Abstract
Seeff opens her study with the African Theatre, Cape Town, site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa. The African Theatre symbolized the struggle over incipient nationalisms, languages, and identities that would play out for nearly two centuries. Seeff argues that the African Theatre participated in a linguistic struggle at a moment when neither the status of English nor the place of Shakespeare was assured. As rival, amateur theatrical groups emerged from the diverse, white settler population, performing in turn in English, Dutch, German, and French, which language—and therefore which identity—were questions the little theater regularly addressed in the four decades of its existence.
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Notes
- 1.
The first British occupation extended from 1795 to 1802.
- 2.
The Times, 11 July 1801, from the British Library.
- 3.
It is a delicious coincidence that the first performance of a Shakespeare play in Sydney, Australia, was Henry IV, Part One in April 1800, at Robert Sidaway’s theater. The founding of the colony of New South Wales had taken place just twelve years earlier, in 1788. It would seem that this particular drama had special resonance for this particular moment. See “‘Speakest Thou English?’: Shakespeare and Contemporary Australian Theatre,” in Shakespeare’s Legacy: The Appropriation of the Plays in Post-colonial Drama, ed. Norbert Schaffield (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005), 53. See also O Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage, ed. John Golder and Richard Madelaine (Sydney: Currency Press, 2001).
- 4.
Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope 1797–1802, ed. Dorothea Fairbridge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 290. “The Doctor thought that he shone in Falstaff, we did not agree with him. …” As the wife of Andrew Barnard, the Secretary to the Governor, Lady Anne was a member of the governing elite at the Cape Colony from 1797 to 1803. As a First Lady of sorts, she was arguably South Africa’s first theater critic.
- 5.
The French actors were all officers. After 1801, they performed on the stage of the African Theatre.
- 6.
This was less true of the Dutch whose rich classical, theatrical tradition in Holland did not travel to the Cape Colony. During the Dutch period—before 1795 when the British occupied the Cape—comedies and farce were performed at the Barracks and so, as in the case of the French, when the African Theatre was established, there was a theatrical tradition and an audience to draw upon.
- 7.
Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony 1750–1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 43.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
It goes without saying that nationalisms are, among other things, complex constructions that begin in the imagination.
- 11.
I am, of necessity, simplifying a complex development. Anglicization was openly advocated as an official policy in the 1820s. However, as early as 1812, Sir John Cradock, then Governor, had insisted on fluency in English as a pre-requisite for public employment. Such a requirement would demand an education in which English was highly valued. See L. C. Duly, “The Failure of British Land Policy at the Cape, 1812–1828,” Journal of African History 6, no. 3 (1965): 360, cited in Sturgis, and CO 48/14, Cradock to Bathurst, 8 December 1812, 238–39, also cited in Sturgis, “Anglicisation at the Cape of Good Hope.”
- 12.
Ross, in Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, describes the creation of an Afrikaner identity as “building the nation with words.” This is Isabel Hofmeyr’s phrase in “Building a Nation from Words: Afrikaans Language, Literature and Ethnic Identity 1902–1924,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (London: Longman, 1987), 95–124; cited by Ross, 47.
- 13.
Leon de Kock, “South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction,” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 271.
- 14.
When the Netherlands was occupied by revolutionary France, the British seized the Cape Colony in 1795. The Cape Colony was part of the British Empire until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, when it was renamed the Cape of Good Hope Province.
- 15.
See A. F. Hattersley, An Illustrated Social History of South Africa (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1969), 61, for composition of European settlers.
- 16.
See Hattersley, 17 and 29, for his estimate of fewer than 6000 white settlers. See also Percy Ward Laidler, Growth and Government of Cape Town (Cape Town: Unie-volkspers, 1939); Richard Elphick and H. Giliomee, ed., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979).
- 17.
See Elphick and Giliomee, The Shaping of South African Society; Robert Ross, A Concise History of South Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 2008).
- 18.
