Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare is enlisted in the service of identity formation and nation building. Seeff offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana. The rise of Afrikaner nationalism manifests itself in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, first through language, and then through the development of Afrikaans for creative, literary endeavors. In the first half of the twentieth century, Shakespeare’s texts are harnessed to advance the Afrikaner nationalist project as Dutch evolved into the Afrikaans language. Similarly, the emergence of an African national consciousness finds a voice in the translation of a Shakespeare text into Setswana by Sol Plaatje.
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Notes
- 1.
Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 17 October 1828 and 2 February 1838.
- 2.
South African Commercial Advertiser, 25 May 1833, 25 May 1839, and 24 August 1839. Almost every week, many other books were advertised for sale including the Old and the New Testament, a History of the Jews, “12 volumes in Hebrew and English, containing 5 books of Moses,” and “5 books of writs and Hebrew Daily Prayers and Prayers for the appointed Fasts and Festivals during the Year” according to the Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, 6 April 1839.
- 3.
See Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa: 1780–1930 (Cape Town: Vlaeberg, 1994), A73. She does not provide a source for the quotation.
- 4.
The Cape Argus, 9 August 1860.
- 5.
Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, eds., Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 13.
- 6.
Eliza Somers, An Occasional Prologue, written and spoken by Mrs. Somers, 109.
- 7.
See Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 482–93, esp. 483, for Guha’s description of the club as “a surrogate for home … a circle of illumination where [an Englishman] can recognize fellow exiles by their heads bent over English newspapers and their thoughts, like his, turned to a place far away from this outpost of empire—a place called home.”
- 8.
Tiyo Soga translated Pilgrim’s Progress into Xhosa in 1866. There are, according to Isabel Hofmeyr, eighty translations, half of these in African languages. See Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
- 9.
D. M. Ramoshoana, “Shakespeare in Sechuana,” Umteteli wa Bantu, 4 (October 1930), cited in Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, 1876–1932 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 330.
- 10.
See David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 101–10, for an illuminating, theoretical discussion of Plaatje.
- 11.
See Laurence Wright, “Trafficking in Shakespeare: Origins and Prospects for the ‘Southern Hemisphere Spread of Shakespeare’ Research and Publication Programme,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 19, no. 1 (2007): 71–75.
- 12.
Mark Thornton Burnett, “Writing Shakespeare in the Global Economy,” in Writing About Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey 58, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185–98, comments on a nationless Shakespeare who is mediated by a process of localization.
- 13.
In one instance, David Garrick’s appropriation of Davenant’s operatic version of Macbeth appeared in 1882 in Pietermaritzburg, Natal: a transmission route beginning in 1673 with Davenant, moving through the hands of Garrick, and coming to rest in remote Natal in a British garrison town.
- 14.
Burletta was a term that described a performance at the minor theaters which included five or six songs per act.
- 15.
Shakespeare was global in his own lifetime, as we know from performances of the texts in Germany. The dispersal of people, artifacts, and capital, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accelerated in the nineteenth century.
- 16.
After its premiere at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Birmingham, the play transferred to the Haymarket, London, 30 April 1864, where it was a huge success. Its success on a London stage guaranteed its passage out to the Cape Colony with actor-manager Roebuck. This is a small illustration of the transmission of dramatic material to the Colony. In 1847, the year before Lycett’s arrival, the garrison soldiers presented The Merchant of Venice in the Barracks Theatre. Two amateur theatrical groups whose names will be familiar from Chapter 2, the “Private Amateur Company” and “All the World’s a Stage,” were occasionally active in the production of Shakespeare. See Internet Shakespeare Editions, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/sa2/, accessed March 2012.
- 17.
Amateur actors continued to perform in Shakespeare’s plays, as they had done in the first half of the nineteenth century at the African Theatre. In that earlier period, however, as we saw in Chapter 2, only amateur actors appeared on the stage, and, for the first two decades of the century, only men performed on stage.
- 18.
Percy Ward Laidler, The Annals of the Cape Stage, 1st ed. (London: William Bryce, 1926), 54. This view of Lycett is contested by Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 77. She cites W. G. Groom, Cape Illustrated Magazine, vol. 8 (10 September 1897), 520, 547. Laidler economizes with footnotes, as I noted in Chapter 2, so his information cannot be verified. Furthermore, the performance of the third act only of Hamlet contradicts this claim.
- 19.
Ibid., 54. There are no footnotes to support this information.
- 20.
Ibid., 55.
- 21.
Ibid., 78. Gustavus Vaughan Brooke was well known in England for his portrayals of Romeo and Othello. He had played Othello to Macready’s Iago. A Miss Cathcart and a Mr. Young were the other two actors.
- 22.
Ibid., 54, for a mention of Richard III, 58, for a description of the Hamlet production. This, despite Laidler’s claim that Lycett produced full text Shakespeare only.
- 23.
This theater opened with pieces by a French Theatrical Company. The reappearance of a French amateur theatrical group is a trend that continues from the earlier period during the life of the African Theatre. The source for Lycett’s Richard III is Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa. See p. 77 for more detail. She gives no documentation for her citation of the “splendour [sic] of the dresses, scenery and the excellence of the acting.”
- 24.
The Playbill is reproduced in Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 82. It is worth noting the three accompanying ballads if only to illustrate the variety—in terms of tone, genre, and mood—of the program. “You’ll Remember me,” an aria from Michel William Balfe’s opera, The Bohemian Girl, a popular parlor piece, is based on La Sonnambula. Charles Dibdin’s “Wapping Old Stairs” is a song about young Molly’s plea to her lover to remain true to her, despite the fact that she cannot claim the title of wife. And “Molly Bawn,” in its turn, is an Irish ballad in which a young fowler mistakes his beloved for a faun and shoots her. The aria from La Sonnambula, “Do not mingle sorrow with the rapture now stealing over me” (“Ah! non giunge”) is one of the showpieces of Italian opera. To contrast this aria with the ballad from the Balfe opera, with “Wapping Old Stairs,” and with “Molly Bawn,” all followed by a smattering of scenes from Romeo and Juliet, is to grasp immediately the flavor of an evening at the theater at the Cape in 1851. The program is a harbinger of the English variety show.
