This article argues that beneath the spectacular surface imagery of bearded hags and cauldron-boiling in Macbeth lies a sustained philosophical exploration of the power of language to shape reality. Drawing on Diane Purkiss's scholarship on early modern witchcraft, James I's Dæmonologie and Holinshed's Chronicles, the article shows how Shakespeare encodes within Macbeth a psychological and linguistic account of evil – one that quietly subverts the theological orthodoxies of his sovereign. This reading is illuminated through a comparison with Othello, in which Iago explicitly describes his destructive manipulation of others as working "by wit and not by witchcraft". In Macbeth, too, Shakespeare presents witchcraft as the planting of word-seeds in receptive minds. In the context of teaching Shakespeare in South Africa, the author reflects on how students may come to understand an apparently theological, teleological problem in psychological and linguistic – humanistic – terms.
While the study of English literature in South Africa inevitably carries some colonial residue, it can also serve as a site for decolonial education. This article considers the potential for English literary studies to produce a culturally responsive experience of texts like Hamlet through Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). It presents the findings of a study that sought to establish how role-play and narrative empathy engaged SEL when participants studied Hamlet in a second-year English Literature class. A qualitative approach was used to examine students' experiences as meaning-making subjects. As part of a larger Action Research project, this article focuses on how the social awareness SEL competency was developed through the study of Hamlet. Each cycle produced data from observation and field notes, research diaries, writing tasks and autophotography. Participants demonstrated empathy for Hamlet and other characters, considered the perspectives of other participants and examined their own understanding of social awareness in relation to Hamlet. From this SEL-specific exploration of the play, participants reflected that they learned useful social tools and how to identify danger. The article contributes to a decolonial system of knowledge that provides opportunities to build intrapersonal and interpersonal skills for South African students.
While the field of Global Shakespeare remains popular in Shakespeare studies, some Shakespeareans have been producing scholarship insisting on the recognition of Global South Shakespeare as a distinct field of inquiry. Global South Shakespeare is constituted by a growing body of work that presents appropriations, adaptations, translations, reinventions and subversions of Shakespeare within the transnational geographies of the Global South. The latest addition to this decolonial body of knowledge is the book African Shakespeare: Subversions, Appropriations, Negotiations, edited by Ifeoluwa Aboluwade, Serena Talento, Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong and Oliver Nyambi. With a clear focus on the African continent as a major stakeholder in Global South politics, the book engineers an ideology of reading Shakespeare not as a borrowed canon in Africa but as a canonical product of Africa's complex and rich encounters with Shakespeare over the centuries. In a time of Global South consciousness, this collection of essays directs our scholarly sensibilities towards an African Shakespeare consciousness that is both provocative and self-reflexive.
After enthusiastically agreeing to review Shakespeare in the 'Post'Colonies, I found myself hesitating before reading it. As a citizen of a 'post'colony (South Africa) and a descendant of colonisers, I have been down dark tunnels of outrage and guilt with regards to my ancestors' actions. This tunneling is ethically necessary, but also draining and disturbing. Shakespeare used to be a haven I escaped to from the horrors of the real world, but in academic settings, my passion for Shakespeare has been problematised to the point where I feel naïve and ignorant for simply loving his plays. This book was sure to show me more ways in which Shakespeare was and is complicit in colonial processes and legacies of manipulation, oppression and violence towards the most vulnerable. I prayed I could write something intelligible ... O, what form of prayer could serve my turn?
This article began as a paper for the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa conference, “Shakespeare Towards an End” at Spier, Western Cape, South Africa in May 2023. In its revised form it still seeks to connect to the conference title. There are three types of journeys in King Lear: journeys away from (like Lear’s from Goneril to Regan); journeys towards (like almost everyone’s towards Dover); and journeys without destination (Gloucester’s “I have no way”). From the chaotic, imprecise, unmappable travels within the play, there is the possibility of charting the ways in which the play itself travels and what the ends (as aims) as well as end (as terminal) are that those charts might show, whether it be to Hull (Ben Benison’s Jack Lear), to Korea (Kim Myung-Gon’s King Uru) or to the United States (Theatre of War’s King Lear Project), or by tracking the journeys into our awareness of characters Shakespeare excluded but whose rethought inclusion serves to show what the play resists and how we might – even must – resist it.
