‘Think about Shakespeare’: King Lear on Pacific Cliffs

Summary

‘Think about Shakespeare’, admonishes the garrulous ‘Academic Woman’ in Toa Fraser’s acclaimed play Bare, ‘and perhaps if he had known about the Pacific, what might have been his interpretation of it? I mean, these are pretty complex issues, but I’m sure you can get your heads down and start thinking about it. And while I think of it, see you next week, All right.’ The question is both haunting and hilarious: Fraser catches perfectly the concatenating logic which can easily attend weakly formulated studies of Shakespeare’s texts and imperial discourse; yet haunting because, as Fraser clearly also knows, there are no direct Shakespearian representations of the Pacific. Shakespeare has been present in the Pacific since at least 1769 when a copy of the Complete Works sailed on Cook’s ‘Endeavour’ in the luggage of the artist Sydney Parkinson. For Shakespearians, of course, 1769 marks Garrick’s famous Shakespeare Jubilee, and its signal announcement of the canonization of the bard. Australasians remember 1769 instead for the epochal voyage during which Cook claimed both New Zealand and Australia as English possessions. The conjunction of that famous voyage and Garrick’s jubilee means that these territories have been, over the last two hundred years, inescapably Shakespearized, as have the more tropical islands, such as Samoa, which Cook’s voyages also helped to bring to the attention of Europe.