The Fifth Ratna Chatterjee Memorial Lecture
On December 16, 2025, the Department of English, Loreto College, Kolkata, organised the fifth Ratna Chatterjee Memorial Lecture. Conducted in a hybrid manner, the audience comprised UG and PG students of the Department of English, Loreto College and from the college's MoU. partners, former and current faculty, and family members of Ms. Chatterjee.
The session began with Mrs. Mangala Gauri Chakraborty, former faculty member of the Department of English, Loreto College, introducing the late Ms. Chatterjee. A sagacious teacher, she was the first and longest serving Head of the Department of English at Loreto College and heralded several contemporary educational methods in the institution.
Thereafter, Dr. Sukanya Dasgupta, Head of the Department of English, introduced the speaker, Prof. Abhijit Sen, a renowned scholar of Early Modern Literary Studies and retired Professor of English at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. Keenly interested in theatre, Prof. Sen delivered a lecture entitled "To glad your ears and please your eyes": Staging the Play in Renaissance England.
With the element of spectacle in Early Modern English theatre as the locus, Prof. Sen theorised the spectacle by tracing Classical antecedents, the de-centring of the author from their work in Renaissance England, to the precedence of spectacle in Jacobean theatre. Drawing on two modern critics, Frederic Jameson and Guy Debord, he applied their notions of the commodification of style and how life became "an immense accumulation of spectacle" to the proto-capitalistic, commercially acquisitive, autocratic Jacobean society.
After illustrating this with the examples of Tudor and Stuart playwrights, to conclude, he highlighted how Shakespeare may be "debunking" the power of the spectacle with purposefully created fissures in the text, for, to quote Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, "While the state performs power, the power of the artist is solely in the performance."
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