The Bard,Punctuated

It was the 1920s. With the end of World War I,American society was undergoing several changes in the economy and lifestyle. Seated in his humble home,Oberon was making plans to get Titania to fall in love with him. In the next 10 minutes,the props changed and the scene shifted from Midsummer Night’s Dream to the Merchant of Venice,where,in the Britain of the 1950s,Portia was seeking a match from among a host of unwittingly obnoxious suitors.

The members of Shakespeare Society,dramatics club of St. Stephen’s College,are known for their familiarity with the Bard’s work,but working on the mid-term production The Blue Pencil: Punctuating Shakespeare,brought with it several firsts. Staged recently in the assembly hall of the college,the play has been directed by nine female students. It is also the first time that the team is bringing together six plays of Shakespeare. The “Punctuations” refer to the punctuation marks assigned to different works of Shakespeare. If Midsummer Night’s Dream is a ‘comma’,Merchant of Venice is a ‘slash’. One version of Romeo and Juliet is an ‘exclamation mark’ and another parody of the same is a ‘question mark’. A medley of Othello,Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet is ‘inverted commas’ and the ‘full stop’ comes with Macbeth. “Students have explored Shakespeare without legislating or patronising it,” says NP Ashley,the society’s faculty advisor. “There are different kinds of readings of Shakespeare in the classroom,from revolutionary to feminist,post colonial and historical. In the production,they have depicted the different interpretations on stage. We’ve called it “Blue Pencil” because they are all editing and punctuating Shakespeare,” he states.