ABSTRACT
‘Shakespeare–Post-coloniality–Johannesburg, 1996’ – by the very syntactical abruptness of their title, the organizers of the Witwatersrand conference appeared to register a certain scepticism about its improbably yoked terms. Was there, or could there ever be such a thing as ‘post-colonial Shakespeare’? The history of colonial Shakespeare is by now well documented; and the work of Ania Loomba (1989; 1997), Martin Orkin (1987), Jyotsna Singh (1989; 1996), Gauri Viswanathan (1987; 1990) and others has begun to illuminate its neo-colonial afterlife. But it is by no means clear at what point that afterlife can be said to have ended. The high period of neo-colonial Shakespeare was perfectly represented by the coronation-year tour of Australasia mounted by the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre under the direction of Anthony Quayle. The play given most prominence in this mission to the furthest outposts of British influence was, appropriately enough Othello; and in a programme note that sought to physic postwar disillusion with a mixture of Cold-War rhetoric and visionary neo-imperialism, Quayle summoned the white dominions to a New Elizabethan cause. He was disarmingly frank about the key role assigned to Shakespeare in the cultural hegemony that (under the benign presidency of the British Council) was to take the place of Empire:
The most remarkable characteristic of the Elizabethan age was its surging and expansive vitality. The inhabitants of a small island in the North Sea became suddenly and proudly aware of their nationhood and of their destiny, and with the energy born of that awareness they flung themselves into every possible adventure, mental, physical and aesthetic; they fought, they built, they governed, they wrote, they explored. …
We, who live three and a half centuries later, are the inheritors of a greatly expanded, but at the same time much more cramping world. We belong to a weary and cynical age in which exploration of any kind is the privilege of the specialist, and enterprise of any kind is increasingly shackled. … The old Elizabethan zest is almost gone, but the old Elizabethan dangers remain, looming greater and with more deadly import than Philip’s Armada. Our heads today are so bowed with the stubborn effort to maintain our individual and national way of life that we can hardly raise them to glimpse … our place in History.
Yet History has challenged us. This very year a young and gallant Queen will be crowned in Westminster. … Inevitably we are the New Elizabethans, and inevitably the two epochs will one day be weighed one against the other. May ours not be the less glorious.
But what are we to do, we twentieth-century Elizabethans? Can we only look back regretfully to those twenty fabulous years of 1580–1600, when our nation was in the very May-day of its youth and vigour, when every horizon was unbounded? … The impulse which drove the old Elizabethans to expand outwards was one of intense nationalism: the impulse we new Elizabethans must achieve is of practical internationalism; ours must not only be an outward voyaging, but a drawing and binding together of what is already so far-flung. … In this adventure of unification, the theatre has a great part to play, and especially the theatre of William Shakespeare – a man whose words and whose characters have become a very part of our subconscious lives, a man whose writing is so potent that it would be hard to say whether he interpreted more than moulded the English character. … While the English tongue is spoken on this earth his works will stand, a mysterious and ennobling human document. … And I find it fitting that our theatre’s contribution to Her Majesty’s coronation should be this visit to her farthest Dominions. … [I hope] that you, our audience, may have some idea of the … ardent hope which we all share that this visit and these plays may make their contribution to the flowering of the New Elizabethan Age.
(Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Tour Programme, 1953)