Worlds Elsewhere (48 page)

The directors, Anirudh Nair and Neel Chaudhuri, had defined the play linguistically. Shakespeare's English was used in the Sicilian court scenes, with the servant characters speaking in accents a shade heavier. When the action moved to the countryside of Bohemia – the on-stage narrator Time hurrying us forward sixteen years, the cast exchanging their fine tunics for patchwork shirts and jackets – the language shifted to Hindustani. We moved, too, to another space on the opposite side of the garden. As the shepherds prepared for their sheep-shearing celebrations with wild dances, the audience began to yell and cheer.

I wasn't able to judge the translation, but it seemed to me an
expressive solution to the shifting geographies of the play – and, perhaps, only possible in a multilingual, multivocal country like India. Hindustani itself is an Indian sort of compromise: chunks of Hindi alongside gobbets of Urdu, mixed with Persian Farsi, Sanskrit and Arabic. The language has a colonial history – promoted by Orientalist educators in the nineteenth century as a way of keeping the Raj intact – but the theatre-makers told me later they hadn't intended to invoke it. For them Shakespeare was a fully Indian writer, not British property. They wanted to make a production that moved beyond the colonial past; which, as far as possible, broke free from it. As
The Winter's Tale
demonstrated, there were issues at stake larger even than postcolonial politics – love, jealousy, birth, death.

It has usually been assumed that
The Tempest
was the last drama Shakespeare wrote on his own, with three co-written scripts, probably done with his younger colleague John Fletcher, coming later:
Henry VIII
or
All is True,
the lost play
Cardenio,
the bittersweet and troubling romance
The Two Noble Kinsmen.
In truth, as with so many things about Shakespeare, there is no way of knowing in which order the late plays came. It is autobiographical over-reading that makes us yearn to associate the magician Prospero who breaks his staff and drowns his book with Shakespeare bidding farewell to his art.

Myself, I had always preferred the theory that
The Winter's Tale
was Shakespeare's goodbye note, if such a thing existed. There was something about its gleeful hop-skipping across improbabilities: the shepherds who stumble across a baby in its basket on a hillside (‘Thou metst with things dying, I with things new-born'); the budding Bohemian romance between the girl Perdita, brought up in innocence of her royal birth, and a disguised prince, the son of her father's mortal enemy. Then there was the crowning impossibility, the most theatrical of all: that a statue of a long-dead wife might yet turn out to be really her, and alive.

By now we had moved yet again, to English and the side of the lake. On the opposite bank, a female figure clad in white stood motionless, silhouetted against the dark trees – Hermione. A drum began steadily to beat. Leontes stepped towards her, and faltered; then reached out a hand to touch. ‘O, she's warm!' he exclaimed. It was left to Paulina, Hermione's fiercest and most faithful friend, to deliver Shakespeare's riddling explanation, and with it all the paradoxes of theatre:

The American critic Anne Barton, who lived for many years in Britain, put it well. ‘The last plays,' she wrote, ‘appeal so poignantly to our sense of how we should like the world to be, and know that it is not.' It took supreme art to contrive happiness from such wreckage; a kind of artlessness, too.

Walking slowly back to the metro afterwards, I realised there had been one other noise, alongside the frogs and grasshoppers and peacocks – the noise of frantic drumming. It was the wedding I had passed earlier. As I climbed the stairs to the platform, I looked down and across: the party was in full swing. The hotel grounds were ablaze with crimson and pink spotlights, tables dotting the grounds. On the grass, people were whirling in dance, arms high above their heads. I looked for a long time, but couldn't see the couple.

It was July 2012. I had come to the private view of a new Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum in London. Gallerists, art-world types, theatre folk, hacks, hangers-on: we were gathering in the Great Court, balancing canapés and glasses of warm white wine. Serving staff slid neatly through the crowd. Refracted and diffused by the swelling glass roof, the hubbub was building into a soft, contented roar.

