A Note on Religion

At the beginning of our era, after a battle on the Ionian Sea, Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives in Egypt, and Augustus was made an imperator by his senators . Roman emperors had sexual access to those senators’ daughters and wives, and to thousands of slaves. But they ran governments with help from their cubicularii, castrated civil servants. And they enforced an Imperial Cult: subjects made sacrifices to the emperor's genius, or procreative spirit; or they got disemboweled by wild animals, or decapitated. Then Constantine moved off from the Tiber to the Bosporus, and Europe was ruled over by a few. Lords covered the countryside with bastards, but passed on estates on to their oldest sons. Daughters and younger sons were put away in the Church, where some became parents, but most were reproductively suppressed: they were ἄνανδρος or anandros, or without a husband, and ἄγαμος or agamos, or without a wife. Heretics who objected got burned at the stake. Then the Crusaders expanded Europe to the East, and Columbus went off to the West, and politics, sex and religion became more democratic. Power was more widely distributed; more men and women had families if they wanted them, and monasteries emptied out. The Reformation followed the Roman Church, which had followed the Imperial Cult.

Mark Antony and the date of the Inimitables. A remark on an edited text

A Greek inscription on stone found in Alexandria in the nine- teenth century and exhibited in the Alexandrian Greco-Roman Museum contains an unusual dedicatory text in honour of Mark Antony. The text was edited several times. It contains useful information which agrees with the passage of Plutarch on the lifestyle of Antony and Cleopatra, and their entourage. In this paper the author suggests the date 34–30 bc for the activity of the ‘Inimitables’ and adds a further commentary on the history of Antony and Cleopatra.

Transculturated Shakespeare: Malayalam cinema and new adaptive modes

Malayalam cinema offers a unique body of work for scholars seeking to understand the heterogenous traditions of Indian engagement with Shakespeare. In this article, after a brief overview of the history of Malayalam reception of Shakespeare generally, I focus on the film adaptations of director Jayaraj (Kaliyāttam / Othello [1997]; Kannaki / Antony and Cleopatra [2002]; and Veeram / Hamlet [2017]). Of particular relevance is Jayaraj’s interest in Shakespeare’s female characters, whom he reshapes by immersing his adaptation in the local practices and idioms of Kerala culture, thus transforming the Shakespearean play-text thoroughly. The article examines the influence especially of kathāprasangam upon Jayaraj to understand what aspects of Shakespeare endure in Jayaraj’s films and what are transformed. By approaching the question of adaptation from the perspective of the emic and the etic, an apparatus made influential by linguist-anthropologist Kenneth Pike in his analysis of a cultural text, I examine why, in Malayalam, cinematic Shakespeares have seen greater commercial and critical success than Shakespeare in translation or literary adaptation. The article seeks to understand this disparity by closely reading some of the recurrent patterns that emerge in Shakespeare transculturated in the two domains of Malayalam literature (including translation) and film.