Abstract
Since the airing of the Shakespeare in Mzansi series in 2008, which concludes this study, much has changed in the landscape of South African politics and political discourse. There have been sociopolitical, economic, and institutional modes of devolution. Shakespeare’s plays have readily served as a scaffolding for the political anxieties of South African history, but what is the future of Shakespeare in a decolonizing, post-rainbow South Africa? Could these texts facilitate a theorizing of a new South African cultural identity for all South Africa? What claims can be made for the ethical study or staging of Shakespeare’s text against the counterclaims of deep inequality, unimaginable poverty, and unemployment? In the current uncertain political moment, the place of Shakespeare’s texts is hardly assured.
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Notes
- 1.
Chris Thurman, ed., South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). See “Introduction,” 2.
- 2.
I am borrowing Dennis Kennedy’s term in his essay, “Global Shakespeare and Globalized Performance,” in The Oxford Handbook for Shakespeare in Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 441–58. A number of essays in this collection connect the current international Shakespeare explosion to market forces, cultural tourism, the Festival circuit, and the Internet.
- 3.
Laurence Wright’s comment in a telephone conversation with the author in January 2010 was, “There’s a lot of it. Fugard trails behind Shakespeare.” See also Laurence Wright, “Introduction: South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century,” in The Shakespearean International Yearbook 9, Special Section, ed. Laurence Wright (Farnham and Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 3–28. See 6, for Shakespeare “is still far-and-away the country’s most produced dramatist.” In 2012, Colette Gordon corroborated this statement. See “Critical Conditions: Reviewing Shakespeare in South Africa,” Cahiers Elisabéthains 81, no. 1 (2012): 117–26.
- 4.
See Geoffrey V. Davis, “‘This Compost Heap of a Country.’ An Interview with Barney Simon in Johannesburg, 1992,” in Theatre and Change in South Africa, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1996), 232–33.
- 5.
Laurence Wright, “Introduction: South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century.” See 8.
- 6.
Michael J. Echeruo, “Shakespeare and the Boundaries of Kinship,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 7 (1994): 1–14. See 13.
- 7.
Natasha Distiller, “‘The Mobile Inheritors of any Renaissance’: Some Comments on the State of the Field,” English Studies in Africa 51, no. 1 (2008): 138–44. See 138.
- 8.
See Leon de Kock, “Sitting for the Civilization Test: The Making(s) of a Civil Imaginary in Colonial South Africa,” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (2001): 391–412.
- 9.
Cited by de Kock, 393.
- 10.
See Es’kia Mphahlele, “Prometheus in Chains,” English Academy Review 2, no. 1 (1984); Ali Mazrui, The Anglo-African Commonwealth, 1st ed. (London: Pergamon, 1967); Ali and Alamin Mazrui, The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Neville Alexander, The Intellectualisation of African Languages (Cape Town: PSAESA and University of Cape Town, 2004).
- 11.
As we know, current linguistic research emphasizes the hand of external agents such as nineteenth-century missionary ethnographers in the “making” of the official nine vernaculars. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Sinfree Makoni and Alistair Pennycook, “Disinventing Multilingualism: From Monological Multilingualism to Multilingua Francas,” in Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, ed. Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge, and Angela Creese (London: Routledge and Taylor & Francis, 2012); and Robert J. C. Young, “That Which Is Casually Called a Language,” PMLA 131, no. 5 (2016): 1207–21, all register this shift in scholarship. Consider the following explanation furnished by scriptwriter Marina Bekker in relation to the languages spoken in Death of a Queen. Balobedu-ba-Modjadji is a small tribe that forms part of the South Venda branch of the larger group of Northern Sotho language speakers in Limpopo province. Their language is Silobedu or Khilobedu, a non-Pedi dialect of Northern Sotho with similarities to Venda. Sociolects and dialects contribute to the mix of “languages.”
- 12.
“Shakespeare in Mzansi: A South African Perspective,” The SLQ Interview with Minky Schlesinger by Tinashe Mushakavanhu. http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/slq/4-1-oct2010/interviews/tinashe-mushakavanhu.html, accessed 14 June 2011.
- 13.
Stephen Smith, “Mandela: Death of a Politician,” London Review of Books 36, no. 1 (9 January 2014). Smith goes on to cite land distribution: more than 80% of privately owned land is still in white hands; South Africa’s agriculture is profitable for about 50,000 almost exclusively white farmers; the black rural population is poorer than it was; a “new” school system is worse than Bantu Education; and unemployment is at 25% but at 40% for those under age 30.
- 14.
Shakespeare ZA. Colloquium: “Decolonising Shakespeare?” Shakespeare.org.za/s/Decolonising-Shakespeare-programme.pdf, accessed 28 January 2018.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Cited in Lee Scott Taylor, “The Purpose of Playing and the Philosophy of History,” Inventions 1, no. 3 (1999): 373–87. See 373–74.
References
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Davis, Geoffrey V. “‘This Compost Heap of a Country.’ An Interview with Barney Simon in Johannesburg, 1992.” In Theatre and Change in South Africa, edited by Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996.
De Kock, Leon. “Sitting for the Civilization Test: The Making(s) of a Civil Imaginary in Colonial South Africa.” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (2001): 391–412.
Distiller, Natasha. “‘The Mobile Inheritors of any Renaissance’: Some Comments on the State of the Field.” English Studies in Africa 51, no. 1 (2008): 138–44.
Echeruo, Michael J. “Shakespeare and the Boundaries of Kinship.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 7 (1994): 1–14.
Gordon, Colette. “Critical Conditions: Reviewing Shakespeare in South Africa.” Cahiers Elisabéthains 81, no. 1 (2012): 117–26.
Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Kennedy, Dennis. “Global Shakespeare and Globalized Performance.” In The Oxford Handbook for Shakespeare in Performance, edited by James C. Bulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Makoni, Sinfree and Alistair Pennycook. “Disinventing Multilingualism: From Monological Multilingualism to Multilingua Francas.” In Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, edited by Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge, and Angela Creese. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2012.
Mazrui, Ali. The Anglo-African Commonwealth. London: Pergamon, 1967.
Mazrui, Ali, and Alamin Mazrui. The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Mphahlele, Es’kia. “Prometheus in Chains: The Fate of English in South Africa.” English Academy Review 2, no. 1 (1984).
Mushakavanhu, Tinashe. “Shakespeare in Mzansi: A South African Perspective.” The SLQ Interview with Minky Schlesinger by Tinashe Mushakavanhu. http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/slq/4-1-oct2010/interviews/tinashe-mushakavanhu.html. Accessed 14 June 2011.
Shakespeare ZA. Colloquium: “Decolonising Shakespeare?” Shakespeare.org.za/s/Decolonising-Shakespeare-programme.pdf. Accessed 28 January 2018.
Smith, Stephen. “Mandela: Death of a Politician.” London Review of Books 36, no. 1 (9 January 2014): 17–19.
Taylor, Lee Scott. “The Purpose of Playing and the Philosophy of History.” Inventions 1, no. 3 (1999): 373–87.
Thurman, Chris, ed. South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
Wright, Laurence. “Introduction: South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century.” In The Shakespearean International Yearbook 9, special section, edited by Laurence Wright. Farnham and Surrey: Ashgate, 2009.
Young, Robert J.C. “That Which is Casually Called a Language,” PMLA 131, no. 5 (2016): 1207–21.
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Seeff, A. (2018). Afterword. 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_7
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