Drifting with some warm white wine of my own, I eavesdropped. A group of actors was midway through a satisfying disquisition on the awfulness of a colleague's show. Someone was talking clamorously about securing Olympics tickets against the odds. A frisson went around when a team of security men materialised near the entrance. The frisson flattened, then evaporated: it was merely the retinue of the culture minister, widely despised.

Unable to spy anyone I knew, I wandered off and did what one is never meant to do at private views: view the exhibition. For a Shakespeare obsessive, there was much to savour. On one wall was the portrait of the Moroccan ambassador to the court of Elizabeth I, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun. Depicting the ambassador scowling splendidly, scimitar at his side, white turban neatly knotted, this was thought to be the first portrait by an English artist of a Muslim. From what I had learned in India about Shakespeare's eagerness to pluck inspiration from anywhere and everywhere, Messaoud played a more intriguing role here, too: he was (just possibly) the original for Shakespeare's Othello.

I was unexpectedly entranced by the skull of a brown bear, perhaps female: a sad, broken wedge of bone, the colour of old toffee. Excavated
from the site of the original London Globe, it had been donated to Dulwich College, the boys' school in south London founded by a great rival of Shakespeare's, the actor-manager Edward Alleyn. The bear had been baited, her teeth filed down to make her less lethal to the mastiffs who tormented her, so prolonging her death. I wondered if playwright or actor had heard her bellow in pain. Alleyn, who owned bear pits and brothels as well as theatres, might well have supervised her demise.

A few cabinets away was a ‘hornbook', a wooden pallet about the size of a small restaurant menu, enclosing a slip of paper on which were printed the letters of the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer, with a translucent piece of horn in place of a glass panel.
Aeiou, ba be bi bo bu, ca ce ci co cu …
The young Shakespeare would have used one exactly like this. There was something uncommonly affecting about the thought of the boy's lips shaping the sounds.

In a corner was a fragment of ‘Herne's Oak', the tree in Windsor Great Park that witnesses Falstaff's humiliation at the hands of Mistresses Ford and Page in
The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The scene is a fiction, of course, but the oak was real enough: it had blown down in 1863, a sad but accurate augur of the tercentenary fiasco. Here it was, neatly catalogued and archived, testifying to little more than the Victorian fetish for making relics – any relic at all, no matter how circumstantial – from the National Poet.

Lost in thought, I took a little while to notice the buzz of activity near the gallery exit. In the middle of the shadowed space, illuminated by a shallow pool of warm light, a crowd had collected around a display cabinet. Faces pressed close against the glass, they stood there in mute contemplation. Behind them, others were politely waiting in line. I looked around: the rest of the gallery was almost empty. Whatever was in that cabinet, it was the star of the show.

I sidled closer. It was a book. Compared to the treasures I'd been looking at a few moments before, it wasn't much: modern, small, dumpy, its scuffed pages propped open on an acrylic stand. On the spine were printed the words ‘The Complete Works of Shakespeare' in faded blue type. The dustjacket was lined with what seemed to be Hindu prayer cards: images of gods and goddesses in pink and garish yellow.

As I was watching, two women solemnly bowed their heads. They looked as though they were venerating a holy object.

In a way, they were. Hindu camouflage notwithstanding, the book was the so-called Robben Island Bible: a copy of the complete works owned by Sonny Venkatrathnam, a former South African political activist who spent six years on the island penal colony during the late 1970s. The book was a cheap, mass-market, single-volume edition of the plays and poems first published in the 1950s, named the ‘Alexander' text after its editor, Peter Alexander. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of identical copies in existence; indeed, the one that accompanied me on my travels through Germany, America and India was a reprint of exactly the same edition.

