World Book and Copyright Day: Authors pick out Shakespearean titles that resonate with the present

Vintage colour lithograph of William Shakespeare from 1853. Pics/Wikimedia Commons

Considering that historically books have been the most powerful factor in the dissemination of knowledge and the most effective means of preserving it," April 23 was proclaimed World Book and Copyright Day by UNESCO in 1995.

Miguel de Cervantes

This date was decided upon because it marked the death anniversaries of three prominent literary figures: Miguel de Cervantes, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and The Bard himself, William Shakespeare. Four writers from Mumbai share Shakespearean titles that best reflect the times, or those they would like to revisit.

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

Jerry Pinto would like to revisit: Hamlet, and Titus Andronicus
When I joined college and bumped into a whole lot of ICSE students who had read a whole Shakespeare play, I was determined to read all of Shakespeare's work. And over a summer, I settled in with the family, collected and read the plays. I was bored until my mother found out what I was doing and said, "Those are plays, silly, they won't work unless you read them aloud."

That evening, we began to read Hamlet, and the play opened itself out to all of us. It was magic and I should like to go back to it now and see what new layers it will reveal. But alas two of the four voices are gone. I remember clearly my father doing ‘Mine offence is rank, it smells unto heaven/It hath the primal eldest curse upon't/A brother's murther...' Equally [I would like to go back to] Titus Andronicus but only because I have a gruesome memory of how a child is killed and baked into a meat dish and fed to his father!

Rehana Munir recommends: King Lear

From a loaded premise - a king punishing a daughter who refuses to indulge his megalomania - King Lear launches into an exploration of both political and psychological themes with deep humanism and empathy. "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" asks the tragic hero, stripped not just of glory, but even the most basic cloak of self-knowledge. "Lear's shadow," replies the Fool, holding a mirror to human folly and its fateful consequences.

Anukrti Upadhyay would like to revisit: A Midsummer Night's Dream

In this time of tragic chaos, I want to escape into the fantastical confusion of A Midsummer Night's Dream. When newspapers are full of callous politicians holding rallies and permitting religious festivities in the time of pandemic and social media flooded with hapless citizens seeking help, the enchanted woodlands of Shakespeare's comedy, with its cast of tender lovers, blundering play-actors and the estranged fairy couple and their sprite bent upon all sorts of mischief, gives a moment of respite, a chance to regain a semblance of sanity. This is one of the magical things that literature does - preserves our sanity in times too terrible to comprehend or endure. The insane plot of the Dream is an antidote to the unbearable happenings around us.

Murzban F Shroff recommends: Hamlet

The Shakespearean play that exquisitely captures the mood of the moment, the weight of our current circumstances, is - without doubt - Hamlet. Who among us has not felt a sense of personal despair? "The time is out of joint/O cursed spite/That I was ever born to set it right." Who among us has not felt a sense of national regret? "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"? Imprisoned in our homes, have we not woken up to the futility of material accumulation and to human systems that have failed us? "O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of the world." Ruminating on the vagaries of fate, the bard presciently reassures us: "Our wills and fates do so contrary run/That our devices still our overthrown." Shakespeare, as always, is the immortal true-teller, cautioning us to the "heartache and thousand natural shocks that the flesh is heir to."

1995
The year World Book and Copyright Day came to be