- 25.
Apparently, La Sonnambula, tacked on to the end of a performance of a play, was a great favorite. See Laidler, Annals, 68. La Sonnambula was a hit in New York in the 1830s and the 1840s; The Bohemian Girl premiered in New York in 1844. Once again, the Atlantic Basin is the source for travelling cultural artifacts. The playbill moves easily from genre to genre and from art form to art form.
- 26.
“God Save the Queen” is simply displaced onto one of Britain’s colonies.
- 27.
“The alterations in the … play are few, except in the last act; the design was to clear the original as much as possible, from the jingle and quibble, which were always thought a great objection to performing it,” wrote David Garrick in his Advertisement to the 29 September 1750 adaptation, recalling almost precisely Nahum Tate’s discovery in King Lear of a “Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht; yet so dazzling in their Disorder, that I soon perceiv’d I had seized a Treasure.” See Horace Howard Furness, ed., King Lear, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), 468. For Garrick’s comments, see Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, eds., The Plays of David Garrick, vol. 3 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 78. Over the course of three revisions, Garrick added the brief reunion for the lovers before their death; he excised Rosaline, whom Garrick considered a blemish; and he added a very brief funeral procession accompanied by a chorus singing a dirge.
- 28.
A quick look at Garrick’s 1750 adaptation, slightly bolder than his 1748 version, confirms this supposition. Garrick followed Thomas Otway whose Juliet awoke before Romeo dies, thereby granting the lovers more than seventy lines of dialogue together before their death. Garrick’s brief funeral procession for Juliet was omitted from the stage of the Commercial Exchange. The act and scene numbers in the 1851 program make absolutely no dramatic sense at all when applied to Shakespeare’s play, but they do fit Garrick’s revision. What the audience saw was, indeed, love, marriage, and death, facilitated by the Friar and the Nurse.
- 29.
We saw in the earlier period how relatively frequently Katharine [sic] and Petruchio, Garrick’s much-loved afterpiece, was performed at the African Theatre.
- 30.
See John J. Joughin, ed., “Shakespeare, National Culture and the Lure of Transnationalism,” in Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 286.
- 31.
Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 100.
- 32.
Ibid., 99.
- 33.
See Laidler, Annals, 94.
- 34.
See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 116. According to Fletcher, Searelle toured throughout the country, going as far as Rhodesia and Delagoa Bay.
- 35.
Excalibur, 3 April 1889.
- 36.
See Dennis Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, Prior to 1914,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 19 (2009): 9–23. See esp. 16.
- 37.
Shakespeare, however, was never as popular in southern Africa as he was in America in the first half of the nineteenth century. See Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
- 38.
In 1846, two plays were offered in a large room in the Barracks in Pietermaritzburg Natal, and the first Shakespeare production there—also a garrison soldiers effort—took place, according to Schauffer in “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg,” 10, in 1847. Johannesburg only became a theater city after the discovery of gold, and then it was a focus for Shakespeare productions.
- 39.
See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 79.
- 40.
Ibid., 81.
- 41.
As Henry IV was one of Shakespeare’s plays that escaped alteration or adaptation on the eighteenth-century stage, except for the occasional omission from the play of 3.1 (the scene with Lady Mortimer, who speaks only Welsh), we can assume that the audience at the Lyceum Theatre saw Shakespeare’s play and not the work of a redactor.
- 42.
See Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg,” 10. He cites the Natal Witness, 29 April 1851.
- 43.
Ibid., 10, for Schauffer’s speculation that the performance could have been “either a lampoon of one kind or another or an extract, scene, or monologue from the play.” He supplies no evidence for this observation beyond the appearance a year later of The Death of Julius Caesar, which he speculates must have been a single scene because it appeared on the playbill together with The Rivals and a farce, House Dog. He must be correct. Roads were unlit, cattle roamed the roads at night, and, traditionally, playbills announced a play for 8:00 p.m. It is impossible to visualize a full-length production of Julius Caesar, The Rivals, and a farce as one evening’s entertainment. There is a Julius Caesar Travestie of 1861, but this is obviously too late. The Death of Julius Caesar, to my knowledge, is not a burlesque. The Garrison Players would have acted in all these productions—if they were productions. Stanley Wells, Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques, vols. 2, 3, and 5 (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1978), vol. 2, p. xii, cites an anonymous, unpublished (italics mine) Macbeth Travestie that was performed at the Strand Theatre in 1842. The dates fit; 1847, in Natal, is too early for Talfourd’s 1847 Macbeth Travestie or the 1847 American W. K. Northall-Mitchell Macbeth Travestie in Two Acts. So, one could speculate that someone on board ship had an actor’s copy in manuscript of the anonymous Macbeth Travestie, 1842, if Schauffer is correct in his speculations. Single scenes were common in the period: the trial scene from A Merchant of Venice, for example, in Pietermaritzburg in 1867. Laidler, Annals, 100, notes that “the old run of acts or scenes from Shakespeare, and scratch companies, appeared once more” in 1888–1889.
- 44.
See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 81, and Laidler, Annals, 78.
- 45.
Wright believes that the earliest Shakespeare performances outside Cape Town, based on print records, like the earliest Shakespeare performances at the Cape, were acted by the British garrison soldiers. See Laurence Wright, “Trafficking in Shakespeare,” 73. See also Laurence Wright, “Shakespeare on the South African Stage: From Farce to Shakespeare,” Internet Shakespeare Editions, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/sa1/, accessed March 2007.
