Shakespeare in Southern Africa

Editorial

2024-04-04T12:33:18+00:00

No Abstract

“Is this the promised end?”; Travels with/in King Lear

2024-04-04T12:40:53+00:00

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.

Paulina’s Inspiration for Radical Change in The Winter’s Tale

2024-04-04T12:51:21+00:00

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.

Exploring Gender Relations via Shakespeare: Students’ perspectives on Shakespeare’s life

2024-04-04T12:57:03+00:00

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.

Transforming Romeo and Juliet in a Juvenile Detention Centre in Italy: A decolonising approach to Prison Shakespeare

2024-04-04T13:04:50+00:00

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.

“(The) Play’s the Thing”: Shakespearean drama as an end in itself

2024-04-04T13:11:57+00:00

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.

Translanguaging as Transformative Pedagogy of Shakespeare in South African Secondary Schools

2024-04-04T13:15:27+00:00

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.

Sovereign States: Byatt, Bard and coronations

2024-04-04T13:27:08+00:00

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

“To the elements be free”: Carnivalising the legacy of Shakespeare in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed

2024-04-04T13:35:22+00:00

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.

Revisiting B.B. Mdledle’s isiXhosa translation of Macbeth (1959): Prophecy, tragedy and history

2024-04-04T13:44:08+00:00

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.

Old Money: A poem

2024-04-04T13:55:35+00:00

No Abstract

Marx, Herder and the German Shakespearean Dialectic: A review essay

2024-04-04T14:02:06+00:00

No Abstract