Soyinka and the Dead Dramatist

Abstract

The explosion of interest in international responses to has not, so far, led to much commentary on one of most intriguing and distinguished of these responses, Wole Soyinka's essay, Shakespeare and Living Dramatist. This regrettable, since beneath several layers of irony, Soyinka presents a deeply serious reading of Antony and Cleopatra that challenges critical orthodoxies and, when understood in relation to Soyinka's other works, offers an alternative to perspective of much postcolonial criticism. When Soyinka wrote his essay and some two decades after, this criticism was dominated by a political turn that saw postcolonial cultural influence in terms of stark alternatives of oppression and resistance and that focused on critical, even hostile, responses to issues of race and in plays like Othello and The Tempest; but in last decade or so it has developed a more nuanced view of Shakespeare's relationship to global and local cultures. (1) Soyinka's essay anticipates this development, poking fun at some kinds of appropriation while slyly practicing others. His goal neither to bury nor simply to praise him, but to locate him in a continuing conversation--a location that neither wholly local and particular nor entirely global and universal. In this way Shakespeare and Living Dramatist complicates simple choices between resistance and subservience and between global and local perspectives and illustrates dramas contribution to challenging and rich hybridity of contemporary cultural identities. Shakespeare and Living Dramatist began as a lecture to International Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon on 17 August 1982, and was first published in Survey following year. It included in Soyinka's 1988 collection of essays, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, and in 2000 Cambridge volume and Race, a collection of essays from Survey. (2) The essay's tongue-in-cheek premises are that Shakespeare's popularity in Arab world so great, and that Antony and Cleopatra in particular shows an understanding of Egyptian culture so profound, that widely believed by Arabs to have in fact been an Arab named Shayk al-Subair, which, Soyinka notes wryly, everyone knows ... as dune-bred an Arabic name as any English poet can hope for (149). (3) This is, to put it mildly, an unusual set of premises an essay, and although irony obvious, it not at first obvious what it conceals. Soyinka be poking fun at idea of Shakespeare's universality, or at those who seek to resist a Shakespearean influence they view as oppressive. In latter group, he be firing a shot at his own critics, who accused him in 1970s of hindering decolonization of Africa by borrowing from Shakespeare. (4) He be targeting all of these--it initially difficult to say. Margo Hendricks attempts to untangle these ironies in her introduction to and Race, but has a hard time placing Soyinka's essay. She begins by suggesting that it might be viewed as a precursor to post-colonialist readings of Shakespeare's drama but has trouble making label stick. (5) The reason, I think, that postcolonial, as Hendricks uses it--and her use not idiosyncratic--is too narrowly political a term to capture Soyinka's vision. In first four sentences that address Soyinka's essay, Hendricks mentions the of and race studies the of race inherent in his canon, the of culture, the of race and culture, and colonialism and its politics (5-6). This establishes an expectation that Soyinka's essay will throw light on such politics, but, after several paragraphs describing essay's premises, Hendricks concedes that essay does not contain illumination she seeks. Soyinka, she notes disappointedly, only hints at a traditional notion of race in relation to Shakespeare's works; he is less interested in of race in Shakespeare's poetry than he in poetry of politics (7). …