- 46.
Wright, “Trafficking in Shakespeare,” 73.
- 47.
As late as 1882 and 1891, touring companies were performing selections, rather than full-text versions, of Shakespeare plays.
- 48.
See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 117. See Fletcher, 113, for her citation of D. C. Boonzaier in Theatrical Cape Town, “His [Searelle’s] coming was an event in the history of our theater, for in those days South Africa was more or less cut off from the rest of the world.” Even Fletcher, herself an avid Anglophone, remarks that Searelle started the trend of bringing “top foreign talent to South Africa” (p. 113). This is inaccurate. Actors from Britain had been visiting the Cape Colony since the early years of the nineteenth century and had always been regarded as “top” in comparison to local talent. This did not change until the 1970s and 1980s.
- 49.
Born in New York, educated in Paris, and already a star in New York, she was the first actress ever to be created a Dame Order of the British Empire.
- 50.
See Genevieve Ward and Richard Whiteing, Both Sides of the Curtain (London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne: Cassell and Company, 1918), 173, www.archive.org/stream/bothsidescurtai00whitgoog#page/n218/mode/2up, accessed March 2017.
- 51.
We have her own account of the tour: “We played in Johannesburg eleven weeks and produced sixteen plays. The work was very hard, as we had a change of bill every three nights, and we had prepared only some ten pieces on our starting for Africa. … Our success was so marked that we even gave six of Shakespeare’s plays, till then a thing unknown there–Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing.” See Ward and Whiteing, Both Sides of the Curtain, 174.
- 52.
The move toward performing full-text versions of Shakespeare’s plays begins earlier in the United States. See Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 33–34. Because of the length of the individual plays, farces disappear from the playbill and the play itself “constitute[s] the Evening’s Entertainment” (p. 33). Levine theorizes that Shakespeare, without the jugglers, acrobats, singers, and instrumental music, was divorced from everyday life and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, became “Culture” (p. 34). The end of the nineteenth century in southern Africa also marks the appearance of full-text versions.
- 53.
See Ward and Whiteing, Both Sides of the Curtain, 174.
- 54.
Ibid., 178. See Ward’s chapter on her visit to South Africa in Both Sides of the Curtain, 170–84. See particularly her account of rehearsing on deck during the voyage out to Cape Town. The captain “marked out a part of the deck … for our [sic] mimic of Shakespeare’s ‘mimic stage’” (p. 170). One cannot but be reminded of Homi Bhabha’s “sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond’.” See Homi Bhabha, Locations of Culture (1994; repr., Oxford: Routledge, 2005), 1.
- 55.
Rayne was invited by William J. Holloway of the Lyceum Theatre, London to join a company that Holloway was taking out to southern Africa. By 1895, all major cities in southern Africa had a theater: the Theatre Royal in Durban, the new Opera House in Cape Town, an Opera House in Port Elizabeth, and in Johannesburg, the Standard, the Gaiety, and the Theatre of Varieties. These were typical Victorian theaters complete with dress circle, gallery, and rows of boxes, all lit by electricity.
- 56.
See Victor Houliston, “The Merchant of Venice in the City of Gold: The Tercentenary in Johannesburg,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 9, Special Section, South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Laurence Wright (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 46–65. Houliston remarks that Rayne dominated the Johannesburg theater scene from 1898 to 1912.
- 57.
“Shakespeare in South Africa: The Earlier Twentieth Century,” Internet Shakespeare Editions, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/sa3/, accessed March 2012. According to this website, the list of Shakespeare plays is by no means comprehensive.
- 58.
Each of the actor-managers who dominate the nineteenth-century narrative about Shakespeare’s place in the Colony invited their share of imported “stars” from abroad. Roebuck recruited the American tragedian Boothroyd Fairclough (himself a globetrotter to New York, London, and Melbourne) to “star” in a popular season of Shakespeare. Searelle’s imported stars included a Mrs. Brown-Potter and her partner, Kyrle Bellew. Mrs. Brown-Potter had made her acting reputation as an amateur in America and as a professional in London and in Australia—the by-now familiar trajectory. If one reads the theater histories about her, she was a beautiful, but certainly a minor, actress. Kyrle Bellew had performed in London, most notably with Henry Irving. Early in 1892, they embarked on what was intended to be a five-month Shakespearean tour, which opened at the Exhibition Hall to great acclaim. Romeo and Juliet was a great success, as was Hamlet. However, the tour was precipitously cut short in February of 1892 when the Exhibition Theatre in Cape Town burned to the ground. Shortly afterward, the two actors returned to England.
- 59.
Shakespeare: The Players. “Shakespeare” http://shakespeare.emory.edu/actordisplay.cfm?actorid=4, accessed January 2012 (site discontinued).
- 60.
Theater historian Dennis Schauffer describes a Morton Tavares as “an Australian performer on tour to the colonies.” Tavares is yet another example of the globalized circulation of actor-manager-theater owners circumnavigating the Atlantic Ocean, in this instance from the Caribbean Sea to Britain, and later, by way of the Indian Ocean to Australia, and thence to Natal on his way back to Jamaica via a brief visit to Britain. Tavares produced Macbeth, adapted by Davenant and then reworked by Garrick.
- 61.
The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello were the other plays. I am assuming that Shrew was Shakespeare’s play, rather than Garrick’s. See Richard Madelaine, “‘Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth’: Audiences’ Ingratitude and Oscar Asche’s Tour of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, 1912–1913,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 19, no. 1 (2007): 1–8.
- 62.
Stanley Wells, Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques, vols. 2, 3, and 5; Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; and Richard W. Schoch, Not Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- 63.
