ABSTRACT
The tercentenary of Williiam Shakespeare's death was marked in Cape Town with an exhibition of folio facsimiles from the Fairbridge Collection in the South African Library and by an evening of tribute in the Edwardian-Viennese Cape Town City Hall. The progress of the war in France, Africa and the near East, as well as the Easter Rising in Dublin on the very day of the tercentenary, limited the thespian potential of the event. The newspaper account of the tercentenary speaks of an occasion that was staged for the sake of being exemplary. While working Capetonians were entertained by lively recruitment campaigns and noisy entertainments for passing troopships, the gathering in the City Hall was genteel, hosted by the Elizabethan Society and the National Home Reading Union. Modernity with the annihilation in France, with emergent mass culture and with anti-colonial politics around the gilded empire, was, for a decade or two, held offstage by these neo-Shakespearean hearts and minds.
