Constructing the subject rewriting Shakespeare: a study of select modern Shakespeare receptions

Abstract

This analysis puts in perspective the multifarious ideological mechanisms whereby the subject is constructed during the reception processes of the master canon of Shakespeare. The attempt here is to cull out the motive behind the worldwide phenomenon of the Shakespeare industry . The present scrutiny locates the destabilizing attempts on the Shakespeare canon and the ways in which most of them get co-opted in disguise into the dominant ideologies. The work deals with four Shakespeare adaptations: the British dramatist Tom Stoppard s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the Malayalam film director Jayaraj s film Kaliyattam, the post-war British dramatist Edward Bond s Lear and the British Women s Theatre Group s Lear s Daughters. The title of the dissertation focuses on an Indian woman s position as a reader vis-à -vis the texts under discussion. Being in a marginalized position, and decentred from the patriarchal as well as colonial discourses of literary production and reception, she is in a vantage point to uncover the hidden pockets of the consolidation, subversion and the final containment of power. The possibilities of a woman-centred reading are explored here. The introductory chapter, Righting the Canon , makes a foray into the strategies through which literary representation functions to ratify the existing social order. The new writers intention of opening the established canon is brought under enquiry. The concepts of reception, subjectivity, discourse, canonization and decanonization are dealt with in detail. The second chapter tries to disclose the implicit agenda behind the production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The dissertation as a whole is an attempt to fix the chronotopicity of the adaptations of Shakespeare. Applying post-theory, one finds that Stoppard s play involves a shift in time alone. The setting is the same as that of Hamlet. Hence the title Hamlet Then, Hamlet Now .