Shakespeare’s London was at the centre of high commercial and intellectual activity. Merchants and adventurers were setting out for and returning from various parts of the world in search of precious stones, ivory, spices, curious artefacts and human cargo – slaves. Some of them wrote accounts of their adventures but also, perhaps more importantly, talked about them at the dinner tables of the rich and influential, as at the taverns and meeting places of the city. Shakespeare, one of the most acute imaginative minds, was absorbing all these new influences and incorporating them in his plays. Malvolio in Twelfth Night ‘does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies’, a direct reference to a new atlas published by Abraham Ortellius. Touchstone’s brain is ‘as dry as the remainder biscuit/After a voyage’, and Ancient Pistol, raising Falstaff’s expectation of absolute bliss, exclaims, ‘I speak of Africa and golden joys’.
Africa presented a unique treasury of images, landscapes and characters because the recent accounts of contemporary travellers rested on a rich bed of myths and wonders, which had been fed to English readers by classical writers like Herodotus and Pliny. It was from such fantastic stories that Othello derived his ‘Anthropophagi, and men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders’ with which he fascinated not only Desdemona but even, at first, her father. Sometimes, within the same travellers’ accounts mythological figures like Prester John jostled side by side with living men like the King of Benin with whom Shakespeare’s own contemporaries did business. This was the difference between the use of Africa and America by the English Renaissance writers. English minds had been prepared (if that is the right word) for a reception of Africa by the ancient writers in a way that they had not been for America. For John Donne, for instance, America was a ‘new found land’.
One extraordinary contemporary event brought Africa dramatically to the attention of Englishmen: the battle of Alcazar, 1578, in which Sebastian of Portugal had led his troops into Africa in a disastrous adventure in which not only he and his troops were wiped out – that was bad enough – but in which an English folk hero, Thomas Stukeley, also perished. This catastrophe was the subject of books, pamphlets and plays all over Europe. Shakespeare’s contemporary George Peele seized on the scandal with a play (1594) of the same title as that of the battle, and gave London its first full-length black character, Muly Hamet. The play was an instant success for the Admiral’s Men, Shakespeare’s rival company, and within a year, he was writing the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s answer, Aaron, in Titus Andronicus. This was the start of a line of plays with black characters, which Shakespeare topped with Othello and put an end to the fashion for a time.
Shakespeare drew from the world but he repaid the debt adequately. An East India sea captain, William Keeling, took with him copies of the plays on his journeys and, in 1607, had his men perform Hamlet in the harbour which, two hundred years later, in 1808, would become Freetown, the capital of a British colony, Sierra Leone, whose schoolchildren in their English classes would be reciting lines like ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’. Keeling’s main aim was to keep ‘his people from idleness and unlawful games’ and not to entertain the inhabitants of the area. He did, however, invite some of the dignitaries on board, though as they spoke no English they would have made little of Shakespeare’s play.1 Three centuries later, anthropologist Laura Bohannan narrated the story of Hamlet in response to the elders of the Tiv of Nigeria who had entertained her with traditional stories of their own. The elders, however, confident of the validity of their own cultural beliefs, questioned the moral basis of the Hamlet story and pointed out ‘errors’ in the interpretation.2 Nevertheless, Hamlet, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, both as reading and acting texts, were to become quite familiar to audiences all over Africa. Africans further established their ownership by translating them into their own languages. In 1962, to celebrate the first anniversary of its independence, the Sierra Leone National Theatre League presented Thomas Decker’s Krio translation of Julius Caesar on the ground of State House, Freetown. The opening lines of Mark Antony’s famous rabble-rouser come out like this in Decker’s text:
Padi dεm, kɔntri, una ɔl we de
na Rom. Mek una kak una yes ya!
A kam ber Siza, a no kam prez am
Dεn kin mεmba bad we pɔsin kin du
lɔng tem afta di posi kin don day
Bot, plenti tεm, di gud we posin du,
kin bεr wit in bon dεm, Mek i bi so
wit Siza…
The same Sierra Leonean author, apart from some delightful translations of lyrics from the plays, in which ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ becomes ‘Uspat yu de, mi yon yon pɔsin’, wrote an imaginative realisation of As You Like It under the title Udat di kiap fit. Dele Charley, another Sierra Leonean, took even more liberties in his adaptation of Macbeth, which he called Macuba. Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania, one of numerous Juliuses in Africa, translated Julius Caesar (Julius Kaisari) into Swahili in 1963.
Shakespeare has been entrenched in the school and college syllabuses of many English-speaking African countries for two hundred years, and the poetry has become part of the common currency of African writers. They have even appropriated the plays for political protests. J.P Clark, the Nigerian poet, playwright and critic, in an essay, ‘The Legacy of Caliban’, examines the role of Caliban, who has become a symbol for the oppressed colonial. He and Prospero, in The Tempest, have been recognised as standing at the opposed poles of the colonial experience. Caliban speaks:
When though camest first,
Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then lov’d thee
And show’s thee all the qualities o’th’isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.
