This article notes the largely land-bound imagination that has guided post-apartheid Shakespearean performance in South Africa – albeit with some significant exceptions – and considers how creative practice might be spurred or enabled by the application of a 'blue' paradigm. Given its lengthy coastline, South Africa is particularly exposed to the oceanic consequences of climate change. While the country's history has been shaped by sea crossings and maritime encounters, and while many sub-fields within the Oceanic (Blue) Humanities have made productive use of this scholarly framework to address both shared colonial histories and present/future catastrophes facing countries across the global south, it has remained largely underutilised in terms of South African Shakespeares. Taking his cue from the Decentred Shakespeares Network's Pericles on the Seas initiative (which emphasised site-specific, digitally-shared performances, facilitating collaboration between scholars and creative practitioners in Scotland, Ghana, India and Brazil), the author reflects on what a South African contribution to such a project might include and, shifting from Pericles to another of Shakespeare's watery late plays, The Tempest, he identifies two 'littoral' sites with significant historical and Shakespearean resonances. The final section of the article discusses three case studies – a music ensemble, a poetry collection and an experimental radio play – that indicate future possible directions for Blue Shakespeares in South Africa.
When I moved to London some ten years ago to teach and research Shakespeare, a large part of the incentive and my excitement was at last to be at the centre of Shakespeare performance. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was central to that eager expectation, but there were many venues, such as the National Theatre, the Barbican and the Donmar Warehouse, among others, where Shakespeare was regularly performed. Some Royal Shakespeare Company productions transferred to London, but Stratford-upon-Avon was, in any case, an easy train ride away. At last, I could take students to world-class events and leaven the text with the 'real', not to say, 'risen', Shakespeare on the stage. I was indeed fortunate to see some very impressive performances, notably the all-female Shakespeare trilogy at the Donmar (2012-16) including a riveting Harriet Walter, and Ivo van Hove's stunning Roman Tragedies (2017), but very few excellent performances at the iconic London theatres. I gradually became disillusioned, bored and irritated by the imposition of director's 'concepts' upon the plays in the quest for 'originality' and 'impact'; actors' poor diction and projection, and inability to understand or command the iambic pentameter's demands of stress, rhythm and flow; and designs that overwhelmed and cluttered up what Peter Brook celebrated as "the empty space". I started leaving at interval; then after the first few scenes; and finally stopped going altogether. I now avoid those iconic theatres, and after performing Shakespeare across Europe and the UK with a small professional group of actors, without a director or designer in a company we dubbed Anərkē Shakespeare (anarchos = without a ruler), I have decided that directors, by and large, should get out of the way of Shakespeare the poet and dramatist.
B.B. Mdledle translated three of Shakespeare's plays into isiXhosa. This article focuses on one of these, his uJulius Caesar (1956), and considers the context in which it was produced. Readers would be justified in assuming that Mdledle's translation implies opposition to apartheid policies; at the same time, it could be viewed as a warning about the consequences of violent revolution against an oppressive regime. Mdledle's own political position during this period was ambiguous. Having been an active critic of the lack of black representation in South Africa's government from the 1930s to the 1950s, he would subsequently join the cabinet of Kaiser Matanzima, the Chief Minister of the "Homeland" of Transkei – placing him in a compromised position. Younger contemporaries, such as Can Themba, put Shakespeare to different uses in their literary activity (including, in Themba's case, satirising Transkei politicians using Julius Caesar). The article thus explores the politics of South Africa and the Transkei, as well as the enigmatic Mdledle himself, in its analysis of uJulius Caesar.
In Stephen Greenblatt's superb study of the life and work of Christopher Marlowe, the England into which the poet was born was "a world apart". Quoting from both travellers' accounts and the diaries of Londoners, Greenblatt gives us a picture of a bleak, alienated, radically divided society. Crime was rife in a city where the most popular entertainments were animal fights and public torture and execution. While there was some evidence of urban finesse and grace, most of the city was a mess of dark, narrow and filthy streets, subject to visitations of the plague. Justice (or law) was arbitrary and cruel, Protestantism had led to violent iconoclasm, and London Bridge was decorated with the severed heads of those judged to have been traitors. Marlowe's birthplace, Canterbury, centre of the English church, was the scene in 1538 of Henry VIII's agents' violent despoliation of the tomb of Thomas à Becket. English scholarship lagged behind Europe, and the regime changes that followed Henry VIII's seizure of the church in England had given rise to "dark waves of conspiracies, suspicions, arrests, and executions". By 1580 the English monarch was nearing fifty, unmarried and heirless: although milder than her father's, her reign kept torturers and executioners occupied. Mary Queen of Scots had been in England in "protective custody" since 1568, and would be beheaded in 1587, after the discovery of a Catholic plot to kill Elizabeth.
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.
