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Jatra Theatre and Elizabethan Dramaturgy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

John Russell Brown
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Abstract

I could not have written this essay without the help of friends and counsellors in Calcutta, Bhubaneswar, and Puri. They listened carefully to my questions and took time to help me appreciate what I was encountering for the first time on stage and in life around me. This indebtedness makes this essay a fitting contribution to an issue in honour of Jan Kott, for he has offered encouragement of the same kind on many occasions. First I had read his Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and then I was able to enjoy his company, at Brighton, Vancouver, and for over two years at Stony Brook, Long Island. He helped me to think adventurously and showed me how to be watchful. I owe him a great debt and this essay is offered in token of my gratitude, pleasure, and admiration.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 40 , November 1994 , pp. 331 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1. For making this visit possible and for much translating and information, I am indebted to three brothers, Byomakesh, Biswakesh, and Byotakesh Tripathy, who were my hosts and guides in Orissa in November 1992; I could wish for no better and no other friends. Funding for travel was provided by the Department of Theatre, the School of Music, and the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan; I am pleased to acknowledge this and other support from colleagues.

2. Based on a memorandum to the author by Biswakesh Tripathy, 3 March 1993.

3. Strange News (1592); Works, ed. McKerrow, R.B. (1904), i, 296.Google Scholar

4. Heywood, Thomas, Epistle and Prologue, The Jew of Malta, ed. 1633.Google Scholar

5. Quoted, with further testimony, in, Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage (1923), ii, 308–9.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 33.

7. See Rangvarta, (News Bulletin of Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta), Nos. 33–34 (1988), p.7–12.Google Scholar

8. Quoted from a letter to the author, 3 March 1993.

9. These and other reports, of much the same kind, are conveniently available in Salgado, Gamini, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590–1890 (1975).Google Scholar

10. Brook, Peter, in New Theatre Quarterly, VIII (05 1992), told how, having experimented in the 'sixties with abandoning narrative entirely, 'I arrived at the conclusion that, although all kinds of other structure possibilities exist, narrative is perhaps the most powerful of them all. Even an insubstantial anecdote, if well told, can demonstrate the extraordinary power of suspense that every narrative contains’ (p. 110–11). The audience at Pun, gripped by the story, was drawn into the situations cnfronted by the characters and actors.Google Scholar