Performing Calibanesque Baptisms: Shakespearean Fractals of British Indian History

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.23.04

Keywords:

Shakespeare, Caliban, Peter Pope, Catherine Bengall, John Talbot Shakespeare, genealogy, New Historicism, anecdotes, fractals, London

Abstract

This paper uncovers new complexity for Shakespearean studies in examining three anecdotes overlooked in related historiography—the first Indian baptism in Britain, that of Peter Pope, in 1616, and its extrapolation in Victorian history as Calibanesque; the tale of Catherine Bengall, an Indian servant baptised in 1745 in London and left to bear an illegitimate child, before vanishing from Company records (like Virginia Woolf’s invention Judith Shakespeare vanishing in Shakespeare’s London); and the forgotten John Talbot Shakespear, a Company official in early nineteenth-century Bengal and descendant of William Shakespeare. I argue that the anecdotal links between Peter, Caliban, Catherine, Judith, Shakespear and Shakespeare should be seen as Jungian effects of non-causal “synchronic” reality or on lines of Benoit Mandelbrot’s conception of fractals (rough and self-regulating geometries of natural microforms). Although anecdotes and historemes get incorporated into historical establishmentarianism, seeing history in a framework of fractals fundamentally resists such appropriations. This poses new challenges for Shakespearean historiography, while underscoring distinctions between Shakespeareanism (sociological epiphenomena) and Shakespeare (the man himself).

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Author Biography

Arup K. Chatterjee, OP Jindal Global University, India

Arup K. Chatterjee is an Associate Professor at OP Jindal Global University. He is the founding chief editor of Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures, which he has run from 2011 to 2018. As a writer, he has authored The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways (2017), The Great Indian Railways (2018), Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India (2021) and The Great Indian Railway Saga (2021). https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-7762

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Published

2021-06-30

How to Cite

Chatterjee, A. K. (2021). Performing Calibanesque Baptisms: Shakespearean Fractals of British Indian History. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 23(38), 59–74. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.23.04

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