KARACHI: To celebrate playwright and poet William Shakespeare’s 460th birth anniversary, the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) held an event titled Celebrating Shakespeare across the Globe on Wednesday.

Eminent scholar Prof Abbas Husain — who talked about the bard first in detail and then in segments — set the tone for the programme by delivering an insightful short speech on the subject.

He said there were some who said that Shakespeare, along with the game of cricket, was a gift, the most intelligent export of England to other parts of the world. Then there is a scholarship which says actually he is our gift to the British education system because literary theorist Gayatri Spivak in her research has pointed out that during the East India Company’s time a gentleman was coming by ship to India having a stack of published Shakespeare plays which were not selling; so the plays were made part of Indian curriculum and the gora sahib started teaching Shakespeare to Indian children. Subsequently, they realised he’s worth their children, too.

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Prof Husain said his story vis-à-vis Shakespeare began with his mentor, the late Dr Rafat Karim, his first teacher at the University of Karachi in 1974. He was the teacher who in his class used to say Shakespeare was not just a poet, a dramatist, a sonneteer… he’s a lot of other things as well: he was a psychologist, the one who captured the nuances of human nature; he had a [profound] understanding of legal literacy, finance, the dynamics of love. Prof Husain then added, “One of the things that I say to my students is that if human love in relationships is to be captured in literature, watch... You want to see what a mother-son relationship is like [read] Hamlet; you want to see a husband and a wife know each other’s buttons, [read] Macbeth; when things go wrong with a husband and wife [read] Othello; if you want to see a father and a daughter, there’s King Lear; and if you want to see the relationship between a brother and a sister, there’s Measure for Measure. These were the kinds of nuances and realities that this genius was able to capture.”

After the speech, Prof Husain gave a brief introduction to the scenes from four of Shakespeare’s plays which were performed on stage — Hamlet (the opening scene and Act V, Scene II), the three witches’ scene from Macbeth, the bond scene from The Merchant of Venice and the opening scene from King Lear.

Each scene was followed by the professor’s commentary on it. In Hamlet, he said the line stand and unfold yourself was important because throughout the play the ‘unfolding’ happens. In Macbeth, the issue of choice is significant because Macbeth knows well what good and evil are. In The Merchant of Venice the interplay between fantasy and reality needs to be looked at. And in King Lear the maintenance of a kingdom is more important than its foundation, and it is in this light that one needs to see Lear’s decision to divide his kingdom.

Despite the fact that the professor didn’t talk about the translations of Shakespeare’s work in Urdu and Sindhi, the two languages in which the scenes were performed, the professor’s commentaries were absorbing and engaging. However, it seemed that the actors hadn’t paid enough attention to the text and the depth it carried. For example, in the first Hamlet scene, some members of the audience were chuckling, thinking it was a funny sequence. Also, one has noticed that either the acoustics of the Zia Mohyeddin theatre have changed or the actors don’t practise ‘voice projection’ enough. A few of them were barely audible.

A book exhibition was also lined up for the evening.

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2024