See Jane Moody, “Writing for the Metropolis: Illegitimate Performances of Shakespeare in Early Nineteenth-Century London,” Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 61–69. Moody makes the point that theater reviewers regarded Whitechapel as a “theatrical terra incognita: distant, exotic, primitive, and sometimes threatening” (p. 61). All the minor or illegitimate theaters were outside London in what were considered less than respectable neighborhoods whose audiences were deemed “vulgar.”
- 64.
Ibid. See also Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 65.
One of the most accomplished actors of the period, Frederick Robson, acted mainly in burlesque at the Olympic Theatre to great acclaim.
- 66.
See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 90. The South African Chronicle, 15 March 1861, comments on Mr. Milton’s performance as Desdemona: “Mr. Milton … excited the sympathies of the audience to an extraordinary extent, brought to a climax by the very graceful manner in which she [Desdemona] gave up the ghost.” It is possible that the Othello Travestie was presented for a third time six months later that same year. See Fletcher, 92, for the review: “They managed to give very high tragedy the effect of low, very low comedy. They convulsed the audience with laughter at certain highly tragic passages.” No further information is available on this performance. Dowling’s Othello Travestie had premiered at Liverpool’s Liver Theatre in 1834 before transferring to London.
- 67.
See Laidler, Annals, 60. Laidler, 72, makes mention of a burlesque of Shakespeare (unnamed) “then very much in vogue” during the 1857–1858 theatrical season organized by a “Powerful Dramatic Club of gentlemen amateurs.” There is no further record of this performance or the one the following year in 1859, by a rival company of amateurs, the “Boscawen Amateurs.” And for all three performances of A Travesty of Macbeth, the question of which travesty cannot be settled. Once again, there are at least three possible candidates. See Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 188–91, for his bibliography of burlesques.
- 68.
The source for this is Laidler, Annals, 60 and 73, respectively.
- 69.
At the urging of the Cape Argus, Parry attempted a production of Richard III “in a style of completeness never yet attempted here.” Critical response was scathing. Similar claims of restoring the complete text of Shakespeare were made in the mid-Victorian period in London. It was rarely true in London and, to judge from the critical response, not true in 1860 at the Cape either. The critic for the Monitor, 11 April 1860, castigated Parry for presenting such a radically abbreviated text. One could infer from the sustained popularity of Colley Cibber’s Richard III in London theaters that Parry had used Garrick’s reworking of Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III. However, Laidler, Annals, 84, describes the production as “Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, with much of the dialogue left out, and the remainder travestied.” Theater historian Schoch cites more than a half dozen burlesques or travesties of Richard III that could qualify as candidates by virtue of their date of publication. Unfortunately, these records for the Cape Colony are lost to us.
- 70.
Laidler, Annals, 84. Laidler also notes that both these burlesques were performed by the officers of the 1st Battalion of the 9th Regiment. However, contrary to the burlesque tradition where men regularly performed the roles of women, in the Macbeth Travestie, the roles of Lady Macbeth and Portia were played by the then-manager of the Theatre Royal, a Madame Marie Durer. The Macbeth Travestie was composed in 1847 and first published in Oxford in 1848, said to be a second edition. See Wells, Shakespeare Burlesques, vol. 3, ix. It was first performed publicly (the first two private performances were at Oxford and then at Talfourd’s parents’ home) either in 1848 at the Strand Theatre (unsubstantiated) or in 1853 at the Olympic Theatre with Frederick Robson in the role of Lady Macbeth. Talfourd offers a very different genre of burlesque from Dowling, Rice, or any of the other blackface burlesques, although the burlesque does contain several imitations of songs from Negro minstrel shows. The 1858 edition has additional songs and choruses and has more of a Negro minstrel flavor. Talfourd, an Oxford University student, produced a rash of burlesques and performed in them. He wrote his Macbeth Travestie for an all-male amateur performance at Oxford for Oxford undergraduates and played Lady Macbeth himself. There were a number of private performances and it has a private theatricals feel to it. In Talfourd’s Macbeth burlesque, everybody is alive at the burlesque’s close; Macbeth tenders his resignation good-naturedly to Duncan, Lady Macbeth and Banquo enter arm in arm, and all is well. See Michael Dobson, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 87. Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, does not mention Talfourd’s Macbeth Travestie or Shylock, or, The Merchant of Venice Preserved.
- 71.
See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 68. Fletcher cites the Cape Town Mail, whose reporter attributes the Othello Travestie and Operatic Burlesque to Dowling. I could find no mention of it in Laidler, Annals. Maurice Dowling, Othello Travestie: An Operatic Burlesque Burletta in Two Acts (London: Lacy’s Acting Editions, n.d.).
- 72.
Maurice Dowling, Othello Travestie: An Operatic Burlesque Burletta in Two Acts.
- 73.
See Michael Neill, ed., Othello, the Moor of Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 43.
- 74.
The South African Commercial Advertiser, 6 June 1855.
- 75.
Tilden G. Edelstein, “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. James H. McPherson and J. Morgan Kousser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 356–69.
- 76.
Maurice G. Dowling, Othello Travestie: An Operatic Burlesque Burletta in Two Acts (London: John Duncombe, 1843), 10–11, reprinted in Wells, Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques, vol. 2. See Joyce Green MacDonald, “Acting Black: Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness,” Theatre Journal 46, no. 2 (1994): 231–49, esp. 236–37, for her analysis of the way that minstrel dialect and behavior function to maintain constructed ideologies of race and class.
- 77.
See Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 27, for his early observation that Charles Mathews popularized the representation of the black man that was widely available in the minstrel show, both in America and in Britain.
- 78.
Dowling, Othello Travestie, stage direction, 42, reprinted in Wells, Shakespeare Burlesques, vol. 2.
- 79.
