Two Nations, Both Alike

This Introduction to the special issue on “Shakespeare in Bengal” offers a grounded, granular, multi-lay-ered snapshot of the history and currency of Shakespeare in Bengal as registered in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. As the Introduction to four critical essays and three interviews that follow, it sets the ground for the analyses and conversations to come. This Introduction thus offers, first, brief overviews of Bengal’s histories, encounters, partitions, and attendant on-the-ground realities. Second, this essay delineates the main through-lines of Shakespeare education, adaptation, and performance in Bengal and in Bengali. The accounts of histories and cultural formations of course intermesh con-stantly; there can be no neat partition between the two. This essay then ends with a few notes about the critical works and interviews that come after.The Introduction also makes clear the position of this special issue against the very grain of the colonial and the divisive and the exploitative by taking as its subject the matter of Shakespeare engagements in Bengal, all of Bengal, undivided Bengal. This project’s main ethics and aesthetics remain in the antico-lonial, the relational, the coalitional, and the reparative. Through its focus on undivided Bengal, this project presents a radical and consequential decolonization in Shakespeare studies and English early modern studies, both within the academy at large and outside academia.