Rhizomatic Harmonies

Abstract

While some critics have argued that music’s role in contemporary staged Shakespeare’s meaning has diminished since the Renaissance, this chapter explores music’s deeply significant role in filmed Shakespeare, particularly in the films of Vishal Bhardwaj. Arguing that a focus on alternative lexicons (such as those expressed by music and dance) that play a significant role in non-Anglophone Shakespeare, this chapter contends that the field can offer a broader hermeneutic, hence inclusive, epistemological field, via more careful attention to the ways that non-Western and non-Anglophone cultures interpret and use Shakespeare as mythic, narrative, and sociocultural commentary on their own historical moment outside of Shakespeare’s language. Such a reconsideration of language as the most significant locus of meaning within Shakespeare’s studies facilitates a more capacious template for understanding how Shakespeare can be deployed as a form of resistant participation in what Barbara Hodgdon has called ‘the Shakespeare trade’. Via a focus on Vishal Bhardwaj’s tragic trilogy—Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014—this chapter explores how this composer-filmmaker’s Shakespearean oeuvre provides insight into these plays’ historical and performed past, and, even more significantly, their practice-based and interpretative present and future. In particular, the chapter focuses on Bhardwaj’s participation in a ‘Shakespeare’ that interrogates the (still rather strongly stratified) boundaries of its Anglophone performance and literary traditions. In doing so, these works imagine, even help bring into being, an entity that is fluid, multicultural, and endlessly ‘adaptive’.