As the world sets to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare it would be worthwhile to assess and gauge his influence on theatre and the performing arts in the subcontinent.

The Muslim rule in the subcontinent, in contrast to the lavish patronage of music, literature and even painting, did not really promote theatre. The heartland of Arabia and the cultural dynamo of Persia only had the dramatic narrative to fall back on but the Indian subcontinent did have a theatrical tradition.

From the high point of the Sanskrit Theatre, it was scaled down to become part of the religious ritual like Ram Lila/Ras Lila and some Islamic rituals during the Muslim rule. Its techniques were incorporated and mutated in various forms and dimensions without it regaining its autonomous stature.

European sailors and shipmen took Shakespeare wherever they went and so the first theatre companies that were set up in godowns of the ports staged European plays, dominant among them Elizabethan plays, foremost being Shakespeare, about a hundred and fifty years after his death. The dead Sanskrit theatre was revived in the port cities by intermingling European plays with the local fare of song and dance.

The first plays were, thus, staged in Calcutta and Bombay as adaptation of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan plays to audiences that was a mix of European sailors, the local traders, and labourers. With the gradual increase in the population of local people in the audience, these plays became a hybrid affair of the local song and dance and plot and character of the Europeans.

Shakespeare was indirectly responsible for the growth of popular theatre in the subcontinent. The greatest playwrights of the nineteenth and early twentieth century either acknowledged or did not acknowledge that the plots, the language, and the expression that they used were Shakespearean.

Agha Hashar, the greatest example of a playwright, also labelled as the Indian Shakespeare, translated and adapted Shakespeare with a great deal of success and facility, opening doors for others to go beyond that. Subsequently, it became very difficult in theatre to extricate oneself from that language that appeared excessively poetical and decorative when rendered in Urdu.

In a formal setting, according to historian Dr Abdul Aleem Nami, the first Shakespearean plays to be translated into Urdu were by John Gilchrist, the famous orientalist and linguist in the beginning of the nineteenth century at Fort William College in Calcutta. But there is evidence that the first Shakespearean plays were staged in these port cities by the mid 1750s as the theatre companies as well as theatre halls came into existence.

Bombay Greens was one such establishment that started to stage plays away from the godowns in proper theatre environment. As it went along, there is also proof that these plays were staged, albeit with plenty of freedom at adaptation to give them the indigenous feel. The most successful and dominant phase in theatre had been what is called the Parsi Theatre and many plays of Shakespeare were staged by some of the most successful playwrights.

One Ahsan Lakhnavi adapted his plays and were staged regularly -- Hamlet as Khoon-e-Naahaq, Othello as Shaheed-e-Wafa, Merchant of Venice as Dil Farosh and Comedy of Errors as Bhool Bhulieyaan.

Agha Hashar, too, adapted many of these plays and these were roaring successes at the box office. King Lear was staged as Safaid Khoon, King John as Said-e-Hawas, Measure for Measure as Shaheed-e-Naaz, Richard the Third as Aseer-e-Hirs, Macbeth as both Dao Pech and Khawb-e-Hasti and Winter’s Tale as Mureed-e-Shak.

One reason why Shakespeare is known universally is because of English language that was taken to the four corners of the world by the expanding British Empire. From the American continents to Australia and parts of Asia, including its biggest jewel, India, culturally speaking, a major portion of humankind became anglophile even if they did not know the language or could understand, speak and write it.

Similarly, in schools and colleges, as plays were staged as part of the extra-curricular activities it was considered as being educated if one knew the English language, and it was being civilised if one acted in amateur theatre. As the English language and literature became the benchmark of openings in the administrative setup of the country more of Shakespeare became part of the vocabulary.

English and being educated became synonymous with Shakespearean poetry and plays in English, and the annual plays in the leading colleges became the most prized occasion which everyone looked up to. The same alumni from the colleges were responsible for establishing radio and much later television and so the plays; the radio plays had a great imprint of theatre in which these people had been nourished.

Shakespearana of the Kendals was one such company that travelled across India staging Shakespeare in the twentieth century. The same two trends are still visible in the way the performing and thespian arts have developed in the last one hundred and fifty odd years. Utpal Dutt and Habib Tanveer in India used Shakespeare with a great deal of generosity while in Pakistan Sawan Rain Ka Sapna; an Urdu and then a Punjabi translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Imtiaz Ali Taj and Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum was much talked about for years to come.

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Similarly, the films too were greatly affected by what was happening on stage. Shakespeare both influenced the films directly and indirectly. The scripts were written with the Shakespearean dominance and then many films were made on the plays of Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear and Othello -- to name only a few -- and these have been made many times over by contemporising them in each version.

The literary and artistic canons were all translated into the local languages which facilitated the virtues that were established by keeping the western authors and artistes in view, and what greater beacon of language and culture could there be than Shakespeare. He then was cast in the role of an ideal playwright and his canons directly or indirectly emulated by the literati all over the world. Modern theatre that is the post renaissance theatre, as indeed poetry was defined by the standards set by the bard and his faithful critics.