Decolonizing Shakespeare: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Three Adaptations of

Three Plays by William Shakespeare

by

Angela Eward-Mangione

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
College of Arts and Sciences
University of South Florida

Co-Major Professor: Hunt Hawkins, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor: Sara Deats, Ph.D.
Marty Gould, Ph.D.
Lisa Starks-Estes, Ph.D.

Date of Approval:
November 14, 2014

Keywords: Adaptation, Early Modern Drama, Post-colonial Drama, Counter-Discursive

Metatheatre

Copyright © 2014, Angela Eward-Mangione

 UMI Number: 3666528

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am profoundly grateful to my dissertation co-chairs, Dr. Sara Munson Deats and Dr.

Hunt Hawkins for their inspiration, guidance, encouragement, and feedback. I also thank my

other dissertation committee members, Drs. Marty Gould and Lisa Starks-Estes for their

insightful and helpful comments and guidance. The dissertation also benefited from Katherine

McGee, who offered thoughtful readings of the work at various stages. I also thank the English

Department’s Dissertation Support Group, especially Jessica Cook, for coordinating our

supportive meetings. The staff at the University of South Florida Writing Center and Library also

offered vital assistance with research and writing.

Work on this dissertation proceeded during a few professional and personal transitions,

and I thank my many colleagues and friends who traveled with me throughout this process. It is

impossible to name all of the individuals who offered encouragement, guidance, and support, but

I wish to extend a heartfelt thanks to Marc Olmsted, Dr. Heather Meakin, Dr. Joseph Moxley,

Dr. Anca Mirsu-Pan, Dana Rine, Jim Thigpen, Lila Potter, Michelle Whitmire, Rebecca

Campbell, Cheryl Castellari, David Cope, Dr. Dianne Donnelly, Dr. Jim Lee, Paul Linn, Charles

Allen, Abby Landmeier, Noreen Rodriguez, Nelson Mangione, Karol Mangione, Chris

Mangione, and Tiffany Mangione. I also thank my mother, Janet Lawrence, and her husband, Ed

Lawrence, for taking me to the conference where I first presented a paper related to the topic of

my dissertation.
 My husband has also been an unending source of encouragement and support, from our

days of courtship and engagement when he endured my insistence on framing quotes from

Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets and placing them on each table at our wedding reception, to the

days of this dissertation when I read and wrote for hours, days, weeks, and months. I could not

have completed this dissertation without his encouragement and support.

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii

INTRODUCTION: THE ROLE OF IDENTIFICATION IN INTERPRETATION:

COUNTER-DISCURSIVE METATHEATRE AS CRITICISM ............................................. 1

CHAPTER ONE: “A PLAY ON THE THEME OF RACE”: RACE, GENDER,

AND COLONIALISM IN NOT NOW, SWEET DESDEMONA ............................................ 20

CHAPTER TWO: “UHURU!”: CALIBAN’S SELF-CONSCIOUS COUP IN

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE’S UNE TEMPÊTE...................................................................................... 62

CHAPTER THREE: ALIENATION ON IMPERIAL AXES IN ANTONY AND

CLEOPATRA AND A BRANCH OF THE BLUE NILE ....................................................... 110

CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF POST-COLONIAL STUDIES OF

SHAKESPEARE .................................................................................................................. 146

WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 152

i
 ABSTRACT

What role did identification play in the motives, processes, and products of select post-

colonial authors who “wrote back” to William Shakespeare and colonialism? How did post-

colonial counter-discursive metatheatre function to make select post-colonial adaptations

creative and critical texts? In answer to these questions, this dissertation proposes that counter-

discursive metatheatre resituates post-colonial plays as criticism of Shakespeare’s plays. As

particular post-colonial authors identify with marginalized Shakespearean characters and aim to

amplify their conflicts from the perspective of a dominated culture, they interpret themes of race,

gender, and colonialism in Othello (1604), Antony and Cleopatra (1608), and The Tempest

(1611) as explicit problems. This dissertation combines post-colonial theory and other literary

theory, particularly by Kenneth Burke, to propose a rhetoric of motives for post-colonial authors

who “write back” to Shakespeare through the use of counter-discursive metatheatre. This

dissertation, therefore, describes and analyzes how and why the plays of Murray Carlin, Aimé

Césaire, and Derek Walcott function both creatively and critically, adapting Shakespeare’s plays,

and foregrounding post-colonial criticism of his plays.

