Omkara: Moor of Meerut: Reconfiguring the Sacred and Profane of Othello Natasha Cooper (University of Durham, UK)
Introduction THIS PAPER PROCEEDS from the standpoint that the functioning of Shakespearean tragedy can be read as being built of the religious traditions of the time in which it is produced in performance. Notably, there was a marked secularisation in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, of which Shakespeare is regarded as largely representative. There is then, most naturally, an ease of adaptation that marks the Shakespearean tradition, which sees such drama re-born in literary and artistic avenues of various generations – a view that has been long established by critics such as Jonathan Dollimore, whose popular text on tragic convention Radical Tragedy, both observes and predicts for the future that: ‘every age interprets [and indeed will continue to interpret] Shakespeare for itself ’. In re-interpretation of its plot and narrative conventions, Shakespearean drama moves from the stage into other narrative forms, and through this shift it has emigrated from the land of its birth, and in travelling the world has become a welcome refugee in world literature, forming a part of a pan-cultural literary corpus. Thus exists the Russian opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District (1934), the American Gil Junger’s cinematic 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), and the English Jeremy Trafford’s novel Ophelia (2001). Similarly, Tim Supple’s 2006 dramatic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream –
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