"Comedies of Errors: Shakespeare, Indian Cinema, and The Poetics of Mistaken Identity" a talk by Prof. Richard Allen at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 7th August 2012

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Details : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to The Seminar on ‘Comedies of Errors: Shakespeare, Indian Cinema, and The Poetics of Mistaken Identity’ by Prof. Richard Allen, Professor and Chair of Cinema Studies, New York University.

Abstract : What does it mean for a filmmaker working with the framework and idiom of popular Indian cinema to adapt Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors as a contemporary work, in a contemporary setting? What does this tell us not simply about Shakespeare, but about Indian Cinema? The voice-over narration that introduces Angoor(1982) provides a clue. While we are used to films about twins, the narrator informs us, it took Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors to come up with a plot involving two sets of twins and our film will tell this story. Gulzar’s introduction serves to place Shakespeare’s plot within the context of Hindi Cinema: we already do what Shakespeare did, the film-maker is saying to his audience, but Shakespeare takes it one step further. The point is well taken. Postwar Hindi cinema is replete with plots featuring identical twins and situations of mistaken identity the twin plot is designed to produce. The Comedy of Errors, as Shakespeare himself recognized when he adapted his play from the Plautine originals and called it The Comedy of Errors, is areductio ad absurdum of the recognition narrative of mistaken identity. The fact that there are two sets of twins self-consciously draws attention to role of the twin conceit in the plot. My argument in this presentation is that Shakespeare’s meta-recognition narrative so readily finds a home in Indian Cinema because Indian Cinema already operates within the idioms of Shakespeare’s play. The adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors that I shall examine must be understood as a self-conscious employment or extension of the vocabulary of Indian Cinema, as much as they can be conceived as adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. The affinity between The Comedy of Errors and popular Indian Cinema teaches us not simply about the “adaptability” of Shakespeare’s plays but about the nature and character of popular Indian cinema as a distinctive narrative and artistic form.

Speaker : Prof. Richard Allen is  Chair of Cinema Studies at New York University. His research focuses on film theory and aesthetics, and he is a leading authority on Hitchcock. He has co-edited six books and he is author of Projecting Illusion, Hitchcock's Romantic Irony, and, most recently, Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (with Professor Ira Bhaskar). He is currently working on a book entitled Indian Cinema: The Poetics of Recognition of which this presentation forms a part.

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