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Three Decades of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa: 1986–2016

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2018
Subjects: To be catalogued
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457895 , vital:75688 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-12040bb834
Description: Under the title “‘In states unborn and accents yet unknown’: Shakespeare and the ISEA”, this essay first appeared as a chapter in ISEA, 1964-2014: A South African Research Institute Serving People, edited by Monica Hendricks (Grahamstown: NISC, 2016). The Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA) was founded by Guy Butler at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, in 1964. Among its many undertakings were several development projects for the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, established in 1986. The article describes the context in which the Society was formed and provides an overview of key activities undertaken in collaboration with the Institute during the course of its first three decades. The piece also reflects more generally on the social, cultural, educational and political history of Shakespeare in South Africa, asking: “Will Shakespeare continue to thrive in South Africa?”.
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Date Issued: 2018

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Thinking with Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, Shylock, Caliban and the dynamics of social scale

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2017
Subjects: To be catalogued
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/454007 , vital:75304 , 10.4314/sisa.v29i1.3
Description: Contemporary criticism seldom acknowledges Shakespeare’s sensitivity to longer-term historical trajectories. One such variable is social scale. If dramatic conflict in The Merchant of Venice is interpreted solely in terms of clashes between ethical character, social allegiance, and religious affiliation, at the end of the play these clashes persist as a morass of irreconcilables, unresolved and irresolvable. The audience is left in unconditioned liberty to make up its own mind. This paper argues that changing social scale provides a framework which allows the ethical dilemmas posed by The Merchant of Venice to be interpreted coherently, bringing us closer to the experience of ‘thinking with Shakespeare’. Shakespeare’s drama anticipates the rise of large-scale cosmopolitan society and, without underestimating the social tensions involved, challenges the audience to welcome an unknown new world appearing over the horizon.
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Date Issued: 2017

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Irreplaceable acting

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2013
Subjects: To be catalogued
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/453995 , vital:75303 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC142419
Description: What do I mean by irreplaceable acting? In one way all acting is irreplaceable. Very obviously, without acting there is no play, just a text - perhaps not even that, if one considers improvised pieces or physical theatre scenarios. In a more important sense, all acting is replaceable, almost by definition. The same part is played by different actors on different stages in different ages. Acting is replaceable, because it is acting; it is not the real thing. But some performances, some moments on stage, seem to me best described as irreplaceable.
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Date Issued: 2013

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Will and Wille Shakespeare on Love: The Sonnets and Plays in Relation to Plato's Symposium, Alchemy, Christianity and Renaissance Neo-Platonism, Ronald Gray: essays and reviews

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2013
Subjects: To be catalogued
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455944 , vital:75469 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC128421
Description: Best known as the author of Kafka's Castle (1956) and a number of highly regarded works on Goethe and Brecht, Ronald Gray turns his attention to Shakespeare in a rich and succinct little book, developed from his earlier article "Will in the Universe: Shakespeare's Sonnets, Plato's Symposium, Alchemy and Renaissance neo-Platonism", which appeared in Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006). Works produced by senior intellects - Gray retired from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1982 - can sometimes spin sugar floss at unnecessary length, or else fling themselves recklessly at momentous questions without tact or scholarly measure. (Helen Gardner's unfortunate In Defence of the Imagination, 1982, would be an apposite illustration of the latter tendency.) Shakespeare on Love avoids both dangers, holding to its challenging thesis with admirable economy.
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Date Issued: 2013

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Guy Butler’s South Africanism: ‘Being present where you are’

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2012
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7069 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007460 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2012.730182
Description: preprint , A peer-reviewed lecture delivered at Rhodes University on the occasion of the presentation to Professor Wright of the English Academy's Gold Medal, 16 November 2011. Guy Butler (1918-2001) has been gone some ten years. This lecture sets out to illuminate the thinking behind his important role in South Africa's national life. The institutions he created continue to make vital cultural contributions in South Africa's efforts to make sense of its own complex historical make-up, working towards a happier, richer, and more equal future. However, despite what he achieved, there is little surety that today the rationale informing his massive effort to foster processes of artistic and cultural endeavour has been appreciated or accurately understood.
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Date Issued: 2012

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'Iron on iron': modernism engaging apartheid in some South African railway poems

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2011
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7068 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007459 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2011.626177
Description: preprint , Modernism tends to be criticised, internationally, as politically conservative. The objection is often valid, although the charge says little about the quality of artistic achievement involved. This article argues that the alliance between Modernism and political conservatism is by no means a necessary one, and that there are instances where modernist vision has been used to convey substantive political insight, effective social critique and solid resistance. To illustrate the contrast,the article juxtaposes the abstract Modernism associated with Ben Nicholson and World War 2, with a neglected strain of South African railway poetry which uses modernist techniques to effect a powerful critique of South Africa’s apartheid dispensation. The article sustains a distinction between universalising modernist art that requires ethical work from its audiences to achieve artistic completion, and art in which modernist vision performs the requisite ethical work within its own formal constraints. Four very different South African railway poems, by Dennis Brutus, John Hendrickse, Alan Paton, and Leonard Koza, are examined and contextualised to demonstrate ways in which a modernist vision has been used to portray the social disruptions caused by apartheid. Modernist techniques are used to turn railway experience into a metonym for massive social disruption,without betraying the social reality of the transport technology involved.
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Date Issued: 2011

