Shakespeare in Ghana

Summary

When Ben Jonson wrote his eulogy on ‘Master William Shakespeare and what he has left us’, he may have had some idea of the temporal, but little conception of the territorial, extension of ‘Master William’s fame. Jonson could not possibly have foreseen to what extent Shakespeare’s ‘buskin’ was ‘to shake a stage’ in the various dim and then little-known corners of the world. He might quite easily have dismissed the idea of a Shakespearian production in the Americas as unlikely, whilst, if he had considered the matter at all, the suggestion of a performance in febrile West Africa, where, according to Hakluyt, sailors such as Job Hartop called from time to time, would have seemed to him like the ravings of a plague-struck mariner. Yet Shakespeare’s ‘unblotted’ and Marlowe’s ‘mighty’ lines are now frequently heard in that part of Africa which, until the comparatively recent years of anti-malarial drugs, has long been known as ‘the white man’s grave’. In attempting to describe some of the problems confronting the teacher and producer of Shakespeare in West Africa, I shall confine my comments to questions which arose out of my experience of lecturing on Shakespeare to training college students in Ghana, but I tentatively suggest that these are fundamental questions to any teacher who is concerned with the explanation of English literature to students whose mother-tongue is not English.