Hattersley, An Illustrated Social History, 61.
- 19.
Both citations come from Letter 11a, reprinted in The Letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas, from the Cape and Elsewhere, 1793–1803, Together with Her Tour into the Interior, and Certain Other Letters, ed. A. M. Lewin Robinson (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1973). The letter was originally written in French and translated into English by the editor. See p. 62.
- 20.
An English Officer, Gleanings in Africa (1806; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 259.
- 21.
Robert Semple, Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope. A facsimile edition with new introduction by Frank R. Bradlow (1805; repr., Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1968), 13.
- 22.
Commissioner J. A. de Mist, cited in Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa: A Guide to Its History from 1780–1930 (Cape Town: Vlaeberg, 1994), 31. Jill Fletcher deals with each language group’s amateur theatrical companies in discrete chapters. This treatment vitiates the argument that the theater was an undeclared, contested site where the different nationalisms could find—or lose—their voices.
- 23.
I could find nothing to suggest that language practice at the African Theatre in the nineteenth century was a class marker among the European settlers. Because slaves and blacks were prohibited from attending performances at the Theatre through a process of informal apartheid, language operated as an ethnic marker.
- 24.
“At the request of several friends who on account of the smallness of the Playhouse, could not be accommodated … with tickets, the German Theatrical company will represent again this present Evening.” The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, 24 July 1802, vol. 1, 38. The following year, the German Amateurs produced Die Ueberrasschung [The Surprise] followed by Das Friedens-feyer [Tranquillity], cited by Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 30, from F. C. L. Bosman, Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, Deel 1: 1652–1855 (Cape Town: J. Dusseau & Co., 1928), 79. Fletcher is not correct when she says: “After this the German Amateurs slipped out of the theatrical spotlight,” 30. They returned in 1815 after a long hiatus.
- 25.
A high percentage of employees and soldiers in the Dutch East India Company were German, and these links continue today. In 1796 when the Dutch surrendered to the British, many of the soldiers and sailors taken into English service were German. In contemporary KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the Natal Education Department has granted permission to certain schools to provide the first 4 years of elementary education in German. There are also two German high schools and a private high school in Natal. There are German schools in the major cities in South Africa, which receive federal funding from the Federal Republic of Germany. See Elizabeth de Kadt, “German Speakers in South Africa,” in Language in South Africa, ed. Rajend Mesthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, rev.), 148–60. The German repertory at the African Theatre in the early years of the nineteenth century drew, if not from Goethe and Schiller, from Kotzebue.
- 26.
According to Laidler, a French company appeared in 1848 at a theater in Hope Street, Cape Town, that was a store fitted to serve as a theater. Les Ressources de Jonathas [The resources of Jonathas] was the production, and two women acted in it. See P. W. Laidler, The Annals of the Cape Stage (Edinburgh: William Bryce, 1926), 51–53. Laidler uses no footnotes; therefore, the material is maddeningly undocumented.
- 27.
See Fritz Ponelis, The Development of Afrikaans (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993), 21–22, for a statement that the French language disappeared before the end of the eighteenth century. In his treatment of the linguistic diversity at the Cape (14–35), he lists Dutch, German, French, African languages, Malaysian languages, and Portuguese as mother tongues in the development of Afrikaans. He does not mention English.
- 28.
She Stoops to Conquer, The Rivals, The West Indian, The Beaux’s Stratagem, The Tragedy of Douglas, All the World’s a Stage, The Comedy of the Brothers, and Abroad and at Home appeared on the stage of the African Theatre, some of these more than once; they were accompanied by a variety of farces: Taste, The Old Maid, The Tragedy of Tom Thumb, Love á la Mode, The Upholsterer, High Life Below Stairs, and The Mayor of Garratt. See The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser for 1807. All issues are housed in the Cape Archive Deposit.
- 29.