Dowling, Othello Travestie, 14–15, reprinted in Wells, Shakespeare Burlesques, vol. 2. Othello’s contribution to the exchange with Brabantio is his song, sung to the tune of “Yankee doodle:” “When de maid a man prefer / Den him no can pass her. / Yes, it is most werry true / Him take dis old man’s daughter” (Wells, Shakespeare Burlesques, vol. 2, 13).
- 80.
Tracy C. Davis, ed., The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2011), 267.
- 81.
Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg,” 11.
- 82.
See Joyce Green MacDonald, “Minstrel Show Macbeth,” in Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance, ed. Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 58–60. British actor William Mitchell, who emigrated to America where he established his own Olympic Theatre in Manhattan, was the star of the 1847 Macbeth Travestie. He is another example of the circum-Atlantic transfer of performance styles.
- 83.
William Knight Northall, Macbeth Travestie (New York and Baltimore: William Taylor & Co., 1847). The cover page announces that this “Travestie was written for the Olympic Theatre, New York, and first played there on the 16th October 1843. Mr. Mitchell performed Macbeth.”
- 84.
William C. Carroll, ed., Macbeth: Texts and Contexts (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999).
- 85.
Joyce Green Macdonald, “Minstrel Show Macbeth,” 59.
- 86.
See Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg,” 11. I mention consecutive-night performances because the idea of a “run” was not common practice at that stage.
- 87.
See Nicholas M. Evans, “Ira Aldridge: Shakespeare and Minstrelsy,” in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 157–79; Bernth Lindfors, “Ira Aldridge as Macbeth,” in Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance, ed. Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 45–54.
- 88.
See Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg, Natal,” 10–11. Certainly, from 1843 onward, the 45th Regiment stationed at Fort Napier, Natal, felt free to combine Negro Minstrels, versions of Shakespeare’s plays, and other entertainments. Robert Hornback, “Black Shakespeareans vs. Minstrel Burlesques: ‘Proper’ English, Racist Blackface Dialect, and the Contest for Representing ‘Blackness;’ 1821–1844,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 125–60, claims that it was “inevitable that Shakespeare would be appropriated by the minstrel tradition generally, and by T.D. Rice in particular, given that Shakespearean plays were regularly on the bill with Jim Crow.” See esp. 149.
- 89.
See John G. Blair, “Blackface Minstrels in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” American Studies International 28, no. 2 (1990): 52–65; Ray B. Browne, “Shakespeare in American Vaudeville and Negro Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1960): 374–91; Tracy C. Davis, The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance; Tilden G. Edelstein, “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage,” 356–69; Helen Gilbert, “Black and White and Re(a)d All Over Again: Indigenous Minstrelsy in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Theatre,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 4 (2003): 679–98; Charles Haywood, “Negro Minstrelsy and Shakespearean Burlesque,” in Essays in Honor of B.A. Botkin (Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1966), 77–92; Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655–1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Robert Hornback, “Black Shakespeareans vs. Minstrel Burlesques;” Robert Hornback, “Speak[ing] Parrot and Ovidian Echoes in Othello: Recontextualizing Black Speech in the Global Renaissance,” in Othello: The State of Play, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 63–93; Coppélia Kahn, “Forbidden Mixtures: Shakespeare in Blackface Minstrelsy, 1844,” in Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, ed. Paul Edward Yachnin and Patricia Badir (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 121–44; Robert M. Lewis, From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Joyce Green Macdonald, “Acting Black,” 231–49; Joyce Green Macdonald, “Minstrel Show Macbeth,” 55–63; Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past and Present (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999); Michael Neill, ed., Othello, the Moor of Venice, 42–44; Felicity Nussbaum, “The Theatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial Realism,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, 2nd ed., ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–90; and Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- 90.
Robert Hornback, “Black Shakespeareans,” 136.
- 91.
Ibid., 125–60. Hornback links the emergence of blackface Shakespeare and the contest over who—black or white American actors—had the right to perform Shakespeare’s texts. This cultural struggle played out around the African Theatre, New York, which successfully produced at least fifteen Shakespeare productions performed by black actors, including the renowned actor James Hewitt, from 1821 to 1824, and was subsequently closed down. Hornback is unequivocal in his judgment that blackface Shakespeare burlesque had an important role in defining the American working class. I have been immensely aided by Hornback’s article.
- 92.
See Charles Mathews, Sketches of Mr. Mathews’ Celebrated Trip to America Comprising a Full Account of His Admirable Lecture on Peculiarities, Characters, and Manners; With the most Laughable of the Stories and Adventures, and Eight Original Comic Songs (London: J. Limbird, 1823), 9, cited in Joyce Green MacDonald, “Acting Black,” 235. We should not miss the explicit juxtaposition of “Negro” speech with the imperial English anthem.
- 93.
Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 133, cited in Hornback, “Black Shakespeareans,” 129.
- 94.
See MacDonald, “Acting Black,” 237, and Hornback, “Black Shakespeareans.”
- 95.
I am grossly simplifying Hornback’s argument. The interested reader should consult his article in concert with Joyce Green MacDonald’s “Acting Black,” cited throughout this chapter.
- 96.
Hornback cites a population growth of 3470 in 1790 to 13,796 in 1830. See Hornback, “Black Shakespeareans,” 129.
- 97.
Ibid., 135, for Hornback’s description of the internal consistency of this stage black dialect with its “regularly featured malapropisms, defamiliarized phonetic spellings, swallowed syllables or elided forms, broken English, and the transposition of ds for this.” For the reference to Edwin Forrest, see Hornback, “Black Shakespeareans,” 135, citing Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13, 17, 19.
- 98.
Edwin Forrest introduced that language to New York that same year.
- 99.
