The Living Dramatist and Shakespeare: A Study of Shakespeare’s Influence on Wole Soyinka

Summary

The student who sets out to examine the influence of Shakespeare on a living playwright can study texts, read the critics, and follow the biography of the living playwright. He can develop theories and postulate possibilities, but his surest guide is the acknowledgement by the living writer of his debts. For such an acknowledgement a student will travel miles, and it was in the hope of such an acknowledgement that I travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1981 to hear Wole Soyinka talk about 'Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist'.

Soyinka is an artist who works in several traditions and who has defined himself in relation to those traditions. Among his poems are those which are composed 'after' James Simmons, Thomas Blackburn, John Cowper Powys or Wilfred Owen; he has written adaptations of plays by Euripides and Bertolt Brecht; he has incorporated masquerade dances, Agemo rites and a New Yam Festival into his plays. He is allusive and eclectic; he borrows, commandeers, steals or requisitions as suits his purpose. He knows that there is a limit to originality and that the way material is used is more important than its source. However, those, like the present writer, who listened to Soyinka on 'Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist', hoping for an autobiographical account or for comments which would make plain the complexities of his own plays, were, initially at least, disappointed.