Charles Villet was a young botanist who was determined that the Theatre turn a profit. With his knowledge of the Comédie Francaise and the Opéra Comique together with the post-revolution vogue for melodrama, he drew on the French citizenry for actors.
- 30.
Plays by Beaumarchais and Belphégor were favorites, presumably partly because the texts were available and, more importantly, because they were popular in late eighteenth-century France. The French company also performed in Dutch, and in 1811, they combined forces with the Dutch Amateur Company under the headline “Honi Soit qui Mal y Pense.”
- 31.
See Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870, 55–60.
- 32.
Dutch companies include “Tot Nut en Vermaak” (formerly the Dutch Amateur Company), “Door Yver Vrughtbaar,” “Door Yver Bloeit de Kunst,” “Vlyt en Kunst,” “Private Dutch Theatrical Company,” United Dutch and French Amateur Theatrical Company under the name “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense,” and two children’s companies, “Tot Oefening en Smaak” and “Kunst en Smaak.” English-speaking companies in the period include “The English Amateur Theatrical Company,” (later “English Theatricals”), “The Amateur Company,” or “Private Amateur Company,” “The Garrison Amateur Company” (all-male), perhaps morphing into “Gentlemen Amateurs,” “Cape Town Amateur Company,” “All the World’s a Stage,” perhaps identical to the “English Private Company,” and “Private Amateur Company.” Sources for this information are F. C. L. Bosman, Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika; The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser; The South African Chronicle; The South African Commercial Advertiser; and The Moderator. Following these sources can very quickly devolve into reading lists. The interest lies, however, in the picture that emerges of a lively theater scene in several languages quite some time after, for example, the French language is reported to have disappeared. One can only imagine the way these amateur companies sprang up, underwent a kind of mitosis, were renamed, disappeared, and were reconvened, perhaps for a season, perhaps for a single performance. Of course, they all sound like the names of splinter political parties.
- 33.
The majority of these newspapers are located at the Cape Archive Deposit, Roeland Street, Cape Town.
- 34.
See Robert Ross, Status and Respectability, 51.
- 35.
The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, vol. 4, 11 February 1809, no. 161.
- 36.
Cited by Dennis Schauffer, “Shakespeare in Performance in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, Before 1914,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 19 (2007): 9–23.
- 37.
Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 23 July 1825.
- 38.
The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, vol. 7, 7 August 1813, no. 395.
- 39.
The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, 24 October 1818, no. 667.
- 40.
“The Dutch Amateur Theatrical Company are [sic] anxious to purchase a copy of the Play of Natuur en Pligt, of [or] De Zoon Regter. Those who may be in the possession of the same, and wish to dispose of it, will be handsomely paid; or, if inclined to lend it, the Company will feel particularly obliged.” (The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, 8 March 1823, no. 895.) And this offer was taken up because, in The Gazette of 22 March, a grateful company announced that they felt “favored” and promised to produce the play as soon as possible.
- 41.
The Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 26 July 1823.
- 42.
The South African Commercial Advertiser, 20 September 1834. The Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 16 August 1823 announced a performance of Rinaldo Rinaldini to be presented with “the splendor it requires: the magnificent Scenery is entirely new, as well as the Dresses, and both combined, will produce an effect hitherto unseen at the African Theatre.” Unfortunately, actors were known to make off with the dresses.
- 43.
Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 10 July 1829. A great deal is made in the newspapers of the period about potential audience members trying to sneak into the theater without paying for a ticket. This was equally true for the Restoration stage where theaters were also small.
- 44.
The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, 14 November and 21 November 1818, nos. 670 and 671.
- 45.
The newspapers for the period covering the life of the African Theatre include prologues and epilogues and sketches of individual actors in costume, which attest to the enjoyment to be derived from performing in these private theatricals. Despite the sparseness of the records, the subjective experience of the colonial garrison transvestite stage would make an intriguing study.
- 46.
William Wilberforce Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822 (1823; repr., London: John Murray, 1966), 167.
- 47.
