Soyinka and the Dead Dramatist (Wole Soyinka) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The explosion of interest in international responses to Shakespeare has not, so far, led to much commentary on one of the most intriguing and distinguished of these responses, Wole Soyinka's essay, "Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist." This is regrettable, since beneath several layers of irony, Soyinka presents a deeply serious reading of Antony and Cleopatra that challenges critical orthodoxies and, when understood in relation to Soyinka's other works, offers an alternative to the perspective of much postcolonial criticism. When Soyinka wrote his essay and for some two decades after, this criticism was dominated by a political turn that saw postcolonial cultural influence in terms of the stark alternatives of oppression and resistance and that focused on critical, even hostile, responses to issues of race and colonialism in plays like Othello and The Tempest; but in the last decade or so it has developed a more nuanced view of Shakespeare's relationship to global and local cultures. (1) Soyinka's essay anticipates this development, poking fun at some kinds of appropriation while slyly practicing others. His goal is neither to bury Shakespeare nor simply to praise him, but to locate him in a continuing conversation--a location that is neither wholly local and particular nor entirely global and universal. In this way "Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist" complicates simple choices between resistance and subservience and between global and local perspectives and illustrates dramas contribution to the challenging and rich hybridity of contemporary cultural identities. "Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist" began as a lecture to the International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon on 17 August 1982, and was first published in Shakespeare Survey the following year. It is included in Soyinka's 1988 collection of essays, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, and in the 2000 Cambridge volume Shakespeare and Race, a collection of essays from Shakespeare Survey. (2) The essay's tongue-in-cheek premises are that Shakespeare's popularity in the Arab world is so great, and that Antony and Cleopatra in particular shows an understanding of Egyptian culture so profound, that Shakespeare is widely believed by Arabs to have in fact been an Arab named Shayk al-Subair, which, Soyinka notes wryly, "everyone knows ... is as dune-bred an Arabic name as any English poet can hope for" (149). (3) This is, to put it mildly, an unusual set of premises for an essay, and although the irony is obvious, it is not at first obvious what it conceals. Soyinka might be poking fun at the idea of Shakespeare's universality, or at those who seek to resist a Shakespearean influence they view as oppressive. In the latter group, he might be firing a shot at his own critics, who accused him in the 1970s of hindering the "decolonization" of Africa by borrowing from Shakespeare. (4) He might be targeting all of these--it is initially difficult to say.