Shakespeare and the coconuts: close encounters in post-apartheid South Africa

Summary

South African literary history is full of the effects of writers having had close encounters with the Shakespeare text. The results have been literary and personal, with writers displaying, and often-times clearly experiencing, a profound emotional connection to, especially, the plays. Since the days of the mission schools in colonial Southern Africa, Shakespeare has been a signifier of education, civility and erudition, as well as a vehicle for the expression of strong feelings. Encounters with the Shakespeare text have shaped hopes, allowed for public self-fashioning, and have influenced more intimate subjectivities as writers and scholars of a particular class stratification were educated in English Literature. Something has changed, though, in terms of what a close encounter with Shakespeare enables. If Shakespeare used to be part of a marker of class and social mobility located in the terms of a discourse of progress and modernity, knowledge of Shakespeare now comprises a much more publicly ambivalent display. Shakespeare once had a particular currency, acquired personally but activated publicly, which he appears to be losing. This article will attempt to account for the change, suggesting that it reveals the gap between theory and lived experience. Close encounters with Shakespeare viewed through a post-colonial lens illustrate that culture is hybrid. Nevertheless, in the face of ongoing socio-economic power differentials which operate along raced and classed axes, the logic of a binary structure of identity continues to inform an experience of Shakespeare in South Africa long after our own cultural artifacts reveal that binary models are an artificial and inadequate way to understand how people live, including how they live with Shakespeare.