Prologue to The Brothers, performed in 1807, composed and spoken by Captain Collins, African Court Calendar, 1808.
- 48.
Epilogue, composed and spoken by Captain W. Fraser, 60th Regiment, assistant to the Deputy Barracks-Master General, African Court Calendar, 1808. Here he is playing the part of Mrs. Sullen in an 1807 performance of The Beaux’s Stratagem.
- 49.
Peggy Phelan, “Crisscrossing Cultures,” in Crossing The Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, ed. Lesley Ferris (London: Routledge, 1993), 157. See her comments on 155–70, on the eroticism of all performances.
- 50.
Epilogue, composed and spoken by Captain Frazer for his 1807 performance as Mrs. Sullen.
- 51.
“Passing” has special resonance in this instance because slaves were allowed to go ahead and hold seats for their masters but were forbidden from attending the performance, even in the gallery.
- 52.
There are two mysterious exceptions to this: a Mrs. Kinniburgh, according to The African Court Calendar for 1808 (Bosman, Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, and Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa), played minor roles in The Rivals and The Tragedy of Douglas on 4 July 1807 and 15 August 1807, respectively. Bosman speculates that Kinniburgh may have been either a burgher’s wife or the wife of an under officer (107). A woman appearing on the stage in this period is clearly an exception. The other less mysterious exception is a Miss Williams, who was part of Mr. Cooke’s British touring company in 1818. She is praised in a review in The Cape Town Gazette, 31 January 1818, for her performance in The Honeymoon.
- 53.
Captain W. Frazer of the 60th regiment played the role of older women such as Lady Pentweazle; a Lieutenant Napier played all the ingénue roles. Tracking these personages through their stage career at the Cape Colony and through their prologues and epilogues is tempting but outside the argument for this study.
- 54.
I wish to thank my colleague Karen Nelson for her observation that the cross-dressing was yet another piece of promulgating English culture, maintaining the English as English in this remote outpost, and keeping the settler community entertained. Certainly, the advertisements in the newspaper records suggest that the “whole of the Characters by Gentlemen of the Garrison” was a big draw.
- 55.
See Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg, Natal,” 10–11.
- 56.
In 1800, for example, Marquis Wellesley, Governor-General of Bengal (and friend of the Barnards) had objected strenuously and dismissively to Governor Yonge’s idea of building a theater. Such a venture would end, Wellesley claimed, by transforming soldiers and statesmen into “broken Players, decayed Spouters, awkward Harlequins, and ungainly Stage dancers.” A. M. Lewin Robinson, “Dangers of a Colonial Theatre, 1800,” Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 30, no. 2 (1975): 36–40. See p. 39.
- 57.
Members of each community—Britain and South Africa—constructed images of one another based on assumptions of the other. This point is seen most clearly in productions that failed or were controversial in South Africa, yet were extremely successful in England because they had, in the words of one theater critic, export written all over the production. To put this another way, the production was designed to appeal to England’s cultural construction of “Africa.”
- 58.
Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 31 January 1818.
- 59.
South African Commercial Advertiser, 11 January 1832.
- 60.
See Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1665–1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Lisa Freeman, Character’s Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- 61.
Lady Anne Barnard, South Africa a Century Ago: Letters Written from the Cape of Good Hope (1797–1801), ed. W. H. Wilkins (1901; repr., New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969), 296.
- 62.
Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 171.
- 63.
An Occasional Address, 112, verso. These documents can be located in Box C.60.01 (1) in the British Library. This is a slim brown bound book, “Somers Miscellaneous Cuttings, etc. 1792–1802.” Various and sundry items are pasted into a scrapbook: a bank promissory note in French dated 19 July 1792, a letter in French, various recipes in French, four letters in English, the Occasional Prologue, an Occasional Address written by Mrs. Somers but delivered by her husband in 1801, and a Farewell Epilogue, written and delivered by Mrs. Somers herself in 1802. Eliza Somers was obviously at home in French and in English.
