Shakespeare in Southern Africa

Editorial

Chris Thurman , Marguerite De Waal — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

No Abstract

“Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile”: Race, degeneration and kinship in King Lear

Lydia Valentine — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores how Shakespeare’s engagement with the concept of degeneration in King Lear encourages us to read the play through the lens of race. It suggests that degeneration is used to articulate the racial consequences of Lear’s conflict with his daughters. This article provides an introductory survey of early modern discourses of degeneration, which aims to show that theories of degeneration were deeply engaged with varying ideas of race. It then places these discourses of degeneration in conversation with King Lear, proposing that Lear distances himself from his daughters by accusing them of having degenerated. Whilst scholars have considered the ways that the male characters of the play are racialised, this article builds on existing scholarship by arguing that the articulation of familial difference through racial difference also has racial implications for the way that we read Cordelia, Goneril and Regan.

“Tongo is a prison” – Revisiting Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet

Stephen Collins , Nii Kwartelai Quartey — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 1964, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) produced an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with staff and students from the University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama. Transposed to the far north of Ghana, Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet is described in the film’s opening sequence as a straight adaptation with very little alteration: “The text is unaltered, except where it would not make sense in a Frafra community, or where an archaic word obscures the meaning.” In this article, however, we explore how the repositioning of Hamlet to Ghana’s Northern Region speaks to a brief window of radical postcolonial politics and culture. 1964 was also the year in which Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, declared a one-party state and himself president for life before his government was toppled in a coup d’état in 1966. We argue not only that Hamile can be read as a profound reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s text but also that, given the political context, the combination of the iconography of northern Ghana together with the ambition of Ghana’s nascent creative institutions captures the highpoint of Nkrumah’s cultural policy. Indeed, the significance of the examination of this largely forgotten film lies both in our positioning of it as a clear example of decolonial practice and in its own denial of radical adaptation.

Herbert Dhlomo, William Shakespeare and South African Drama

Giuliana Iannaccaro — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Among the countless writers who have engaged with the Shakespearean dramatic corpus in their literary production, the South African playwright Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo (1903-1956) offers the opportunity to investigate the relationship of one of the most prominent African intellectuals of his time with the Western cultural tradition. On the one hand, Dhlomo’s plays are a heartfelt celebration of the English literary canon; on the other hand, they are a means of denouncing the oppressive rule of British and Afrikaner colonial powers. The present article discusses this unresolved ambivalence at the basis of Dhlomo’s literary works. My analysis focuses on the two historical plays that engage with Shakespeare the most: Dingane and Cetshwayo, dated between 1936-37. It is my opinion that the two possible readings of the Zulu writer’s works – as celebration and as opposition – are not in conflict; instead, they testify to the great complexity underlying not only the literary activity of black early-twentiethcentury writers but also their thorny position in the cultural context of their time.

“Difference matters”: Challenging myths of Africa-as-country in the RSC’s 2012 Julius Caesar through the legacy of Shakespeare ZA’s #lockdownshakespeare

Henry Bell — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Gregory Doran’s 2012 production of Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Company set the play in an unspecified time and location in ‘Africa’. This article will critically compare the generalised African aesthetics of this production with Shakespeare ZA’s 2020 #lockdownshakespeare initiative to explore how self-recording Shakespeare’s plays in the apartments, cars, cities and dwellings of South Africa can challenge the myth of ‘Africaas-country’. A perceptive framework will be applied to explore how the phenomenal field of these digital captures of Shakespeare served to de-centre the texts and, moreover, how the experience of viewing these performances brought new meanings and readings, beyond the familiar, to the execution of the plays in practice. This will be enabled through the application of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a re-consideration of Bert States’ view of the interpenetration of images and Susan Bennett’s theory of frames within Audience Studies. Finally, the legacy of #lockdownshakespeare will be considered in relation to teaching and practice inspired by this project by the Decentred Shakespeares Network in Brazil, Ghana, India, Scotland and South Africa.

Shakespeare without End

David Schalkwyk — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are various ends towards which critics, commentators and the public have believed Shakespeare was working. Yet we have no idea what ends (other than palpably commercial ones) Shakespeare may have had in mind. What is true is that the ideological ends to which we argue Shakespeare was committed are in fact our own ends. This has been the generally hidden presupposition of all critical engagement with Shakespeare’s texts. For a brief period at the end of the twentieth century this notion was a contentious issue in what used to be called, and celebrated, as “theory”. New Historicism became the secularised, hegemonic mode of academic research and criticism for over three decades, from the mid-eighties well into the noughties, offering endless Shakespeare. In this essay, the author offers a personal reflection, or recollection, in discussing recent transformations of twentiethcentury theory, especially in the form of Critical Race Theory. This offers us a new perspective on both Shakespeare towards an end and endless Shakespeare, in which the two, apparently antagonistic, positions come together in a paradoxical union.

Roundtable: Othello in Cape Town, 2024

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

No abstract