Times of Natal, 23 October 1857, cited by Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzbug,” 21. Schauffer is correct when he remarks, “Racial attitudes in the colonies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their effect on theatre [sic], the development of a theatrical tradition, theater economics, and social demographics would make a fascinating study in its own right” (21). “St. Helenites” refers to blacks who had made their way from the island of Saint Helena to the Cape sometime between 1815 and 1830, thanks to the schooner travel under the control of the British East India Company who governed the island at that time. It is not clear exactly how they made their way to Natal. “Coolie,” during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a racial slur applied to anybody from Asia, southern China, the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines, or Indonesia.
- 100.
See Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg,” 21.
- 101.
In Cape Town, in 1875, actor-manager Disney Roebuck included an Ashantee Dance and a Chorus made up of a band of “coloured boys picked from the streets of Cape Town” in his production of Brown and the Brahmins. This is the first occasion that I could find of Coloureds appearing onstage. But this production emerges after burlesque had disappeared from the theatrical scene in Cape Town. Two years later, in 1877, Disney Roebuck produced a benefit performance to aid the sick and wounded Muslems of the Turkish army, urged to do so by the Cape Times, 3 August 1877, whose reporter approved of the Malays’ sympathy for their “co-religionists fighting so far away, and against fearful odds.” On the actual occasion of the benefit, the newspaper registered its approval, this time at the “picturesque appearance” of the pit “filled with gaily dressed Malays, men and women, amongst whom the turbaned priests were conspicuous.” See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 99, for her comment that this performance of “extravagant contortions of body and limb” caused “a furor among audiences who were seeing coloured [sic] folk on the stage for the first time.” The Cape Argus, 27 July 1875, however, was enthusiastic: “We are glad that an attempt is being made to utilize in this way the class which chiefly produces the street Arabs of Cape Town.”
- 102.
Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 63–64.
- 103.
Ibid., 64, and Christopher Arthur Holdridge, “Sam Sly’s African Journal and the Role of Satire in Colonial British Identity in the Cape of Good Hope, c.1840–1850” (MA diss., University of Cape Town, 2010). Cruikshank’s caption was set to music by Charles Dibdin. That these cartoons were reasonably widely known is attested to by the play, The Bottle, performed during the 1848 theater season at the Cape. The Bottle is based on a series of eight Cruikshank cartoons depicting the evils of drink. See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 77.
- 104.
See Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival, 80: “In 1846, Sam Sly … advised … a famous singer to sing ‘Jim Crow’ because it is so well known.” The song was also used by another theatrical producer in Cape Town, Charles Etienne Boniface.
- 105.
W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow, 4. According to Hornback, 1828, is the moment when T. D. Rice first danced “Jim Crow.”
- 106.
Ibid., 80.
- 107.
The Cape Chronicle advertisement for the first performance of Christy’s Minstrels at the Theatre Royal, Cape Town, 20 August 1862, cited in Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival, 79.
- 108.
The Ethiopian Serenaders also performed for Queen Victoria in London and for Prince Albert when he visited the Cape in 1860.
- 109.
Cited by Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival, 81.
- 110.
Joyce Green MacDonald, “Acting Black,” 231.
- 111.
Ibid., 232.
- 112.
Eric Lott, “‘The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1991): 235, cited in Joyce Green MacDonald, “Acting Black,” 233.
- 113.
MacDonald, 237.
- 114.
Robert Ross, “Cape Town (1750–1850): Synthesis in the Dialectic of Continents,” in Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context, ed. Robert Ross and Gerard J. Telkamp (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 105–21. See p. 111.
- 115.
See Vivian Bickford-Smith, “South African Urban History, Racial Segregation and the Unique Case of Cape Town?” Journal of South African Studies 21, no. 1 (1995): 63–78.
- 116.
See Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, eds., “The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa (New York: Longman, 1987), 1–70. See also Norman Etherington, “Natal’s Black Rape Scare of the 1870s,” Journal of South African Studies 15 (1988): 36–53, for an analysis of Natal’s rape scare of the 1870s and his argument that the panic was the result of a fear of losing control over an enormous black population. However, the scare resulted in repressive legislation regulating African workers in towns, which led, in its turn, a few years later, to the introduction of pass law legislation to control day laborers in Pietermaritzburg. See also R. L. Watson, Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Pamela Scully, “Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 335; and Jeffrey Martens, “Settler Homes, Manhood and ‘Houseboys’: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare of 1886,” Journal of South African Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 379–400.
- 117.
See Vivian Bickford-Smith, “A ‘Special Tradition of Multi-Racialism’? Segregation in Cape Town in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in The Angry Divide: Social & Economic History of the Western Cape, ed. Wilmot James and Mary Simons (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989), 47–62.
- 118.
See Eric Lott, Love and Theft, 4.
- 119.
See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 83. Roach also speaks of the syncretism and ubiquitous nature of American popular culture in circum-Atlantic performance, 69.
- 120.
Helen Gilbert, “Black and White and Re(a)d All Over Again,” 683.
- 121.
The Cape Chronicle, 22 August 1862, cited in Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival, 81.
- 122.
Natal Witness, 3 April 1882, cited by Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg,” 14.
- 123.
See Laidler, Annals, 101. This could be The Rival Othellos, an 1876 British burlesque, which first appeared at the Strand Theatre, London.
- 124.
See David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa, 67–69, for his description of how English literature, particularly Shakespeare, was taught to classes of male students.
- 125.
See David Johnson, 47 ff., for the Cameron report, 1869; footnote 16, 219, for Coley, 1888, on the virtues of a classical education; and see 69, for examples of M.A. examination questions set in 1897 by the University of the Cape of Good Hope. One of these examination questions captures the imperial spirit implicit in the transportation of British patriotism to one of its colonies: “Trace the growth, in the literature of the 16th century, of that patriotic spirit which culminates in the historical plays of Shakespeare: and show how English History and English Literature illustrate each other.” See also Laurence Wright, “Introduction: South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Special Section, South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Laurence Wright (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 3–27; Laurence Wright, ed.,“Cultivating Grahamstown: Nathaniel Merriman, Shakespeare and Books,” 2008, http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/isea/SHSOS/index.html, accessed March 2012; and Wright, “Nathaniel Merriman’s Lecture: ‘On the Study of Shakespeare,’” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 20 (2008): 39–61.