- 64.
Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, has a feminist analysis of Eliza Somers’ various addresses that is based on a misreading of Lady Anne Barnard. Russell’s argument is undermined by her conclusion that the life of the African Theatre ended in 1802. But all the newspaper records housed at the Cape Archive Deposit belie this. We know that the African Theatre continued to produce plays in Dutch and German until 1806 when the British recaptured the territory. From then until its sale in 1838 or 1839, it was a lively theatrical venue. The room in the Barracks that had served as a theater before the construction of the African Theatre continued to host theatrical performances until the mid-nineteenth century.
- 65.
Somers, A Farewell Epilogue, 111.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
Ibid., 111, verso.
- 68.
This is the term Sturgis employs.
- 69.
William John Burchell, Esq., Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, vol. I (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme, and Brown, 1824), 12.
- 70.
John Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (London: A. Strahan, 1804), 453–63.
- 71.
See Hattersley, 75, 152–58. See also Barrow, “The pleasures of the inhabitants are chiefly of the sensual kind, and those of eating, drinking, and smoking predominate” (393).
- 72.
We have Lady Anne Barnard’s word for it that tickets were expensive and beyond the reach of subalterns.
- 73.
Sturgis, 6.
- 74.
See James Sturgis, “Anglicisation at the Cape of Good Hope in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 11, no. 1 (1982): 5–32. See especially pp. 5–11, 16–18, 25–28. The word “Anglicization” was used by contemporaries to describe those policies or processes directed at assimilating the Dutch settlers into English culture. Sturgis offers a taxonomy: direct Anglicization affecting the colonial civil service, local government, and the law; indirect Anglicization affecting immigration, education, and religion over time; natural Anglicization expressed by the attitude of those who espoused British hegemony; and the informal transfer of British sports, architecture, and voluntary organizations. My argument engages most fully with the last two categories. Theatre, not included in the fourth category, belongs there, nonetheless, as a powerful expression of culture. See also Vivian Bickford-Smith, “Re-visiting Anglicisation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony,” Journal of Imperial History 31, no. 2 (2003): 82–95, for an amplification of the effects of Anglicization, particularly on material culture such as architecture, the urban landscape, leisure activities, and fashion.
- 75.
Sturgis, 5.
- 76.
See Coppélia Kahn, “Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2001): 456–78, for an elegantly stated argument that gives Shakespeare the same role of enacting a cultural performance in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. Israel Gollancz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See her interpretation of the Shakespeare summoned up by Homage as the “signifier of an autochthonous English identity, an Englishness that is self-authorized and racially pure” in a performance of a “bardic version of English imperial history” (457).
- 77.
See Adele Seeff, “A Quick Buck,” Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 59 (January–March 2005): 8–12.
- 78.
The theater is the first example in southern Africa of share-holding. See Eric Rosenthal, On Change Through the Years: A History of Share Dealing in South Africa (Cape Town and Johannesburg: Flesch Financial Publications, 1968), 17–18, for a detailed description of the transactions involving the “non-profit” theater: a letter between Henry Murphy and Governor Yonge with the attached “Proposals for establishing a Private Theatre,” and the title deed that issues one-24th share in the piece of land. Their investment turned a profit. See the Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, 19 September 1801, and the Cape Town Gazette, 13 October 1821, for announcements offering dividends to the shareholders. The theater provides the first evidence of share-holding in South Africa. It also provides evidence that the theater was a profitable little enterprise. The erf or deed of sale is available in the Cape Town municipal office: M4392; the contract between Master Carpenter Joseph van Schalkhoven and the proprietors of the piece of land is in the Cape Archive Deposit; the issue of a share to Dr. Edmund Somers is available in the Cultural History Museum, Cape Town, as is the transfer of this share from Dr. Somers to Mr. Thomas Wittenoom. At his death in 1824, his estate transferred his share to John Thomas Buck Esquire, who, by then, had the controlling interest in the theater and always turned a profit. See The Letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas, from the Cape and Elsewhere, 1793–1803, Together with Her Tour into the Interior, and Certain Other Letters, ed. A. M. Lewin Robinson, letter, 28, 252.
