Volume 37 of Shakespeare in Southern Africa (2024) bears the title, “Shakespearean Ends”. In the first instance, this is a nod to “Shakespeare Towards An End” – the theme of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa’s twelfth triennial congress, co-hosted by Wits University’s Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, held at Spier Wine Farm in May last year. Volume 36 of the journal (2023) took the conference theme as its title; it included nine research articles and a creative work, each of which was developed from a paper first presented at the conference. The articles in the present volume likewise have their origins in the “Shakespeare Towards An End” conference, and in one sense “Shakespearean Ends” extends the riff: “ends” here referring to many possible things, as the conference Call For Papers suggested, ranging from the utilitarian, the activist or the purposive to the conclusive/concluding – the final. (It is in the latter set of connotations that “Shakespearean Ends” finds its secondary meaning, but more about that later).
The volume opens with Lydia Valentine’s article on race, degeneration and kinship in King Lear, which shows how early modern discourses of degeneration were imbricated with varying ideas of race and identifies these discourses in King Lear, arguing that the articulation of familial difference has racial implications for the way that we read Cordelia, Goneril and Regan. Valentine notes that while Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) “has done vital work to demonstrate that race was conceptually available to early modern writers such as Shakespeare”, plays such as King Lear “have not received the same attention as others within this field”. Valentine’s article is, then, an indication of how much more generative PCRS can yet be in critical engagements with Shakespeare’s work. In the final article in the volume, however, David Schalkwyk signals an ambivalent tone regarding the self-regenerating field of Shakespeare studies; like influential or even dominant critical modes before it, such as New Historicism, Premodern Critical Race Theory may also be co-opted into the academy’s relentless drive to (re)produce “Shakespeare without End”. Here, Schalkwyk suggests, “Shakespeare towards an end” – the ends or aims being “to show the degree to which Shakespeare has always been implicated in racist thought, to challenge that complacent racism by revealing its complicity in a broader set of social attitudes and forms of exploitation and repression, and to offer an emancipatory programme that will change both the study of early modern texts and transform an academy that is and has been overwhelmingly white” – forms a “paradoxical union” with the “apparently antagonistic” position of “endless Shakespeare” (which is, like Jonson’s Shakespeare, “not of an age but for all time”).
In between Valentine and Schalkwyk are three articles that focus on Shakespeare in/and Africa, specifically South Africa and Ghana. Stephen Collins and Nii Kwartelai Quartey explore the context and the legacy of Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet, a 1964 film produced by the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) with staff and students from the University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama. This curiously neglected film represents, the authors argue, the high point of Kwame Nkrumah’s cultural policy; two years later, Nkrumah was ousted in a coup. Collins and Quartey discuss the film as “a clear example of decolonial practice” despite, or perhaps because of, “its own denial of radical adaptation”. Giuliana Iannaccaro and Henry Bell’s articles draw our attention to South African Shakespeares almost a century apart: H.I.E. Dhlomo’s incorporation of Shakespearean material into his historical Zulu plays Dingane and Cetshwayo (written in the 1930s) and the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa’s #lockdownshakespeare initiative in 2020. Iannaccaro notes that Dhlomo’s work may be read as either “celebration” of or “opposition” to Shakespeare (and by implication the legacy of British colonialism) but that these two readings “are not in conflict”; instead, together they “testify to the great complexity underlying not only the literary activity of black early-twentieth-century writers but also their thorny position in the cultural context of their time”. Bell compares the “situated” performances in #lockdownshakespeare – self-recorded videos produced by South African actors in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic – to the “generalised African aesthetics” of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2012 production of Julius Caesar, and finds the latter wanting in terms of its distance (geographically, culturally and otherwise) “from the semiosphere of the location which it attempted to represent”.
Volume 37 ends on a high note with a roundtable discussion on the production of Othello directed by Lara Foot and performed at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in April 2024 (a version of the production had previously been staged at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus in September 2023). This Othello was notable for its use of isiXhosa, Afrikaans and German alongside Shakespeare’s English, as well as for its design concept and adaptations in terms of setting (colonial German South West Africa) and plot (particularly the murder of Desdemona). The roundtable is a wide-ranging conversation – a 12,000-word humdinger – and includes some rigorous exchanges between the contributors. Foot is joined by two of her collaborators, designer Gerhard Marx and translator Sanele kaNtshingana, with further perspectives from professor of psychology Shose Kessi and playwright and arts activist Mike van Graan.
It is only appropriate, then, that the cover of volume 37 features an image from this production: Atandwa Kani as Othello and Carla Smith as Desdemona, photographed by Fiona MacPherson. I must admit to a further motivation for this choice, which is that it results in a pleasing symmetry – for Kani, in the role of Ariel in the 2009 Baxter-RSC production of The Tempest, also appeared on the cover of volume 21 of Shakespeare in Southern Africa. That was the first volume of the journal I edited, and it now seems like an impossibly long time ago. I took over the editorship from Brian Pearce, who had succeeded Laurence Wright, who had in turn inherited the mantle from founding editor Guy Butler. In various editorials over the years, I have paid tribute to my predecessors and have also wrestled with questions about the journal’s identity, purview and purpose, which – like those of the Society of which it is the official scholarly publication – have in some ways have changed significantly and in others have remained similar, if not the same, since its first volume in 1987.
Shakespeare in Southern Africa has published hundreds of research articles, essays and reviews in that time. This is, in its own right, a remarkable body of scholarship, both constituting its own academic sub-field and making a prominent contribution to Shakespeare studies as a global field. But the time has come to bring one era to an end, and to start another one. I am delighted not only that I can hand over sole editorship of the Society’s journal to my brilliant co-editor of volumes 36 and 37, Marguerite de Waal, but also that Marguerite can announce an exciting new direction for the publication. It remains for me to express my sincere gratitude to the dozens – probably hundreds – of colleagues who have helped to produce Shakespeare in Southern Africa over the past fifteen years: authors who have submitted their work to the journal, guest editors, typesetters and designers (especially Liz Gowans), peer reviewers, editorial advisors, board members and patrons, Shakespeare Society members, and colleagues at the Grahamstown Foundation and the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (in particular Carol Leff). It has been a great privilege indeed to edit Shakespeare in Southern Africa.
CT