The isiXhosa translator of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, B.B. Mdledle, introduces the play as intlekele (a tragedy), and goes on to discuss characteristics of the genre; he cites Fate and Fortune as two forces that are vital ingredients of tragedy. The role of the witches’ equivocal prophecies is key here. In Mdledle’s Transkei (Eastern Cape), the issue of prophesying was taken very seriously – not least because of the prophets Makhanda, alias Nxele, and Nongqawuse, who plunged the region into untold disaster in the nineteenth century. This article also considers Mdledle’s UMacbeth (1959) as a form of intsomi (fable or cautionary tale), both for schoolchildren and for older readers. Furthermore, it relates the supernatural elements in Macbeth to Mdledle’s views as a Christian and to African cultural paradigms.
In her addition to the tradition of rewritings of The Tempest, Margaret Atwood makes Shakespeare travel through time, well beyond the confines of his desert island: Hag-Seed takes place inside a penitentiary in landlocked Ontario, Canada, thus prompting us to ponder how the Shakespearean text can yield new meanings for the contemporary postcolonial world. This essay shows how, in this intertextual novel, Atwood articulates a powerful reflection on freedom and imprisonment thanks to subversive Bakhtinian devices such as carnivalisation and dialogism. Indeed, the inmates of Fletcher Correctional, through their performance of a parodic version of The Tempest, subvert the authority of the Shakespearean text through a carnivalesque reversal of established rules of behaviour. The novel thus posits the importance of theatre as an educational and therapeutic tool. Further, Atwood enlists the help of popular culture as the prisoners reinterpret the Shakespearean model through a series of provocative rap numbers. Moreover, thanks to the imaginary scenarios Hag-Seed’s inmates write about the afterlives of the Shakespearean characters, the monologic authority of The Tempest is dialogised into a cacophony of unruly voices. Playful carnivalisation paradoxically enables a deeper emotional aspect of the novel: the ability of Atwood’s Prospero figure to come to terms with the trauma of the death of his daughter. In that sense, HagSeed can be seen as a long process of atonement and mourning. From an aesthetic point of view, the carnivalised performance of The Tempest illustrates Atwood’s use of metatheatricality and magical realism, the latter being rooted in a carnivalisation of the parameters of conventional realism. All in all, Hag-Seed can be construed as a novel at the crossroads between modernism and postmodernism: if it relies on a postmodern parodic gesture, it nevertheless foregrounds the epiphanic modernist agenda of achieving social justice and spiritual regeneration.
In this article, we discuss the application of feminist theory and criticism in the teaching of Shakespeare in higher education institutions and consider biographical approaches to Shakespeare as instructive for pedagogic engagements with students. We present an analysis of students’ responses to a short YouTube video about Shakespeare’s life used in a second-year English course for pre-service teachers at a South African university. The design and implementation of the course was informed by feminist Shakespeare criticism and theory which challenges the misogynistic attitudes and patriarchal ideologies embedded in Shakespeare’s works, as well as the sexist images of women appearing in many of his plays and poems. The analysis of students’ responses to Shakespeare’s life reveals that students found him to be an absent and a fugitive father and husband as well as a misogynist. Students nevertheless expressed sympathy for Shakespeare, which was neither dismissive nor defensive of his absenteeism and sexism. We argue therefore that the students’ responses echoed feminist interventions that counter the masculinist perspectives dominant in many biographical studies of Shakespeare.