- 79.
Gillian Russell, as I noted earlier, looked only at the single box in the British Museum containing Eliza Somers’ addresses and concluded that the African Theatre closed its doors in 1802. See Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815, 166–72. Her error was picked up by one of her reviewers who praised her for illuminating some “overlooked areas, such as Cape Town’s African Theatre of 1800–1802, an example of the much-neglected history of entertainment in the colonies.” See Scott Hughes Myerly, “Dramatic Representations of British Solomondiers and Sailors on the London Stage: 1660–1800,” Journal of Social History, 30, no. 4 (1997), book review. There are, however, many references to the African Theatre in the travel literature of the period and in architectural history texts, as well. See, for example, Lady Anne Barnard, South Africa a Century Ago: Letters Written from the Cape of Good Hope, 1797–1801; Dorothy Fairbridge, ed., Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope, 1797–1802; William Wilberforce Bird, The State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822; John Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa; William John Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa; V. M. Golovnin, Detained in Simon’s Bay: The Story of the Detention of the Imperial Russian Sloop Diana (Cape Town: Friends of the South African Library, 1964); Lawrence G. Green, A Taste of South-Easter: Memories of Unusual Cape Town Characters, Queer Shops and Shows, Old Bars, Hotels and Cafes and the Panorama of the Streets (Folkestone: Bailey Brothers and Swinfen, 1971); Petrus Borchardus Borcherds, An Autobiographical Memoir (Cape Town: A. S. Robertson, 1861); An English Officer, Gleanings in Africa; Robert Semple’s, Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope; H. Fransen and M. A. Cook, The Old Buildings of the Cape (Cape Town: Balkema, 1980); A. F. Hattersley, An Illustrated Social History of South Africa; S. E. Hudson, The Diary of Samuel Eusebius Hudson, Chief Clerk in the Customs, Cape Town, 1798–1800, Cape Deposit Archives, Manuscript; Ronald Lewcock, Early 19th Century Architecture in South Africa; A Study of the Interaction of Two Cultures, 1795–1837 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1963); A. Naude, Cape Album (London: Howard Timmins, 1979); J. J. Oberholster, The Historical Monuments of South Africa (Cape Town: Rembrandt Van Rijn Foundation for Culture, 1972); Hymen W. J. Picard, Gentlemen’s Walk (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1968); D. Picton-Seymour, Historical Buildings in South Africa (Cape Town: Struikhof, 1989); A. Plane, Treasury of the Cape (Cape Town: Timmins, 1976); Eric Rosenthal, On Change Through the Years: A History of Share Dealing in South; Nigel Worden, E. Van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998); B. Aldridge, The Pictorial History of South Africa (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1973); R. F. M. Immelman and G. D. Quinn, Symposium on the Preservation and Restoration of Historic Buildings (Cape Town: Balkema, 1968); James Prior, Esq. R. N., Voyage in the Indian Seas, in the Nisus Frigate to the Cape of Good Hope, Isles of Bourbon, France, and Seychelles; to Madras; and the Isles of Java, St. Paul, and Amsterdam During the Years 1810 and 1811 (London: Printed for Sir Richard Phillips, 1820). Laurence Wright and Natasha Distiller, both literary historians and literary critics, are exceptions to the general rule that the African Theatre is referred to only by historians and architectural historians.
- 80.
A traveler in 1810 remarked that, “the English language may be said to be quite unknown to the natives beyond the colonial boundary, and even within that line it is very little understood.” See William John Burchell, Esq., Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, 16.
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Seeff, A. (2018). The African Theatre, Cape Town, 1801. In: South Africa's Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity. Global Shakespeares. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78148-8_2
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