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David Lurie's learning and the meaning of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2010
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7063 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007428 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47864
Description: preprint , One of the teasing characteristics of novels soused in literariness, like J.M. Coetzee’s, is their tendency to leak, to bleed, into vast inchoate terrains of intertextuality.The reader is constantly challenged to measure and assess their implications within or against the frail containing form of the story, much as Russian formalism taught us to keep sujet and fable in perpetual dialogue. However, it has become apparent that in the dense thickets of commentary occasioned by Coetzee’s most controversial novel, Disgrace (1999), insufficient attention has been paid to the intertextual implications of David Lurie’s learning, his scholarly preoccupations. Unless the reader attempts this kind of exploration, two of the most vexed issues freighting the novel’s central fabulation: Lucy’s curiously stoical, impassive response to her rape, together with her decision to stay on in South Africa; and David Lurie’s sudden, seemingly inexplicable care for the doomed dogs, from their last moments at the animal shelter until he lovingly consigns their corpses to the incinerator, must remain opaque. In particular, the final words of the novel, “Yes, I am giving him up” (220), uttered in relation to the immanent “Lösung” of the little dog Bev Shaw calls Driepoot, will tend to taunt the reader, rather than illuminate.
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Date Issued: 2010

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Learning to be original

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2010
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7065 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007431
Description: preprint , My topic suggested itself in response to a point made at a seminar on University autonomy. Someone observed that many people, even shack dwellers, are interested in the cosmos and they always would be. The remark came in the course of a debate concerning the cost of the SKA project, the massively expensive square kilometer array telescope for which South Africa is bidding against Australia, viewed in relation to the country’s huge list of social backlogs: Big science versus food and decent housing; a false opposition, or a grim choice? You can imagine the debate. The nugget that stayed with me was the tangential comment that ordinary people are always interested in the cosmos. If so, is this true merely because human cultures traditionally incorporate such an interest, or because humans themselves actually need a relation to the cosmos? What might this need be?
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Date Issued: 2010

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Third World Express: trains and “revolution” in Southern African poetry

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2010
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7066 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007453 , https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v31i1.34
Description: preprint , This article examines political dimensions of the train metaphor in selected southern African poems, some of them in English translation. Exploring work by Mongane Serote, B.W. Vilakazi, Demetrius Segooa, Phedi Tlhobolo, Thami Mseleku, Jeremy Cronin, Alan Lennox-Short, Anthony Farmer, Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, Abduraghiem Johnstone and Mondli Gwala, the argument shows some of the ways in which the technological character of trains and railways is made to carry a message of political insurrection and revolution. The author shows that the political potential of the railway metaphor builds on the general response to railways evident in poems indebted to traditional African praise poetry. The piece also demonstrates that political contention within different strands of the southern African liberation movement could also find expression using the railway metaphor.
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Date Issued: 2010

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Intellectual challenge is as necessary as breathing: an interview with Laurence Wright

- Wright, Laurence, Pearce, B

Authors: Wright, Laurence , Pearce, B
Date: 2009
Language: English
Type: text , Article
Identifier: vital:7059 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007422
Description: Professor Laurence Wright is Director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. In 2009, he will have completed 25 years of research, teaching and scholarship at Rhodes University and this interview marks the occasion. A Rhodes Scholar and a Commonwealth Scholar, he studied at the universities of Rhodes, Warwick and Oxford. He is also Honorary Life President of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa. He has published widely in literary studies and is the Managing Editor of two academic journals as well as of the poetry magazine New Coin. He currently serves on the Council of the English Academy and is a co-opted member of the English National Language Body. He has taken a broad interest in the role of English in this country, ranging from language policy and teacher education matters, to archival research and the role of the humanities in public life. I thought that it would be worthwhile to interview him as his knowledge of literature is substantial, while his incisive and engaging thoughts on a range of topics are worth hearing. The interview was conducted intermittently by email between July and October, 2008.
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Date Issued: 2009

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Nathaniel Merriman’s lecture: “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History”

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2009
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7060 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007424 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48132
Description: preprint , “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History” is the second of two lectures on Shakespeare given by Archdeacon Nathaniel Merriman in Grahamstown in 1857. The first was delivered in the Court House on the 2nd September 1857, and the second two months later, on Friday 6th November that same year, again in the Court House. The lecture was published in 1858. An article placing the lectures in their local context appeared in Shakespeare in Southern Africa 20 (2008): 25-37, accompanying an annotated edition of the first lecture, “On the Study of Shakspeare”. Readers desiring details of the editorial principles adopted in producing annotated editions of the two lectures are referred to the introductory material prefacing the first lecture.
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Date Issued: 2009

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South African Shakespeare in the twentieth century

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2009
Language: English
Type: Book chapter
Identifier: vital:7061 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007425
Description: This special section of the Shakespearean International Yearbook asks a series of questions about South African Shakespeare, chapter by chapter, focusing on the twentieth century. The temporal emphasis is deliberate, because it was particularly in the last century that Shakespeare became an issue, albeit a minor one, in relation to the titanic political and ideological struggles that convulsed the country throughout the period. The articles set out to examine and re-assess, in historical sequence, some of the acknowledged highlights of Shakespeare in South Africa in the last century. These are the moments when, for a range of different reasons, Shakespeare troubles the public sphere to claim attention in excess of that normally accorded ‘routine Shakespeare,’ that haphazard succession of productions, tours, educational debates, academic publications, reviews and commentary that comprises the internal history of the subject.
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Date Issued: 2009

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Umabatha: Zulu play or Shakespeare translation?