Chapter One analyzes Murray Carlin’s motivations for adapting Othello and using the

framing narrative of Not Now, Sweet Desdemona (1967) to explicitly critique the conflicts of

race, gender, and colonialism in Othello. Chapter Two treats why and how Aimé Césaire adapts

The Tempest in 1969, illustrating his explicit critique of Prospero and Caliban as the colonizer

and the colonized, exposing Prospero’s insistence on controlling the sexuality of his subjects,

ii
and, therefore, arguing that race, gender, and colonialism operate concomitantly in the play.

Chapter Three analyzes A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983) as both a critique and an adaptation of

Antony and Cleopatra, demonstrating how Walcott’s framing narrative critiques the notion of a

universal “Cleopatra,” even one of an “infinite variety,” and also evaluates Antony as a character

who is marginalized by his Roman culture. The conclusion of this dissertation avers that in

“writing back” to Shakespeare, these authors foreground and reframe post-colonial criticism,

successfully dismantling the colonial structures that have kept their interpretations, and the

subjects of their interpretations, marginalized.

iii
 INTRODUCTION:

THE ROLE OF IDENTIFICATION IN INTERPRETATION:

COUNTER-DISCURSIVE METATHEATRE AS CRITICISM

In the Apotheosis scene of Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), by Derek Walcott,

Shakespeare, and what Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins refer to in Post-Colonial Drama as

“other chief promulgators of white western culture” (22), are tried and almost hanged before “the

wife of the devil, the white witch . . . the white light” (319) is beheaded. Basil, the play’s figure

of death, insists that these men should be banished from the archives of the bo-leaf and papyrus

because they are white (312). He follows Shakespeare’s name as one of the many accused

individuals with an additional list that includes Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Galileo, Abraham

Lincoln, and Florence Nightingale. Although Shakespeare is spared, the white witch—the

mother of civilization, and the confounder of blackness . . . the colour of the law, religion, paper,

[and] art” (319)—is beheaded, figuratively symbolizing the death of Shakespeare and the host of

other white icons of Western culture. And yet, in his essay “Meanings,” Walcott advocates a

theater where someone can perform Shakespeare or sing Calypso with equal conviction (Walcott

qtd. in Lowenthal and Comitas 306). This optimistic view towards hybridity is not present in the

trial of Shakespeare in Dream on Monkey Mountain, however, leading scholars to explore the

view of Walcott and other post-colonial writers towards Shakespeare and his plays in an era of

decolonization. To complicate this goal, as Stephen Greenblatt notes in Will in the World: How

Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, aside from Shakespeare’s actual plays and poems, the

1
surviving traces of the playwright’s life are “abundant but thin” (12); thus scholars do not have

much information about this controversial symbol of Western culture.

What, then, did William Shakespeare do to deserve a dishonorable mention—and a

figurative death—in Dream on Monkey Mountain? How did Shakespeare become a symbol of

white law, religion, and art? I propose that in the mission of colonization “Shakespeare” was

reframed and appropriated by the British Empire to tout British literature, culture, and white

Europeans as superior to non-European people, culture, and literature. One result of the

encounters between Shakespeare and colonized people has been the identification of colonized

people with literary figures who signify dominated societies. As such, the Corporal in Dream on

Monkey Mountain describes the white witch as “the mirror of the moon that this ape [Makak]

looks into and finds himself unbearable” (319). Dream on Monkey Mountain provides one of the

many examples of how post-colonial theorists and dramatists have responded to the Bard and his

plays, which authors such as Walcott encountered through colonial education. Rejoinders to

Shakespearean drama by post-colonial dramatists is the subject of this dissertation. Thus, as in

Post-Colonial Shakespeares, the overlaps and tensions, as well as the possibilities of a dialogue

between Shakespearean and post-colonial studies (Loomba and Orkin 2) become part of my

discussion. More specifically, however, this dissertation analyzes a process by which dramatists

formulate these responses to Shakespeare—particularly to aspects of his plays pertaining to race,

gender, and colonialism—as well as how these post-colonial plays seek to decolonize

Shakespeare’s texts. In this introduction, therefore, I will briefly map the intellectual histories of

this dialogue.

