Shakespeare’s role in England’s global expansion is often categorized as a conduit for Empire.1 Considerable doubt has been cast on the performances of Shakespeare’s texts recorded as early as 1607, in Shakespeare’s own lifetime, on Captain Keeling’s ship, the Red Dragon.2 It should be acknowledged that the episode may not have occurred at all. We know that a volume of Shakespeare was on board Captain Cook’s Endeavour as he sailed to New Zealand in 1769. Three decades later, on April 18, 1800, Henry IV, Part One was performed in emancipated convict Robert Sidaway’s Theatre in Sydney, Australia, a year before the first Shakespeare production in Cape Town. Shakespeare’s texts traveled, not only along imperial arteries but along trade routes as well. For example, Shakespeare’s texts were performed in English for the entertainment of European traders in Calcutta and Bombay in 1775. In this volume, I suggest that his texts function in a much more complicated way than these earlier models of transmission from London to the peripheries. Performances of Shakespeare offer a lens through which we can view the movement of peoples and their languages and cultures. People travel, and texts travel with them. For such travelers, Shakespeare’s texts form a small part of “the things they carry” to outposts of empire, bound on trading voyages, or missions of discovery. These texts serve often as markers of cultural transmission refracted through active imperialist policy making but more often through mercantile or military incursions and exchanges. Shakespeare’s texts operate, however, not simply as a matter of transmission, but as agents of exchange and interchange, determined by conditions at the local level and subject to numerous others seeking to establish political identities. In other words, Shakespeare’s texts were put to political purposes from the beginning. Thus, from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, Shakespearean productions offer windows into the particularities associated with global incursions into local environments, which shift over time and space as they do within the context of South African studies. Time and place matter, because the nature of the exchanges between Shakespeare produced or adapted, and the locality which hosts the production or adaptation shifts and the power politics at stake, change as well. Shakespearean performance, embedded in an accompanying material record, offers a useful site of analysis, not only of these cultural practices, but also of the anxieties and utopian visions of the people who enact the productions. Shakespeare is used by the forces of the locality, not just by imperial forces alone.
Linguistic practice is one of these local forces. Ideologies of language shape, modify, or offer new identities. Throughout this study, I am interested in the role of language as a political tool, as a marker of ethnic identity, as an opportunity to create new national identities. Looking beyond Bourdieu’s concept of language as symbolic capital, I investigate how identities, particularly in a multilingual, multiethnic site, can be negotiated through linguistic practice. The debate about language ideology is not about language alone, but about a vision of society: openly democratic and diverse, or minority-imposed, homogeneity. The infinite plasticity of Shakespeare’s texts renders them equally infinitely useful in serving ideological linguistic programs.
I open this study in Chapter 2 with a consideration of the significance of the African Theatre in Cape Town. The African Theatre, the first purpose-built theater in Africa, opened in 1801 with an inaugural amateur production of Henry IV, Part One, Garrick’s Shakespeare thrust into a multicultural, heteroglossic site. While many histories of South Africa, and the British Empire more generally, consider England’s successful establishment of its colonies, the early history of English efforts at the Cape during the first British Occupation between 1795 and 1803, and much more overtly after the second British conquest of the Cape in 1806, was the emergence of an English nationalism. English nationalism was accompanied by an articulated belief in the superiority of English ways and institutions. The proclamation of English as the only official language of the Colony in 1822 was a giant step toward implementing the British policy “to Anglicise the colony.”3 Shakespeare, here, allowed soldiers of the large British garrison and its relatively small expatriate community of English government agents and merchants to hear and perform “home” in a cross-cultural, polyglot society, where a variety of European languages was spoken: Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and a smattering of English. Indigenous Bantu languages such as Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Swati of the Nguni group, and the Sotho-Tswana languages of Northern Sotho (also known as Pedi), Sotho, Tsonga, and Venda were unheard among the European settler population at the Cape.4 Slaves could not attend performances at the theater, but they could hold seats for their masters.
As an artifact of the first British Occupation at the Cape, the African Theatre, in front of Table Mountain, offered a venue in Georgian theater style for the small European settler group of Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, French, German, and British origins. In addition to amateur English theatrical companies, it also served as a performance space for the vibrant amateur theater companies of the French, Dutch, and German communities at the Cape. Advertisements of those early entertainments in the first newspapers of the period indicate that Shakespeare was just one ingredient in the mix of English comedies, prologues, epilogues, and musical interludes; and these, too, were but one component in the complex rehearsals of European culture enacted in this colonial outpost. Performances in Dutch, German, French, and English took turns on the stage, performing, in turn, a repertoire from a distant motherland and, more importantly, in a “mother tongue.” In this linguistically diverse settlement, groups remained steadfastly univocal—one of the vectors of exploration at the center of this study.5
From its early history, the African Theatre is itself an undertheorized contested site. After then-Governor Yonge built it in 1801 during the first occupation of the Cape, with 6000 pounds from the British government in Whitehall, the Peace of Amiens (1802) restored the Colony to its previous owners, the Dutch. War resumed in 1803, and the British recaptured the Cape in 1806. The terms of the peace treaty, the Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic wars, left the southernmost tip of Africa in the hands of the British. This arrangement over the course of the nineteenth century would ultimately lead to developing friction between the British administration and the original Dutch settlers.
