ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts Solomon Plaatje's own hyphenation and inclusion of the h in the 1958 publication. Attention has focused on the play's relevance to Plaatje's early struggles with English colonial control in South Africa. The chapter argues that Plaatje recognized in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors a work whose breadth of poetic insights across languages served Diphosho-phosho's designs on both its Setswana and English readership. It is insufficient to say that the emotional anxieties resulted from similarities between Shakespeare's "pre-industrial". The chapter argues that Plaatje was performing a literary event that had both social and political implications. Plaatje was reinterpreting Shakespeare in the language of political dissent in which The Comedy of Errors was originally written by taking the allusive implications of Shakespeare and making Setswana meaning of them. One of the most valuable contributions of Diphosho-phosho to the field of Shakespeare studies has been the ways that it has alerted us to what Shakespearean translations can reveal.
