Defrauding Daughters Turning Deviant Wives? Reading Female Agency in The Merchant of Venice

Brabantio’s words “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:| She has deceived her father, and may thee” ( Othello , 1.3.292–293) warn Othello about the changing nature of female lo yalty and women’s potential for deviancy. Closely examining d aughters caught in the conflict between anxious fathers and husbands-to- be, this article departs from such paranoid male fa ntasy and instead sets out to explore female deviancy in its legal and dramatic implications with reference to Shakespeare ’s The Merchant of Venice . I will argue that Portia’s and Jessica’s struggle to evade male subsidiarity results in their conscio us positioning themselves on the verge of illegality. Besides occa sioning productive exploration of marriage, law and justice within what Morss (2007:183) terms “the dynamics of human desir e and of social institutions,” I argue that female agency, s een as temporary deviancy and/or self-exclusion, reconfigures the ma le domain by affording the inclusion of previous outsiders (Anto nio, Bassanio and Lorenzo) .

Shakespeare and the Re/Vision of Indian Heritage in the Postcolonial British Context

As part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged a production of Much Ado About Nothing set in India. Shakespeare’s Messina in sixteenth century Italy was transposed to twenty-first century Delhi and with a company of actors who were all of Indian heritage. The casting of individual British Asian actors in mainstream UK productions of Shakespeare is no longer unusual. What was unprecedented here, however, was that not only was the entire cast ‘Asian’ but the director was not, as is standard practice, a leading member of the white British theatrical establishment. Instead the director, Iqbal Khan, is the son of a Pakistani father who migrated to England in the 1960s. I use the term ‘Indian heritage’ with great caution conscious that what began under the British Raj in nineteenth century India led through subsequent economic imperatives and exigencies, and political schism to a history of migratory patterns which means that today’s British Asian population is a complex demographic construct representing numerous different languages and cultural and religious affiliations. The routes which brought those actors to play imagined Indian Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon in July 2012 were many and various. I explore in this chapter the way in which that complexity of heritage has been brought to bear on the revisioning of Shakespeare by British Asian theatre makers operating outside the theatrical mainstream. In general because of the social, economic and institutional challenges facing British Asian theatre artists, the number of independent professional companies is comparatively small and for the most part, their work has focused on creating drama which interrogates thorny questions of identity formation and contemporary cultural practices within the ‘new’ British Asian communities. Nevertheless for artists born and/or educated in the UK the Western classical canon, including of course Shakespeare, is as much part of their heritage as the classical Indian narratives and performance traditions which so powerfully evoke collective memories of the lost ‘home’ of their elders. By far the most consistent engagement with Shakespeare has been seen in the work of Tara Arts which was the first British Asian theatre company set up in 1977. The artistic director Jatinder Verma brings his own ‘transformed and translated’ heritage as an East African-born, Punjabi-speaking, English-educated, Indian migrant to the UK to plays as diverse as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida , The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice. I discuss examples of Tara productions in the light of the way Shakespeare’s plays have been used to forge both creative synergies between parallel cultures and provide a means of addressing the ontological ruptures and dislocations associated with the colonial past.