- 126.
See David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa, 68.
- 127.
The commodification and domestication of various meta-textual representations of Shakespeare is a topic beyond my scope. However, a bust of Shakespeare as the “Bard of Avon” was positioned between Tragedy to the Bard’s left and Comedy to his right on the proscenium of the newly built Royal Victoria Theatre that opened in Cape Town in 1846. See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 74.
- 128.
For the first seventy years of the nineteenth-century stage in southern Africa, as in America, plays were staged in highly truncated form: selected acts, individual scenes, individual speeches, readings, or favourite [sic] impersonations, selected from the works of Shakespeare. See the Natal Witness, 27 September 1879.
- 129.
See Schauffer, 15.
- 130.
Ibid.
- 131.
Ibid., for more detail.
- 132.
Schauffer, “Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg,” 15.
- 133.
“PMB History,” http://www.pmbhistory.co.za/?showcontent&global[_id]=86, accessed December 2011 (site discontinued). As a predominantly white English-speaking settler town, Pietermaritzburg was poised to reproduce, among its white population, a colonial version of Britain’s monolingual society of the years 1830–1900. This was particularly noticeable in the variety of educational projects that emerged at the time. There were dames’ schools and ladies’ academies that were unmistakably stamped “made-in-Britain.”
- 134.
Shakespeare might have been added to matriculation examinations (inaugurated in 1858 under the auspices of the University of the Cape of Good Hope) in 1873 when the University started conferring literature degrees in South Africa.
- 135.
I include blackface burlesque under Anglophone theater, thanks to the influence of British actor Charles Mathews.
- 136.
See Laidler, Annals, 48. One of these locations, an abandoned wine store in Roeland Street, Cape Town, was fitted with two large brass chandeliers that hung through a canvas ceiling and a raised gallery constructed around the side walls to serve as a dress circle. This was a private theater where young men played the parts of women. No women were allowed on stage.
- 137.
See Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony 1750–1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 45; 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): 6.
- 138.
Combrink is mentioned in connection with an 1843 performance at the Roeland Street Theater of the Miller and His Men. See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 72.
- 139.
Ibid., 105. He also presented scenes from King John at the Barracks Theatre during a visit by the Duke of Edinburgh to Cape Town (cited in Fletcher, 105, from the Cape Argus Christmas Number, 1911), presumably in English.
- 140.
See Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 106, for her description of the attempts to suppress Dutch and Afrikaans in colonial schools in the period. Children had to wear a piece of wood with the inscription, “I am a donkey,” tied around their necks if they spoke Dutch instead of Afrikaans during school hours. The Dutch/Afrikaners felt persecuted by the adoption of English as an official language when so few of them could speak English, and equally harassed by constant reminders that the Cape was a British Colony.
- 141.
I am aware that this brief description of the development of the Afrikaans language and its relationship to Afrikaner nationalism is necessarily extremely superficial. The process was much more uneven, heterogeneous, and complicated than I am sketching here. For a nuanced account of the development of the Afrikaans language as embedded in class structures, poverty, and marginalization (this covers the period between 1902 and 1924, and I am focusing on the last third of the nineteenth century), see Isabel Hofmeyr, “Building a Nation from Words: Afrikaans Language, Literature and Identity, 1902–1924,” in The Politics of Race, Class & Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, 95–123. See Hofmeyr, 109, for the stitching together of an “Afrikaner history which could become a myth of national origin.” See also Ampie Coetzee, “Literature and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Afrikaans Literature and Afrikaner Nationalism,” in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (1990; repr., Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 322–66, for a slightly different, less class-based reading. See esp. 324, for Coetzee’s statement: “The ‘appropriation’ of the developing Afrikaans language round about 1875 as an incitement to national consciousness and the creation of a national literature to strengthen that consciousness have sited that literature within a political arena from its beginning … [T]he role of Afrikaner nationalism cannot merely be read in terms of class as it was not originally devised for domination, but rather to promote coherence among a threatened people and define their identity.” Coetzee locates the impetus for “Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners” in Afrikaner reaction against British colonization and Anglicization.
- 142.
“Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners” (“The Fellowship of True Afrikaners”) did not emerge out of nowhere. As early as the 1830s and 1840s, plays and poems were written in a popular form of Afrikaans in recognition of a nascent Afrikaner identity. All these writers were associated with the theater in one way or another. See also Yvette Hutchison, “South African Theatre,” in A History of Theatre in Africa, ed. Martin Banham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 312–79. See also Peter Titlestad and Karina Sevenhuysen, “The Struggle for Freedom: Shakespeare on the Eastern Frontier,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 19 (2007): 25–35, for an extraordinary account of John Daniel Kestell, then 26 and destined to become a leader of Afrikaner nationalism, whose play, The Struggle for Freedom, appeared on the London stage just at the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer war. An enthusiastic Shakespearean, his play was based on Shakespeare. He hailed from Bloemfontein. This is an example not only of the Shakespeare diaspora, but of the cultural power of “Shakespeare” in the service of developing nationalisms.
- 143.
See Rohan Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Productions during the Apartheid Era (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 13–31, for an illuminating, thoughtful discussion of the political history in which this production was embedded.
- 144.
Neethling-Pohl interview, cited in Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa, 15.
- 145.
As settlers, the Afrikaners’ claim to indigeneity and, therefore, nationalism, rested on the myth of empty land; southern Africa was virgin land, largely uninhabited, when the Dutch settlers arrived. In this construction, the British, black South Africans, Coloureds, and Indians were all usurpers.
