LEC052003 , Macbeth and Maqbool

"Macbeth" and "Maqbool " 

Afsana Begum Chowdhury

LEC052003

DR Joseph Koyippally

June 17, 2021 

Macbeth full titled  The Tragedy if Macbeth. This is a famous shakesparean tragedy ,it is 

 thought to have been first performed in 1606 . It dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power for its own sake. Of all the plays that Shakespeare wrote during the region of James I , who was patron of Shakespeare's acting company Macbeth most clearly reflects the playwright's relationship with his sovereign.It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book  and is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth lives in twenty-first

century India in the form of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool. The centre/margin construct that forms the core of Maqbool provides us with an opportunity to ponder over our own historical moment, a moment fraught with interminable violence and hatred inspired by the politics of

difference. Bhardwaj provides us with the possibility, in both Maqbool (based on Macbeth) and Haider (based on Hamlet), that Shakespeare could be directly related to the saga of relentless religious violence that plagues some South Asian countries to date. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool reimagines Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a struggle for power within the hierarchy of organized crime in Mumbai. The film, however, may also be seen as a glimpse into a fiercely patriarchal Islamic set-up by an equally fierce Hindu gaze. This tale of Sha￾kespeare in a twenty-first century setting creates a sense of all-consuming foreboding

whereby the polarization of Hindus and Muslims becomes more than a power game: it becomes symptomatic of Indian society where wily politicians and shrewd policemen, render a state’s law machinery into a den of horrific violence. This article attempts to show that beneath the overt narrative difference between the play and the film lurks a similar political reading of both the texts. The film opens with the illusion of “other” as the “center”. But gradually with numerous instances of illegitimacy like the mock-family structure, the half caste protagonist, the illicit relationships, and above all, the entire space of the film peopled predominantly by the Muslims made illegitimate by consigning it to the mafia world, we realize that the “other”, initially projected as the “center” here is not merely castigated, but defeated, defeated not from without, but from within.

By situating the reader’s experience at the heart of the interpretative process, Kott (1967) in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, asserts that Shakespeare’s plays remain contemporary because of the apparently fluid, but actually static, historical

conditions of time and place, conditions that plague both a sixteenth-century viewer as well as a twenty-first century viewer:

“… for Shakespeare history stands still. Every chapter opens and closes at the same point.... Every great Shakespearean act is

merely a repetition” (Kott, 1967: 6). This is one of the reasons why Shakespeare is contemporary, the reason why his works are

extensively adapted on-screen.A literary text is made up of a series of signs that may lead to countless possible interpretations and may give rise to a plethora of adaptations. We can never assume that one director has said everything about one literary text and has exhausted all other possibilities of interpretations. In each on-screen adaptation we witness a wide range of critical interpretations or, to borrow Stam’s (2000: 62) words, “creative mistranslations”, at work .

Adaptations vary with the passage of time and with alteration of location. But somehow there continues a persistent “dialogue”

between the source text and the adapted text as well as between the “receivers” of the two, because the historical moments, to

borrow from Kott, keep repeating themselves, disregarding time, space and culture. This article attempts to show how Vishal Bhardwaj, despite spatial, temporal and cultural distances,“creatively mistranslates” Shakespeare’s Macbeth and yet remains faithful to its basic theme. Bhardwaj’s own fascination for cinematic projection of social disorder, especially his portrayal of the crime world in Maqbool (2004), Omkara (2006), Kaminey (2009) and Haider (2014), as well as his love of threatened characters unsurprisingly made him turn to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plot-driven plays of lust, murder and intrigue with a tight form and structure may well be

read as nothing less than intense psychological crime thrillers. Thus Bhardwaj took his first apprehensive, yet firm, step towards cinematic Shakespeare with Maqbool.

Work cited 

Mondal Subarna , " All the King’s men and all the King’s women:  reading Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool as a “creative mistranslation” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth" - published-2017