Drama, more obviously than other genres of art, is a form of play; and play, according to Johan Huizinga, is essentially autotelic, or not a means to an end. Shakespeare’s plays are trivialised if they are seen essentially as means to other ends. Science conceives of the material world as an endless chain of causes, just as utilitarianism demands that all human artefacts and endeavours take their place on an eternal chain of purposes. This model devalues all its elements, for they acquire their worth only in terms of what appears next along the chain, never in or of themselves. The model is also counter-intuitive, since human experience values things, people and events differently from one another. Some items give us more pause than others; a few invite us to lose ourselves, as a child becomes lost in a game. Drama asks an audience to play along with its playing actors, pointlessly. If there is a point – moral or utilitarian – it is a mere side effect. A play, like Cleopatra’s hopping, is a digression from the straight journey of human lives toward death; and, as Freud suggests in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, detours are the only places in which the life drive makes any inroads into the death instincts’ relentless onward progress. Shakespeare’s dramatic works not only demonstrate play, and hook their audiences into the delightful, terrifying and all-absorbing world of (the) play, but they also provide a metanarrative about play, playing with the idea of playing. This essay resists the tendency to interpret Shakespeare’s dramatic works pragmatically, and instead shows, with examples from comedies and romances, especially The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and from tragedies including King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, how they refuse to be means toward other ends, but “play till doomsday”, throwing reflective aspects up to their audiences and defying the puritans to stop them as they do so.
This article began as a paper for the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa conference, “Shakespeare Towards an End” at Spier, Western Cape, South Africa in May 2023. In its revised form it still seeks to connect to the conference title. There are three types of journeys in King Lear: journeys away from (like Lear’s from Goneril to Regan); journeys towards (like almost everyone’s towards Dover); and journeys without destination (Gloucester’s “I have no way”). From the chaotic, imprecise, unmappable travels within the play, there is the possibility of charting the ways in which the play itself travels and what the ends (as aims) as well as end (as terminal) are that those charts might show, whether it be to Hull (Ben Benison’s Jack Lear), to Korea (Kim Myung-Gon’s King Uru) or to the United States (Theatre of War’s King Lear Project), or by tracking the journeys into our awareness of characters Shakespeare excluded but whose rethought inclusion serves to show what the play resists and how we might – even must – resist it.
This article examines an Italian Prison Shakespeare initiative based at the Cesare Beccaria juvenile detention centre in Milan and facilitated by the University of Milan and the theatre company Puntozero in 2022. In particular, it focuses on the young inmates’ reappropriation and recontextualisation of Romeo and Juliet, arguing that the structure of the 2022 workshops and final play allows for the empowerment of the participants, decentring the problematic authority of Shakespeare. Through the exploration of a case study that exemplifies a decolonising approach to Shakespeare in the marginal(ised) context of prison, my discussion ultimately invites reflection on the alleged ‘transformative’ aims and impact of Prison Shakespeare.
In the same way that Boethius is a prisoner of his mind more so than the cell that confines him in his De consolation philosophiae (c. 524), Hermione in The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11) is a mind restricted within a body when she chooses to adopt the guise of a statue. The following article situates Hermione’s response to her husband’s tyrannical treatment within feminist criticism of the play and new research published on its sources in order to argue that Paulina embodies a version of Boethius’s Lady Philosophy. The idea of the body as a prison is a major trope underpinning Hermione’s miraculous revivification, but she is not the only prisoner released by Paulina’s ministrations. Leontes’s recalcitrant jealousy and its aftermaths are also mental afflictions from which he needs to be released. Ultimately, Paulina’s embodiment of an insubstantial personification allows her to issue a challenge to the authority of a man in a way that makes her an inspiring feminist, and an icon for life-affirming, regenerative friendship between women.
