Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Production During the Apartheid Era articles

Recent articles from Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Production During the Apartheid Era

Introduction.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... Open to a variety of interpretations on the stage, Shakespeare's plays have for four hundred years served not only as dramatic events in themselves, but also as a site for debating current myths, ideologies and systems of belief, an arena for...

White power on display: Smuts and Vorster as Claudius in Afrikaans Hamlet productions.(Chapter 1)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall'n on th' inventors'...

Apartheid and primitive blood: violence in Afrikaans tragedy.(Chapter 2)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust, And with your blood and it I'll make a paste, And of the paste a coffin I will rear, And make two pasties of your shameful heads, And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed...

Cultural integrity and the rise of Inkatha: Macbeth in Zulu.(Chapter 3)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... When that solid wall of Impi flesh and shield shuffled like a nightmare, relentless, onto the good old London stage, a sort of terrified electricity passed through the theatre, and we trembled and shook like the reeds we had heard about. The...

Assassinations, funerals, and the armed struggle: the ambiguous lesson of Julius Caesar.(Chapter 4)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it...

Crinkles in the carnival: ideology in The Comedy of Errors.(Chapter 5)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... Nay, then, thus: We came into the world like brother and brother, And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another (V.i. 424-6). ********** Given the close cultural affilition with the metropolis essential to English colonials...

Sex, power, and the immorality act: the strange case of Othello.(Chapter 6)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise! Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you. Arise, I say (1.1.90-94) ********** The earliest recorded...

Further sexual transgressions.(Chapter 7)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... Away with him to prison! Where is the Provost? Away with him to prison! Lay bolts enough upon him. Let him speak no more. Away with these giglots too, and with the other confederate companion (Measure for Measure V.i. 352-6). **********...

Masters and slaves, rapists and virgins: The Tempest as colonial paradigm.(Chapter 8)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... But thy vild race, Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, Who hadst deserved more than a prison (I.ii. 361-5). ********** The...

Conclusion.
January 1, 2000... Shakespeare arrived and settled in South Africa as part of the British colonial apparatus. First reproduced on the South African stage as a means of evidencing the colonists' identity with the imperial centre, Shakespeare's plays functioned...