The story of Rao’s ascendancy is in ways an inverse of the Nativity narrative, replete with celestial visitation and a new star shinning in the heavens.

Often when the works of a great writer become inaccessible to later generations, whether due to differences in language or changes in culture, subsequent writers engage in a process that is a strange admixture of adaptation, appropriation, inspiration, and translation.  Such is extremely common among the works of Shakespeare.  The Taming of the Shrew was…