anniversary of his baptism, students, scholars and admirers will honour the playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon whose productions in London held monarchs and commoners alike in thrall.

And to this day the Bard continues to inspire his many devotees. Several summers ago, students of the theatre programme at McGill University staged their production of Midsummer Night’s Dream in Mount Royal Park. The exuberant audience was required to run along with the actors as they chased one another around the wooded area. My poor father was my reluctant chaperone on that particular evening. Over the years he has had to put up with a lot of such adulation, so much so that when I was preparing to hop across the pond, he jokingly reminded me: ‘don’t forget to go read fateha on your pir’s grave’. At the risk of inciting a lynching mob, I admit that I did just that — to the horrified amusement of my host-cousin.

There is, after all, a theory that the Bard was in fact an Arab Sufi, and that his name is a corrupted form of Sheikh az-Zubair. Not in support of this grand speculation, the Globe Theatre celebrated the 400th anniversary of the first performance of Othello in 1994 by organising a season titled Shakespeare and Islam. Speaking on the occasion Patrick Spottiswoode, the director of the education department at the Globe, said:

‘We know that Shakespeare hadn’t read the Quran. We don’t know what his knowledge of Islam would have been. But there was knowledge of an Ottoman threat and of treaties England had with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire against its European enemies.

‘I think we addressed some of the most under-researched areas of the 16th and 17th centuries. It wasn’t really until the works of Nabil Matar and Jerry Brotton that we have really begun to explore the relationship between Islam and Shakespeare’s world and the political and cultural negotiations between Elizabethan England and the lands of Islam.

‘As Nabil Matar has said, most scholarship has made us look westward for an understanding of Shakespeare, when much of his inspiration came from the East.’

(Q-News magazine, London, Jan 2005)

It is interesting to note that Shakespeare has referred to Islam at least 141 times in 21 different plays: this includes references to ‘Mahomet’, Morocco, Constantinople, Turks, Ottomans, Saracens, Sultans, and Moors.

The appeal of the Bard of Avon is timeless and knows no lingual or cultural boundaries. His work has inspired Hollywood and Bollywood alike. His themes (jealousy, greed, filial ingratitude, xenophobia, star-crossed lovers, etc.) are universal and are as familiar to readers in modern-day Pakistan as they were to the Elizabethans. In fact, as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has argued in a recent issue of Time magazine, his plays are today more relevant to non-western audiences:

‘Shakespeare captivates audiences in the West, and resonates profoundly in post-communist nations. But he is most alive for people of colour. South Asians and Arabs and their diasporic peoples are Elizabethans still. In their world, children are parental possessions, marriages arranged, personal autonomy frowned upon.

‘Strong women like Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing or Katherine the shrew must be tamed. Countless Juliets are bullied, beaten, even killed if they refuse to be dispatched to a chosen bridegroom. They hear their own fathers in Capulet’s warning to his rebellious daughter: