ABSTRACT
South Africa, one could argue, has been global from its first entanglements with Dutch and then British imperial efforts. A British cultural import dispatched by the imperial master not long after David Garrick’s William Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, Shakespeare survived in South Africa partly through a willingness to serve any master. Shakespeare’s enormous cultural capital has been enlisted to help forge national identities through the use of a particular language metonymically standing in for an ideology and a nationalism. The production debuted at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2005, appeared briefly at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town before transferring to Stratford-upon-Avon for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival. “Shakespeare” as high cultural, iconic dramatist, troping Englishness and Britain, was ideally suited for the lead role in a nationalistic, ideological global project at the Cape Colony when the very first purpose-built theater in Africa was constructed there in 1801 under the British administration.