- 146.
See Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa, 20. I am not doing justice to the production. Nevertheless, I include it here because it is exemplary of the themes of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Shakespeare production in southern Africa, themes that are amplified in the case studies in subsequent chapters. I have stressed the complicated linguistic, political, and historical environments to which Shakespeare’s texts migrated because it is these environments that shape Shakespeare appropriation and determine audience response.
- 147.
Ibid., 31, for Quince’s comment that this 1973 production followed in the tradition of the Sestigers (writers who emerged in the 1960s), whose membership included apartheid dissidents André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach, both of whom translated Shakespeare’s plays into Afrikaans.
- 148.
The phrase is Laurence Wright’s. See “‘From Farce to Shakespeare’: Shakespeare on the South African Stage,” May 2004, http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/sa1.html.
- 149.
Brian Willan, ed., Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), 309.
- 150.
There are more than fifty translations of Shakespeare’s texts into South African languages: Tsonga, Afrikaans, Southern Sotho, Northern Sotho, Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, Ndonga, and Venda. Nearly half are in Afrikaans. In his introduction to Diphosho-phosho, published in 1930, Plaatje lists A Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Julius Caesar as his translations to that date. Plaatje also translated Othello but that text has not survived. See also Laurence Wright, “‘From Farce to Shakespeare’: Shakespeare on the South African Stage,” 6, May 2004, http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/sa1.html.
- 151.
See David Schalkwyk and Lerothodi Lapula, “Solomon Plaatje, William Shakespeare, and the Translations of Culture,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 9 (2000), a key article on Plaatje as cultural translator; Peter Limb, “Rethinking Sol Plaatje’s Attitudes to Empire, Labour and Gender,” Critical Arts 16, no. 1 (2002): 23–42; Jane Starfield, “Rethinking Sol Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary,” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 4 (2001): 855–63; Deborah Seddon, “The Colonial Encounter and The Comedy of Errors: Solomon Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 9, South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century, ed. Graham Bradshaw, T. G. Bishop, and Laurence Wright (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 66–86; Coppélia Kahn, “Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 454–78; Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist 1876–1932; Brian Willan, ed., Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings; David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa; Brian Willan, “Whose Shakespeare? Early Black South African Engagement with Shakespeare,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 24 (2012): 3–18; Brian Willan, “‘A South African Homage’ at One Hundred: Revisiting Sol Plaatje’s Contribution to the Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916),” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 28 (2016): 1–19; Shole J. Shole, “Shakespeare in Setswana: An Evaluation of Raditladi’s Macbeth and Plaatje’s Diphoso-diphoso[sic],” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 4 (1990/1991): 51–64; Stephen Gray, Sources of the First Black South African Novel in English: Sol Plaatje’s Use of Shakespeare and Bunyan in ‘Mhudi’, Munger Africana Library Notes, no. 37 (Pasadena, CA: California Institute of Technology, 1976); Tim Couzens, “A Moment in the Past: William Tsikinya-Chaka,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 2 (1988): 60–66; and Catherine Woeber, “Review Article: Plaatje Revisited,” English in Africa, 25 (October 1998).
- 152.
There is a critical debate between Stephen Gray and Mazisi Kunene over Plaatje’s debt to Shakespeare in the novel Mhudi. See Stephen Gray, Sources of the First Black South African Novel in English; and Mazisi Kunene, “Review of Stephen Gray (1976),” Research in African Literatures 11 (1980): 244–47.
- 153.
See Solomon T. Plaatje, “A South African’s Homage,” in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. Israel Gollancz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), 210–12, reproduced in Kahn, “Remembering Shakespeare Imperially,” 471. Plaatje notes that he attended a performance of Hamlet in the Kimberley Theatre in 1896 at the age of eighteen, and the “performance made me curious to know more about Shakespeare and his works. Intelligence in Africa is still carried from mouth to mouth by means of conversations after working hours, and, reading a number of Shakespeare’s works, I always had a fresh story to tell.” Laurence Wright, telephone interview Cape Town, January 2010, for the reading as a performance.
- 154.
See Willan, “Whose Shakespeare? Early Black South African Engagement with Shakespeare.” Plaatje records a performance of Twelfth Night in Secoana, a dialect of Setswana, and English in 1874.
- 155.
For a far fuller explanation of C. L. R. James’ engagement with Shakespeare, whose greatness for James lay in the dramatist’s awareness of social change and political crises, see Lee Scott Taylor, “The Purpose of Playing and the Philosophy of History,” Interventions 1, no. 3 (1999): 373–87.
- 156.
Seddon, “The Colonial Encounter and The Comedy of Errors: Solomon Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho,” 66–86.
- 157.
Ibid., 70. Plaatje’s title means “a series of blunders/mistakes upon mistakes.” I used Shole J. Shole’s translation. See Shole, “Shakespeare in Setswana: An Evaluation of Raditladi’s Macbeth and Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho,” esp. 59, for the translation of Plaatje’s title.
- 158.
See Seddon, “The Colonial Encounter and The Comedy of Errors,” 79.
- 159.
Taken from Charles Whitworth, ed., The Comedy of Errors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5.1.426–28.
- 160.
See Seddon, 81. I am grateful to Seddon for her subtle analysis of Plaatje’s re-visioning of The Comedy of Errors.
- 161.
I have drawn here on a brief paper by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, “Why Public Culture?” Public Culture Bulletin 1 (1988): 5–9. See also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996). Richard Foulkes, in his Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), focuses on areas that are outside my study. However, his discussion of “unser Shakespeare” is apposite as is the background he provides of colonial and postcolonial Shakespeare.
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Seeff, A. (2018). The Shakespeare Diaspora. 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_3
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