For once, the fuss attending the book wasn't about whether Shakespeare had written the words it contained: it was about what happened to the copy in Venkatrathnam's care. A member of the African People's Democratic Union of South Africa (Apdusa), he had been imprisoned in Robben Island's ‘leadership section', and, approaching his release in 1978, had passed the copy around his cellmates and asked them to sign their names. Many had become major figures in the ANC-led government after 1994. Former secretary general Walter Sisulu had signed, as had ANC guiding lights Ahmed Kathrada and Govan Mbeki, father of Thabo – all heroes of the struggle. In total, thirty-three prisoners had inscribed their signatures, with one anonymous mark in addition.

But the book's real claim to fame was that it contained the biggest name in South African history: Nelson Mandela. Mandela, imprisoned a few cells away from Venkatrathnam, had highlighted six lines of
Julius Caesar,
and inscribed his signature and the date in crisp blue ink: 16 December 1977. The words he chose are spoken by Caesar in act two of the play, just before the Roman leader takes the cataclysmic decision to go to the Senate, ignoring warnings that his life is in danger:

Primed to observe the Mandela connection, the global media had thrilled to the book's arrival. The
Guardian
led its story with the news that it had lent ‘solace and inspiration' to the political leaders on
Robben Island. The
Telegraph
described it being ‘passed around from cell to cell and read secretively'.
The Times of India
helpfully explained that the cards on the cover were Diwali greeting cards and had been placed there by Venkatrathnam as a way of hiding the book's identity. It was this that had given the book its soubriquet: Venkatrathnam told a guard it was his ‘bible' as a way of keeping it illegally in his cell.

Dora Thornton, the British Museum curator, took the biblical analogy further: ‘The book was used in the same way as the Bible has been used down the ages: as a constant reference for debating the moral issues of the day.' Other reports said the copy had been ‘smuggled' on to Robben Island and read in secret. In what might generously be described as a flourish of sub-editorial creativity, the BBC had promoted the book to ‘Nelson Mandela's Shakespeare edition'.

As I stood in line, waiting to see this precious tome, my curiosity was piqued and a little puzzled. In an exhibition devoted to antiquities from the worlds inhabited and imagined by Shakespeare (Elizabethan tapestries, Jacobean flag designs, early-modern playscripts, seventeenth-century copies of Roman busts), the Robben Island Bible struck – I thought – a discordant note. It was neither from a world that Shakespeare knew, nor part of any world he had put on stage.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that his European contemporaries made only fitful attempts to penetrate further than the coast of southern Africa, Shakespeare exhibited little curiosity about life at these latitudes, for all his imaginative globetrotting elsewhere. The word ‘Africa' or ‘Afric' appears just a smattering of times in the plays, always used with what appears to be calculated vagueness. When Africa does take more substantial form – such as in the Tunisian wedding that the shipboard party in
The Tempest
have attended, or that possible Moroccan inspiration for
Othello
– it seems that North Africa is what the playwright has in mind. Assuming that the story about the performance of
Hamlet
in Sierra Leone was wishful thinking, Shakespeare's work itself wouldn't arrive on the African continent until the turn of the nineteenth century. There was no denying that the story behind the Robben Island Bible was compelling, but for a sliver of South African history to be here at the British Museum struck me as decidedly odd.

It wasn't just this exhibition: in the years since it had first gone on display in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2006, the Bible had acquired the sanctified glow of a genuine relic. It had inspired numerous articles
and at least two books. Radio and television documentaries had featured it. A play by the American writer Matthew Hahn was based on interviews with some of its signatories. The South African-born actor Antony Sher had rhapsodised about its significance to the history of his country, as had Sher's partner, Gregory Doran, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. After it had finished its stint in London the book was booked to visit the Folger in Washington DC, next to all those First Folios.

As I came out of the gallery, I saw a stooped figure pinned in the glare of a television light. Small in his dark suit, he looked older than the photograph in the display case, but still recognisable – Sonny Venkatrathnam. He was now in his late seventies and had travelled from South Africa for the opening of the exhibition. He was leaning heavily on the arm of his granddaughter and looked a little uncertain on his feet.