Cultivating Grahamstown: Nathaniel Merriman, Shakespeare and Books

Abstract

A common and acutely disabling myopia associated with localised Shakespeare studies is their tendency to make his work fill a canvas unnaturally, when the original context is far wider and less exclusive. The effect is to misinterpret the relative cultural weight and consequence of his presence. Shakespeareans are interested in Shakespeare, but that very concentration sometimes distorts the actual cultural relations within which the object of their interest finally subsists. In 1857, Archdeacon Nathaniel Merriman delivered two public lectures on Shakespeare under the auspices of the “General Institute” of Grahamstown. The first, “On the Study of Shakspeare”, was given on 2 September and “Shakspeare, As Bearing on English History” two months later, on Friday 6 November. The lectures were very successful – a report in the Anglo-African records attendance by more than 450 people at the first lecture, with numbers turned away at the door –
and the committee of the General Institute decided to publish them.1 This article sets out to place the lectures, an annotated edition of the first of which appears elsewhere in this issue of Shakespeare in Southern Africa, in their local context, by providing a brief sketch of literary and cultural life in the town, in which Shakespeare and Nathaniel Merriman played a small part.

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 20 2008: pp. 25-37