Despite the historical tendency to use the teaching of Shakespeare to perpetuate British colonial educational objectives, the study of a Shakespeare play remains a prerequisite for obtaining a school-leaving certificate, with English Home Language as a subject, from each of the three largest examination bodies in South Africa. Against this background, I propose the implementation of translanguaging as a transformative pedagogy of Shakespeare in South African secondary schools. This proposal is based on the results of practitioner-based research I conducted with a class of Johannesburg-based, multilingual, Grade 10 learners during the study of Macbeth. My research showed that translanguaging facilitated learners’ comprehension of Macbeth, while simultaneously empowering them to interpret the play from their own linguistic and cultural perspectives. Although the study was limited in participant numbers and duration and needs verification by further research, its results suggest the potential of translanguaging to transform the pedagogy of Shakespeare in South African schools by equipping learners to contribute to global discourses on Shakespeare with authentic and uniquely (South) African interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays.
This essay is written from the perspective of an Anglophone South African in the ongoing aftermath of ‘state capture’ in this land. It draws on Shakespeare’s preoccupation with monarchy or sovereignty, in the context of a time of transition (in the UK and the Commonwealth of which South Africa is a member) from the reign of Elizabeth II to that of Charles III. It is grounded for that reason in a novel by A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden, which deals with the coronation (the first to be televised) of the late queen in 1953. That novel is also about a largescale outdoor verse drama on the life of Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’. Byatt shows us how the press spoke, in high earnest, of the new dispensation. She is earnest herself, and also ironic, and at times satirical. So is this essay
Drawing on some of the most influential studies on Carmelo Bene, this article aims to offer interpretive tools that will enhance viewers’ and listeners’ appreciation of his misreadings of Hamlet and Macbeth. It also suggests that la scrittura di scena (scenic writing) and la macchina attoriale (the actorial machine), his most celebrated inventions as an actor, dramatist and musicologist, are two theatrical methods that could possibly assist the ongoing decolonial reinvention of Shakespeare’s stories in the (South) African context. The article provides introductory biographical notes on Bene and an overview of his main literary and philosophical influences. It then discusses the key concepts of scenic writing and the actorial machine as applied to Bene’s rewriting of Hamlet and Macbeth. Finally, it suggests some potential lines of research for decolonial scholars, playwrights, actors and poets from South Africa and beyond.
This article examines a phenomenon that may trigger a resurgence in the pleasure of reading or watching performances of Shakespeare’s plays in Nigeria: adaptation and translation into Naija (previously Nigerian Pidgin). Specifically, it examines how the Naija translation Hamlet for Pidgin (Oga Pikin) is prototypical for such a revival. The study adopts a comparative approach and explicates how anaphoric reformulation (AR), cataphoric reformulation (CR) and exophoric reformulation (ER) condition the translation’s peculiar lexico-semantic choices in terms of borrowing, reduplicatives, calquing and the like. These forms enter a networked relationship within the co-text and context to bring about a contemporary equivalent to Hamlet. Readers and audiences extract meaning through clues such as collocation, background knowledge and other linking strategies provided consciously or unconsciously by the author/translator. The article concludes that this translation is also significant for its shift away from the cathartic effect of Shakespearean tragedy and towards a comic mode that has greater popular appeal.
There is a popular belief that Cape Town’s Maynardville Theatre was founded in 1955, and first used in 1956, as the brainchild of the two professional actresses Cecilia Sonnenberg and René Ahrenson. While this is true of the Shakespeare-in-the-Park productions over the years, the use of Maynardville as a performance venue dates back to 1950 and the efforts of Margaret Molteno, the Athlone Committee for Nursery School Education and the University of Cape Town Ballet Company. This article traces the evolution of the popular theatre venue from the first production of a triple bill (comprising Les Sylphides, St Valentine’s Night and Les Diversions) in a makeshift theatre in the Maynardville Park grounds in 1950, to the introduction of Shakespeare in 1956, and ultimately the outdoor theatre of today with its annual Shakespeare and ballet productions. The Shakespearean history is already well-documented, so this article focuses more specifically on the somewhat forgotten role played by ballet productions in that history. The article includes a short history of the original property and the creation of the public park, as well as a full list of the ballets and plays performed at Maynardville since 1950.