Prior to offering a theory for analyzing these post-colonial plays, one must confront the

objection of anachronism and argue persuasively that Shakespearean plays lend themselves to a

2
post-colonial reading. For example, Meredith Skura notes in her article about The Tempest that

Shakespeare could not have had access to the records of England’s colonial ventures into the

Mediterranean (42-69).1 Moreover, Brian Vickers takes aim at poststructuralist critics who, in his

view, have improperly appropriated Shakespeare for non-altruistic and commercial purposes.

Addressing post-colonial views of Othello, Skura also contends that Moors in English

Renaissance drama derived from Mediterranean discourse, that their blackness signified

exoticism but not inferiority (302), and that “the others most occupying the minds of

Shakespeare’s country men were people wanting to colonize them, specifically the Ottomans”

(301), since, together, the Ottoman and Spanish Empires defined a Mediterranean world in which

a white slave trade became central to England (301).

And yet English mercantile and colonial enterprises were developing during the early

modern period. David Bevington’s description of life in Shakespeare’s England depicts a

fledgling empire in which England’s territories in France were no longer as extensive as they had

been during the fourteenth century and earlier (xi). In fact, Bevington observes that by the end of

Queen Elizabeth’s reign (1558-1603), England had “virtually retired from the territories she had

previously controlled on the Continent, especially in France” (xi). However, Wales was a

conquered principality, and England’s overseas empire in America had just begun with the

Virginia settlement established in the 1580s (xi). Scotland was not yet a part of Great Britain,

and Ireland was declared a kingdom under English rule in 1541 but was “more a source of

trouble than of economic strength,” all of which made the England of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries “small and isolated” (xi).

How did the fledgling empire of England conceive of colonization during the early

modern period? Loomba observes that analogies between sexual and colonial contact worked to

3
define both forms of contact in terms of male possession (30), arguing that colonial space was

sexualized, and women’s bodies figured as colonies (30). Extending this analysis, Loomba

contends that, increasingly, European Christian identity is expressed in terms of masculinity: “its

superiority and power are described and comprehended as the penetration, rape, or husbanding of

an inferior or feminized race” (31). Toni Francis also focuses on the concept of possession,

contending that “as the principal vehicle of English colonial expansion and the most rewarded

approach to maritime war in the colonies, the practice of piracy became the prime metaphor for

early modern colonialism and imperialism” (112).2 In contrast, Mark Netzloff persuasively

asserts that the idea of a British Empire first gained currency during James I’s joint rule of

Scotland and England from 1603-25 (9), maintaining that England’s colonies were initially

devised as a form of social organization intended to extract surplus from agricultural production”

(11). Additionally, he reasons that the means through which these colonies were formed, the

confiscation or “escheating”3 of tracts of lands, originated in capitalist practices of agriculture

and land management in England (11). However, Netzloff also addresses the role of

proselytization in domestic and foreign colonization.

Indeed, proselytization and colonial education, which were not always unrelated, led to

the circulation of Shakespeare throughout the world, though Shakespeare was not celebrated

everywhere and at all times. Tompkins reminds us that Shakespeare’s plays figure prominently

as targets of counter-discourse because “the circulation of ‘Shakespeare’s Books’ within

educational and cultural spheres has been a powerful hegemonic force throughout the history of

the British Empire” (19). Thus a brief overview of the role that British Literature played in

England’s early endeavors in colonialism and imperialism may help to sharpen our perception of

how Shakespeare became a significant hegemonic force. Significantly, Gauri Viswanathan traces

4
the trajectory of the English language and literature within and outside of Europe in Masks of

Conquest, the seminal text regarding the roles of the English language and literature in colonial

education. According to Viswanathan, English Literature made its appearance in India with a

crucial act in Indian educational history: the passing of the Charter Act in 1813 (23), the same

year in which the opening of India to free trade also occurred (35). England undertook the

education of the natives in India; and yet this was not a responsibility it bore for its own people