Throughout the lifetime of the theater, the first four decades of the nineteenth century, the official policy of the British administration was the introduction of British principles and practices in various areas: in the law, by means of the designation of the English language as the Colony’s only official language, and in education. These areas were the most significant, but “English ways are best” was seen in fashion, recreation, and architecture. No resistance to Anglicization was offered by the Dutch or the Germans or French. The step toward building a Dutch/Afrikaner identity was only taken in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and then initially through establishing a nation through a new language: Afrikaans.
The playbills associated with the African Theatre reflect the vibrancy of the linguistic and cultural interplay through its life as a theater. As Shakespeare, adapted in the fashion beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London dramatists, theater managers, and actors, jockeyed for position among favorites of the eighteenth-century London stage, his presence serves as a marker not for “the Bard” but, rather, as a reminder of “home” in this rich multilingual citizenry, one of many competing voices helping to articulate the many histories of South African cultural practices.
When, in 1839, the Theatre was sold and transformed to a Lutheran church and a school for runaway slaves and then, in 1857, brought under the control of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission, its transformations, until it was declared a historical monument in 1965, mirrored the way that Shakespeare’s texts were transformed. Shakespeare was brought (one among many imports) to an alien land where little English was spoken, employed as part of an informal Anglicizing project, and used to further ideological ends. Shakespeare’s texts were contested, rejected, then translated, appropriated, and re-visioned for media that were undreamed of in 1801. The African Theatre stands today, still functioning as a church and a busy curbside restaurant and with a bar at the rear, made and re-made over two centuries, much as Shakespeare’s plays have been made and re-made.
After 1822, South Africa’s linguistic history is most often described as one of cultural Anglicization and British expansion. Although these aspects certainly indicate the end result of the Anglicizing trajectory, as I demonstrate in Chapter 3, the linguistic policies are much more complex and lay the groundwork for much of the contestation around language policy that occurred throughout the twentieth century and continues to the present day. Language policy both shaped and constrained identity. Here again, Shakespeare played a role in highlighting that contestation.
In Chapter 3, I consider the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter is by no means a survey of Shakespeare in South Africa. Rather, it is an occasion to explore language as a marker of identity, particularly national identity, and to understand how imaginative literature, in particular Shakespeare’s texts, is harnessed to promote self-chosen identities. It is also an opportunity to observe the broadening of the Shakespeare diaspora. I investigate three main vectors of linguistic inquiry. The first is English, and the English colonial government’s Anglicization policy, with efforts to turn everyone into little Englishmen. Anglophone Shakespeare travels along the southeast coast of what would become South Africa in 1910 and, until the arrival of the railroad, by ox wagon into the interior. Shakespeare’s travels extend beyond high-culture Anglophone adaptations to blackface burlesque and include appropriations by working-class communities as well as higher-class efforts to educate young girls. Blackface burlesque of Shakespeare can be considered another ideologically charged language. These racialized bits of culture were exported far and wide, especially to areas of territorial expansion. Blackface burlesque of Shakespeare in South Africa in the nineteenth century provides further evidence of the globalized Shakespeare diaspora and evidence of racial tensions.6 The second vector is Afrikaans; its language codification is slower to develop, but ultimately it enacts a much more proscriptive set of policies tied to its own nationalist project, again reflected onstage and in educational practices. The Shakespearean trajectory here is more serpentine, but in 1947, on the eve of the electoral triumph of the white supremacist Nationalist government, the first production of a Shakespeare play in Afrikaans, Hamlet, took place in Johannesburg. Based on the Afrikaans translation by L. I. Coertze, the production was both the crowning touch to efforts to construct a body of literature in a new language, Afrikaans, beginning in the 1870s, and a powerful expression of Afrikaner nationalism. My third vector is a vernacular language: Setswana. Sol Plaatje, activist, founder and first General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress, and writer, asserted the primacy of an indigenous language and in 1930 offered an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors in Setswana. Besides recuperating and preserving his own language, he proposed the representation of an ideological argument in answer to the separatist, fractured identities of all South Africans: the Antipholi and the Dromios as mixed-race brothers.
South Africa, since its early beginnings as a refueling station established by the Dutch East India Company at the Cape in 1652, has been haunted by constructions of race and ethnicity. South Africa remains today a land “sundered at its heart by the politics of race.”7 In the colonial period, and then when South Africa became a republic of the British Commonwealth, the politics of race played out initially around land distribution (the Land Act of 1913) and language. Of course, later successive apartheid governments, as is well known, enacted increasingly repressive, separatist legislation.8 I am interested here in how hegemonic, oppressive language ideologies that impose homogeneity in the name of linguistic purity (coded for race) spur groups and individuals to negotiate peacefully—or otherwise—new ethnic or national identities.9 Shakespeare’s plays, implicated as they are in the politics and ideologies of the early modern period, serve readily as a scaffolding for the political anxieties of a later period: they exhibit what Michael Bristol called transumptive power.10
My case studies in Chapters 4–6 allow me to examine in turn the use of language as a means of social control in a charged political context. From the mid-nineteenth century on, in this multilingual world, Shakespeare was used as a tool to ad...