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sets out to identify and explicate a historical source for the Indian episode which establishes the leitmotif of Somerset Maugham’s early novel The

This article sets out the South African background to a previously unknown play by John Bright, the Hollywood scriptwriter, based on Wulf Sachs's famous psycho-documentary Black Hamlet (1937) and written in conversation with him. The playscript appears as an Appendix to this number of English Studies in Africa. The aim is to provide pertinent information to enable international readers and theatre practitioners to assess the script's historical value and theatrical potential. The article concentrates on the sociological and anthropological moment from which Wulf Sachs's work emerged and its relevance for understanding the playscript John Bright wrote. Further literary-historical detail about the play's discovery, focused mainly on America, is available in Wright (2021).

Shakespeare travels the globe more variously and unpredictably than any other dramatist. In performance his texts have shown themselves hospitable to vastly different ideological interpretations. By making these two points, I do not mean that Shakespeare pops up around the globe, sometimes in quite extraordinary guises, without rhyme or reason. Far from it. Where Shakespeare makes his appearance this is an act of deliberate choice, by a producer, a production company, an arts foundation, a school or university, a national arts authority, or even simply an ad hoc group of Shakespeare enthusiasts. His advent is always intentional, and often contextually explicit, whatever the rationale. But the sheer variety of guises in which his work appears, the disparate cultural and ideological vogues that attach to his work, the geographical spread of art pieces, performances and installations based on Shakespeare, not to mention the diverse artistic disciplines which seize on him as an inspiration, calls for explanation. No other artist in any medium exhibits comparable artistic fertility across time and space. To claim the limelight for more than 400 years without any sign of diminution is remarkable. This article seeks to understand why this ubiquity is possible. Specifically, is there a definable textual mechanism underlying his historical and international success? At the outset it should be indicated that this paper focuses on a technical diagnosis of textual prerequisites for Shakespeare’s international success. It is not about what his plays say or mean, and only incidentally about the values they exemplify. While the paper sets out to describe textual features which make possible some of his manifold theatrical enchantments, there is no intention to describe, evoke, or celebrate those enchantments.

What might Caliban have looked like on the early modern stage? This article argues that at one point in The Tempest (2.2.56–107) Shakespeare presents on stage an elaborate theatregram invoking a sp...

Mann Alive! is the title of one of Chris Mann’s twenty-two collections of poetry. It captures my abiding sense of him. Boy, was he alive!We worked together for many years in Rhodes University’s Ins...

This article, based on archival research, discusses the discovery, origins, and genesis of a lost play by the Hollywood scriptwriter John Bright, written in collaboration with Wulf Sachs and derived from the latter's famous psycho-documentary Black Hamlet (1937). The playscript was discovered by the author in 2018 in the Library of Congress. The article investigates its origins, speculates as to how it was that its two progenitors came to collaborate, and pieces together a history of the project from the papers of Leah Salisbury, the New York theatrical agent who handled the property. The play embodies an effort in the late 1940s by two white writers to intervene in the American civil rights movement from a southern African perspective by dramatising an even more catastrophic betrayal of justice in Africa, the ancestral "homeland" of Black Americans. Reasons why Bright's play never made it to a Broadway stage, and how the script came to lodge unnoticed in the Library of Congress, are presented and analysed.

Abstract Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ turns on the paradox of a privileged elite succumbing to a plague that is ravaging society at large, and from which they believe themselves completely protected. The horror of the story consists not in the devastation of external society – that is taken for granted – but in the abject failure of the elite’s supposedly impregnable defences, their faith in which is exposed by the ‘Red Death’ as utterly delusory. ‘Put not your trust in Princes’ (Ps. 146.3) takes on an entirely new meaning.

Set during the Anglo-Boer War, The Hero is the story of a young man’s rebellion against the mores of fin de siècle England. It offers a fierce critique of military heroism, anticipating by some years the drastic demolition of military idealism that was to follow WWI. Ambiguous off-stage soldierly heroics, under the big skies of South Africa, take the novel far beneath the gently comic surface of life in Little Primpton to probe fundamental questions about human nature: war and sex, politics and combat, mating and marriage. Published in 1901, Maugham never permitted this novel to be republished. No reason was given, but this article proffers an explanation presenting the novel as a revealing autobiographical fable that establishes the philosophical roots of Maugham’s emerging aesthetic.

