South Africa's Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity

Adele Seeff

"This volume considers the linguistic complexities associated with Shakespeare presence in South Africa from 1801 to early twentieth-first century televisual updatings of the texts as a means of exploring individual and collective forms of identity. A case study approach demonstrates how Shakespeare texts are available for ideologically driven linguistic programs. Seeff introduces the African Theatre, Cape Town, in 1801, multilingual site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa where rival, amateur theatrical groups performed in turn, in English, Dutch, German, and French. Chapter 3 offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 analyses André Brink Kinkels innie Kabel, a transposition of Shakespeare The Comedy of Errors into Kaaps, as a radical...