ABSTRACT
From the earliest documented performances of Shakespeare's plays by Black South Africans to the present day, first British colonial and then White Anglophone South African audiences have evinced a combination of curiosity and condescension in their responses to the delivery of “difficult English” in the various accents that can be found in the country's multilingual landscape. This chapter refers to a number of examples of this phenomenon, from both the apartheid and the post-apartheid eras, and also discusses productions that complicate an account of the ways in which “Black African” and so-called “Colored” accents (and, indeed, White Afrikaans accents) have been recruited toward characterization or caricature. Ultimately, it is argued, the only way to overcome accentism entirely is to perform the plays in translation into South African languages—although this undertaking has other attendant risks, ranging from versions of blackface to the re-inscription of language hierarchies.