Curs’d be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For, I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you stay me
In his rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’th’island.
As Clark commends most appropriately, ‘There has been no agitator in all of colonial Africa to better Caliban’s story and struggle’.3
One of the most striking of such applications of Shakespeare to the African scene is Dr Martin Orkin’s in his Shakespeare Against Apartheid. He selected three plays – Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear – and saw a parallel between the traditional times in which they were written and the then prevailing South African situation. In Hamlet, Claudius’ corruption of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern parallels the wholesale corruption of police, lawyers and doctors after the death of Steve Biko, the martyred leader of the Black Consciousness Movement. Othello is powerfully against the Immorality Act and the position of non-whites in that society. King Lear, similarly, is against the South African Land Act; and the dispossessed Lear, in the hands of his daughters, parallels the landless ‘masterclass’ who are manipulated by the dominant power group.4
J.P. Clark’s own creative writing style shows direct and indirect Shakespearean influences. In his play The Masquerade, the meeting of Titi and Tufa in the marketplace is reminiscent of Enobarbus’s description of that of Antony and Cleopatra on the Cyndus:
You should have seen their first meeting. It was
In the market place. Nine maids all aglow
With cam flesh from stem formed her vanguard train.
Another four of a bigger blossom,
All of them wearing skirts trimmed with cowrie
And coins, mounted props for a canopy
Of pure scarlet and lace, and cool under it5
We catch similar echoes from other poets. Ghanaian poet George Awoonor-Williams (Kofi Awoonor) was probably unconscious of Macbeth’s words ‘I am in blood/Steep’d in so far that, should I wade in no more/Returning were as tedious as go o’er’ when he wrote in his ‘Songs of Sorrow’:
Dzogbese Lisa has treated me thus
It has led me among the sharps of the forest
Returning is not possible
And going forward is a great difficulty6
In the same poet’s ‘The Year Behind’, Enorbarbus’s description of Cleopatra, ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety’, is echoed in
Age they say cannot wither the summer smiles
Now will the trappings of our working clothes
Change into the glamour of high office.7
Niyi Osundare, the Nigerian poet, uses a Shakespearean glance from As You Like It – ‘Time travels in divers paces with divers persons’ – quite familiarly, like a refrain, in his long poem Waiting Laughters.
| a termite-eaten thatch for the advent of the rain |
| a waiter | |
| a waited-upon | |
| Time | Ambles |
| In | |
| diverse |
| paces | with |
| diverse | persons |
| I, too have witnessed the pasture | |
| in the purple bleatings of probing knives | |
| And | minute |
| drag | their |
| feet | so |
| in- | finitely |
| in | grey |
| boots | of |
| leaden | hours |
| each | wink |
| a | wail |
| each | wail |
| one | eon |
| in | the |
| sleepy | chronology |
| of | drastic |
| etherings |
| Time ambles in diverse paces … | |
| History’s stammerer | |
| When will your memory master | |
| the vowels of your father’s name? | |
| Time ambles in diverse paces …8 |
In Africa, Shakespeare’s corpus is a moral repository. Themes, characters and languages encapsulated in venerated passages are often treated as guides to living – great moral parables. This approach has its drawbacks, especially when particular passages quoted for their resonance, usually out of context, are found to be loaded. Mark Antony’s lines in Julius Caesar have thus caused much agonising for preachers of memorial sermons:
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones:
(How true is this in real life?)
Pious men embroider their sermons with the following unexceptionable lines, without knowing or reflecting that Shakespeare cleverly undermined the rhetoric by putting these words into the mouth of one of his most treacherous villains, Iago:
Who steals my purse steals trash, ‘tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
But equally, other lines out of context become morally and socially therapeutic. In Uganda under Idi Amin’s reign of terror, the otherwise muzzled citizens found unexpected relief in a production of Hamlet, particularly in the lines:
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions
Not even in Amin’s Uganda could Shakespeare have been indicted for treason! This application of the lines to the immediate social situation of military dictatorship is represented in more deliberate considerations of the plays.
On the whole, it is the tragedies which make the greatest impact, all of them as reading texts and Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth the most popular as stage plays. Curiously, Othello, though very popular as a text, is seldom performed except perhaps in South Africa, where, in 1987, in a race-ridden society, Janet Suzman boldly presented a black Othello (John Kani) against a white Desdemona (Joanna Weinberg). Some of the comedies, particularly those with an active plot – Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Merry Wives, the Falstaff scenes from the Henry IV plays and The Taming of the Shrew – have all been comic successes in Africa. The reception of my own production of t...
