The popularity of William Shakespeare’s plays means that they will be restaged or adapted for television and cinema in different parts of the world and in many different languages. In India, the use of Shakespeare in present day is complicated by India’s colonial past and the ways Shakespeare was used to colonize its citizens. It might be surprising then to see that Indian productions of Shakespeare texts have continued long past colonial rule, resulting in productions that blend British and Indian cultural traditions. This process sounds very much like a process called inflection, whereby new ideas, dramatic conventions, and technical advances are combined with older forms. Because of their longevity and obvious conventional elements, Shakespeare’s plays can be seen as a genre or form that India, and other cultures as well, bend and twist for their use. This presentation will examine the instances of inflection in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (2003) paying particular attention to the setting, characters, subject matter and texture that are key to identifying whether a text is an inflection. The use of inflection allows Bhardwaj to infuse the original Shakespeare text of Macbeth with elements specific to Indian culture and in doing so also offers new ways of seeing the original text.
About the presenterStephanie Clayton
Stephanie Clayton is a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary MA in Popular Culture at Brock University. She completed her BA in film studies and communication studies at Brock in 1998. Her major research project deals with the embodied spectator and the performing body in Black Swan and The Red Shoes.