Untold tales from dusty archives

Somewhere in the heart of Kolkata is a handful of graves that tells an astonishing tale. Going back a couple of hundred years, these tombs don’t get many visitors today and yet they speak of the city’s probable tryst with one of the greatest literary personalities of all time, William Shakespeare.

These graves, in the South Park Street Cemetery, are a reminder that the Shakespears were here. Although, very little is known or discussed about this branch of the ‘Shakespear’ family (read on to find out why they dropped the ‘e’), they spent over a century and a half in India.

Cousins of the Bard of Avon, the family wove their lives into the city’s fabric and left a lasting legacy in Kolkata’s artistic, literary, military, civil, judicial, and civic history, while even influencing her social mores. Some Shakespears were colossuses in their own right; others married into some of the other most influential families of the time (including that of another literary giant, William Makepeace Thackeray). So, who were they, really?

William Shakespeare’s grandparents, Richard and Abigail, had five children—Henrye, Anna, John, Thomas and Matthew. John Shakespeare and his wife Mary were the parents of the Bard of Avon. In all likelihood, although not conclusively proven, the ‘Shakespear’ family of Kolkata descended from William Shakespeare’s uncle, Thomas, through his son John. However, some writers believe the family may have descended from William Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert.

These Shakespears also have a probable match in their family’s Coat of Arms with that of the Bard’s family crest. The descendants of this family line are known as the ‘Shadwell Shakespears’, and they were engaged in the rope-making business. The boys in every generation of this family were usually named John, William, Richmond, Henry, or Thomas.

John Shakespear (1749–1825), the great-great-grandson of John, son of Shakespeare’s uncle Thomas, was a close associate of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal. This is corroborated by Walter Kelly Firminger, the first editor of Bengal Past and Present, the journal of the Calcutta Historical Society. It was this John Shakespear who initiated the long association of the Shakespear family with India.

Born in the parish of St Dunstan, Stepney, Shadwell, in England, his father was John Shakespear, Senior (1718– 1775), a rope-maker, and alderman of London, and a sheriff. John Shakespear, the son, was the second of the 14 children of the alderman. He joined the East India Company (EIC) in 1767 as a Writer (clerk/junior officer). One of his younger brothers, Colin Shakespear, came to Kolkata too and became the Postmaster-General at a later date.

After completing his training, John became the Supervisor of Jashore, now in Bangladesh, in 1770. He rose through the ranks to become the Chief of the EIC in Dhaka, currently the capital of Bangladesh, in 1778, and a Senior Merchant in 1779. He retired in 1780 and settled in England. His father, Alderman John Shakespear, Senior, held stocks worth 500 pounds sterling in the Company and probably supplied ropes to the Company for its fleet of ships, wrote James M. Holzman in his book The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760–1785.

After retiring from the East India Company, John Shakespear married his first wife Mary Davenport in 1782, in England. He belonged to a rare group of early Englishmen who remained bachelors during their stay in India. After Mary Davenport died, he married Charlotte Fletcher in 1798.

It was not unusual for John Shakespear, the son, to have left his father’s rope-making business and join the Company. The young Writers of that time were men chosen from a specific group of people. They were the sons of Directors or shareholders of the EIC, of army or naval officers of the Company, of old colleagues abroad, and drawn from the families of merchants and tradesmen connected with the EIC in England, explained Holzman.

Xiao Wei Bond, a curator of the India Office Private Papers at the British Library, on 28 November 2011 wrote in her short article, ‘Tales From The Other Shakespears’ in the Untold Lives blog of the archive:

Among the generous benefactors to the India Office Private Papers is the late Dr Omar Pound (1926–2010), teacher, writer, and translator of Persian and Arabic literature, only son of the celebrated American poet Ezra Pound and his English wife, artist Dorothy Shakespear. Ezra and Dorothy met at the salon of her mother, Olivia Shakespear, who was a lifelong friend and one-time lover of W.B. Yeats. Olivia was a novelist and playwright in her own right and an influential patron of the arts. Her Kensington salon was frequented by writers and artists, including Pound himself, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce.

The Shakespear family is related to a number of other illustrious figures in English literary and military history in British India, including William Makepeace Thackeray, General Sir John Low and Colonel Sir Richmond Campbell Shakespear. In order to avoid confusion with William Shakespeare, the Shakespears of British India dropped the ‘e’ at the end of their name. There is, however, a distinct possibility that their earliest traceable ancestor, John Shakespear of Shadwell, could well be from the same stock as the great poet of Stratford.

The return journey of John Shakespear, the son, to England, after his retirement, became one of those tales of adventure, rivalry and intrigue that would be worth a play or even a movie. As John was planning his trip to England in December 1780, he was handed over a confidential letter by Warren Hastings.8 The letter mentioned a decision Hastings had taken to end the in-fighting among members of the Company’s Provincial Council, over the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and the Sadar Diwani Adalat, the newly established court for settling land revenue disputes—by placing both the courts under the Chief Justice, Elijah Impey.

Hastings requested John Shakespear to personally hand over the letter to Laurence Sullivan, Chairperson of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, for his knowledge and concurrence. Since, at that point of time, it contained information of a very sensitive nature, John Shakespear had to be discreet.

Philip Francis, the Irish-born British politician of the Whig party and Hastings’s main adversary, was in ill health and recuperating in Kolkata. He was yet to recover from the effects of his recent ‘duel’ with Hastings a few months earlier. Francis was completely against Hastings’s proposed actions over the jurisdiction disputes. He did not want Sullivan to approve Hastings’s decisions.

(Excerpted with permission from Devasis Chattopadhyay’s Harry Hobbs of Kolkata and Other Forgotten Lives; published by Niyogi Books)