SHAKESPEAREWALIS: VERSES ON THE BARD (forthcoming)

This is a collection for our times – from four women poets who have taken on Shakespeare, their love, during the pandemic. The fact that they were in conversation with each other about a literary figure and his works, and worked towards this anthology is evidence that we humans (at least the women) can work together during the toughest of times, times that push us and lock us into our own individual resources. We have the capacity to overcome anything.

They show too that we the former colonized can also overcome our own colonization, read the texts the colonizers were excessively proud of, read our own resistances and appropriations, think through it all, and come up with an anthology of poems that demonstrate that we can critique that we love, accept the love even as we can read the contexts that gave us that love, celebrate the love with joy and irony and humour and clearsighted acceptance.

The four Shakespeare Walis, Shweta Garg, Shashikala Assella, Sureshika Piyasena, and Ipsita Sengupta, from two different countries (India and Sri Lanka), united by their education at the same university (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), and their love for Shakespeare (which they must have developed earlier!), have their individual voices even if they write on the same topics. They write on women characters (with interesting twists – one making the boy actor ‘come out’ as Juliet), write on the ‘twisted’ men (of course), write (very appealing) appropriations, and in a final section called “Shakespearewalis to Shakespeare,” in a series of very funny poems, they comment on his plays, his characters, his writing, and him!

But then all the poems in this anthology work as commentary on Shakespeare’s works by four feisty subcontinental women who can see the humour in their readings and display it in verse and make you part of their literary journey. This is good poetry and good criticism. Shakespeare is in their good books and this book will be a good addition to the Shakespearean library, to read in good times and bad.

Prof. GJV Prasad