Can post-revolutionary notions of social justice be imposed on pre-revolutionary works of art? This article explores the concept of honour in the Henriad, using experiences of Lady Anne Barnard to illustrate how Shakespeare’s critique of monarchical government can speak meaningfully to political behaviour across time. Starting with her excoriating dismissal of Governor George Yonge’s dishonourable regime, captured in her description of 1 Henry IV as performed for the opening of the African Theatre in Cape Town in 1801, the paper goes on to unpack her complex attitudes to slavery, including her courageous decision, described as a “debt of honour”, to take care of her deceased husband’s previously unknown ‘love child’ conceived with a slave, Rachel van de Caap. The account draws on fresh insights found in Stephen Taylor’s recent biography of Anne Barnard and argues that the Henriad’s treatment of honour resonates across time, supplying counsel that post-revolutionary ages would do well to heed.

This article explores the startling comparison Huysmans introduces early in Á Rebours (1884) between two French steam locomotives, Crampton and Engerth, and representations of the female form. It suggests that the trope should be read as a modernist cameo proleptically anticipating the story’s later interrogation of homoerotic sexual and gender identity. By detailing some of the railway technology involved, the article explains why the comparison between the female form and the steam engine is flighted between two locomotives rather than one, demonstrating that the bizarre literary figure presents more than a generalised personification of machinery. Baron Jean des Esseintes’ judgement that the two locomotives are more beautiful than Woman plays itself out in significant variations through the texture of the novel, leading eventually to a painful recognition that his rarefied, decadent/aesthetic approach to existence is indeed Á Rebours, ‘against nature’, or ‘the wrong way’.

Daniel Schwarz has argued convincingly that Paul Gauguin’s account of his life in Tahiti, Noa Noa (1893; 1985, ed. Wadley), as well as the visual impact of some of his Tahitian paintings, are important influences in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), underwriting aspects of Kurz’s atavistic regression. He suggests further that Noa Noa may have influenced “Conrad’s Malay novels and short stories—Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), ‘Karain: A Memory’ (1897), ‘The Lagoon’ (1896) and surely Lord Jim” (61). The visual influence of Gauguin on Conrad’s work may not be confined to works of the 1890s and may include that of some of his contemporaries. A notable instance occurs in Victory (1915), in the passage where Mrs. Schomberg is first introduced to the reader, aspects of which suggest memorial influence from paintings by Manet, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. I am not suggesting that Conrad quotes these images as conscious metafictional references; rather, that in establishing the contingent verisimilitude of Schomberg’s establishment, he has drawn substantially on memories of specific paintings. (Coincidentally, such a writerly procedure patterns the art theory fleetingly espoused by Gauguin and van Gogh, among others, when the images to which I refer were produced—“painting de chic.” Rather than working directly from life, these artists were drawn to the notion that painting from recollection enhances the symbolic and personal impact of the images produced.) While Captain Davidson, the figural narrator, sits “alone with the billiard-tables” (45), he stares at a poster advertising performances by the eighteen-piece Zangiacomo’s ladies’ orchestra. Mrs. Schomberg enters from a door “somewhere at his back”:

This lecture was commissioned by the National Arts Festival to mark the centenary of Guy Butler's birth and was presented during the 2018 Festival in the Olive Schreiner Auditorium in Grahamstown. Guy Butler was the father of the National Arts Festival, a former President of the English Academy, and its first Gold Medallist. He was also a poet, a Christian, a family man, a historian of the 1820 settlers, an autobiographer, a short story writer, a cultural theorist, a founder of university departments and several cultural institutions, a political commentator, an academic, a Shakespearean scholar, a permanent head of department serving on numerous university committees, a conference organizer, a theatrical director and producer, an amateur artist, painter, sketcher and 'doodler', a prolific correspondent, a woodworker, a convivial host, a conversationalist and raconteur of note, an urban conservationist, an amateur palaeontologist and interpreter of rock paintings, a mentor for countless poets and writers, young and old, and a great teacher.

In probing the urbane characterization of Dirk Stroeve and Charles Strickland, two central figures in The Moon and Sixpence (1919), this essay investigates Somerset Maugham’s creative use of some d...

Under the title “‘In states unborn and accents yet unknown’: Shakespeare and the ISEA”, this essay first appeared as a chapter in ISEA, 1964-2014: A South African Research Institute Serving People, edited by Monica Hendricks (Grahamstown: NISC, 2016). The Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA) was founded by Guy Butler at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, in 1964. Among its many undertakings were several development projects for the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, established in 1986. The article describes the context in which the Society was formed and provides an overview of key activities undertaken in collaboration with the Institute during the course of its first three decades. The piece also reflects more generally on the social, cultural, educational and political history of Shakespeare in South Africa, asking: “Will Shakespeare continue to thrive in South Africa?” The piece has been lightly revised.