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2009
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7062 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007426 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351963381/chapters/10.4324%2F9781315264219-12
Description: preprint , There can be few recent theatrical productions in greater need of interpretative effort than Welcome Msomi’s Umabatha. From its inception debate has raged over the cultural status of the production: was it an authentic expression of Zulu culture, or a tacky piece of ‘blacksploitation’? – to use Russell Vandenbroucke’s term. Was the production pleasing evidence of Shakespeare’s universality, a gift to the colonies returning joyfully to the motherland with interest accruing? Could it perhaps be a case of Zulu culture triumphing over Shakespeare, native invention swamping and overwhelming a colonially-imposed ‘high culture’? Was the show performing ‘Africa’ for the world and, if so, was this the way Africa ought to be represented in the twentieth century? Or were we perhaps looking at a fetishized theatrical commodity, wrenched from any authentic cultural roots, and circulating aimlessly but profitably through a globalised theatrical cosmopolis? Such speculative questions – and there are many others – have regularly jostled each other in the bulky heritage of Umabatha’s reception history. The central problem underlying this chapter is whether it might not be possible to define a basis for a more objective response to some of them, so that the issues involved no longer rest quite so slackly in the realm of mere critical opinion.
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Date Issued: 2009

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Nathaniel Merriman's lecture: "On the study of Shakspeare".

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2008-09-23
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:7034 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007368
Description: Nathaniel Merriman’s lectures on Shakespeare were published in 1857 and 1858. The first, “On the Study of Shakspeare,” was delivered in the Court House, Grahamstown on the 2nd September 1857 to an audience of more than four hundred and fifty people. The second, “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History,” was given in the same venue two months later, on Friday, 6 November 1857, and was also well attended. The lectures were published under the auspices of the Committee of “The General Institute,” which sponsored the lectures, and printed at the Anglo-African Office in the High Street. The two lectures and their context are little known in Shakespeare studies because the original pamphlets are rare. The first lecture appears in Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography (1910), while the second is picked up only in the 1979 revision of that work. Copies of “On the Study of Shakspeare” are held by the Mendelssohn Library in the Library of Parliament, Cape Town; by The South African Library, Cape Town; and in the Oppenheimer Collection, Johannesburg. Copies of “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History” are held by the Mendelssohn Library; by the University of the Witwatersrand Library, Johannesburg; and by the Kimberley Public Library. The purpose of preparing annotated editions of these lectures is to make them more accessible to scholars and draw them further into the mainstream of international discussion on colonial Shakespeare.
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"Something rotten in this age of hope": Wesley Deintje directs The HamletMachine (Rhodes University Theatre, 28 September 2007)

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2008
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:7048 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007390
Description: Heiner Müller’s most famous play (Die Hamletmaschine, 1977) has evolved into something of a familiar war-horse for student theatre. The United States in particular has taken to the work; indeed, it was meant in part for them: “Heil Coca-cola!” says the script. For today’s South African ears this has become, very aptly, “Hail the Rainbow Nation!” What young director can resist it? Only eight pages in extent, the sparse yet densely referential text offers unfettered scope for interpretation and contextualization. Sure, the original offered Muller’s despairing take on the collapse of western civilisation, typified in the East German predicament where intellectuals felt trapped between the total failure of ‘actually existing socialism’ – that ideological mirage – in the German Democratic Republic, and the horrors of emergent bandit capitalism presaging an uncomfortable future. But the spaces in the text are so capacious that almost any claim to climactic despair can be entertained: idiot consumerism, gender oppression and aggression, political treachery and malfeasance, fascism, existential angst, intellectual cowardice, the postmodern condition, the rejection of hope.
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Date Issued: 2008

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Ecological thinking: Schopenhauer, J M Coetzee and who we are in the world

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2008
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7031 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007362 , https://doi.org/10.5848/CSP.0926.00001
Description: preprint , For the ecological agenda to make substantive progress, we will have to see powerful people and social agencies turning away from the ecological insanity that threatens us all, and for this to happen, people need to embrace voluntary renunciation, on the understanding that this is not self-sacrifice, but a different and more satisfying way of being in the world. The paper offers some thought, provoked by reading J.M. Coetzee and Arthur Schopenhauer, about what would make this change possible, what might enable it; and secondly why it is implausible that any such ideal might actually come to pass.
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Date Issued: 2008

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