(23). Viswanathan comments, “Thus in the course of the argument the question of how England

can serve the people of India blends indistinguishably with the question of how power can best

be consolidated” (26). The English Education Act of 1835, proposed by the Governor-General

William Bentick on Thomas Babington Macaulay’s advice, made English the medium of

instruction in Indian education (44). The English literary text, therefore, became a mask for

economic exploitation, camouflaging the material activities of the colonizer (20). This trend

persisted in colonial education outside of India as well, particularly as the rise of British

nationalism and the institutionalization of the English language and literature coincided with the

colonization of Non-European countries. It is under these distinct types of circumstances that the

post-colonial writers this dissertation examines encountered Shakespeare, and each chapter of

this dissertation will analyze the specific educational experiences of these post-colonial authors.

It is instructive to point out that the meaning of the term “post-colonial” has been, and

continues to be, a point of debate. Following Bill Ashcroft et al. in The Empire Writes Back, I

employ the term “post-colonial” to address all culture affected by the colonial process from the

moment of colonization to the present day (2). I concur with Ashcroft et al. that “there is a

continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial

aggression” (2). Scholars such as Anne McClintock, however, have averred that colonialism is

5
not a monolithic entity. McClintock critiques Ashcroft et al. for anachronistically approaching

the preoccupations initiated by imperial European endeavors: she disagrees with “inscribing

history around a single ‘continuity of preoccupations’ and a ‘common past,’” thereby running the

risk of disavowing crucial international distinctions (87). As Linda Hutcheon argues however,

what unites all of these different or even opposing positions on the meaning of “postcolonial” is

a shared stake in the psychological and social analysis of colonial identity on the collective and

individual levels (“Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition” 11). This dissertation focuses on

psychological analyses of colonial identity, relying frequently on psychoanalytically informed

post-colonial theory to draw attention to the psychological effects of colonialism as they are

dramatized in select early modern and post-colonial plays that write back to Shakespeare’s texts

and the discursive fields of race, gender, and colonialism they engage.

As I analyze these select dramatic post-colonial appropriations of plays by Shakespeare, I

assert that these post-colonial plays “write back” to Shakespeare through identifying and

challenging dominant narratives that represent the colonized and, therefore, perform a dual

function by critically commenting on Shakespeare’s plays while also reconfiguring aspects of the

plays within the context of decolonization. This niche of the dramatic afterlives of

Shakespearean characters, burgeoning during a period of global decolonization that included the

dismantling of the British Empire—or as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has argued in Moving the Centre,

the transition from colonialism and imperialism to neo-colonialism (60)—has recently proved

especially significant to Shakespearean studies, due particularly to globalization. Specifically,

this dissertation treats Not Now, Sweet Desdemona (1967), an appropriation of Shakespeare’s

Othello (1604) written by the South African dramatist and poet Murray Carlin; Une Tempête

(1969), an adaptation of The Tempest (1611) written by the Martinican dramatist, poet, and

6
philosopher Aimé Césaire; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983), an appropriation of Antony and

Cleopatra (1608) written by the Saint Lucian poet and dramatist Derek Walcott.4 Although

penned at varying times and in three different countries, all three of these post-colonial plays

employ the strategy that Salman Rushdie coined as “writing back” (qtd. in Ashcroft et al. 32),

and in “writing back,” the protagonists in these plays—and in some cases their creators (or

authors)—identify with yet challenge representations of “othered” figures within Shakespeare’s

plays. As such, these post-colonial plays begin to decolonize Shakespeare’s by exposing and

dismantling colonial structures.

In The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin identify

“writing back” as a literary technique utilized by Anglophone post-colonial authors who address

the political conflicts between a dominated and dominating society (32). The Empire Writes Back

focuses on the writing of peoples formerly colonized by Britain, yet, as Ashcroft et al. point out,

a significant amount of their work can be applied to countries colonized by other European

powers, including France (1). This dissertation builds on their theories, drawing on Kenneth

Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives to develop the technique of “writing back” from a descriptive

model into a theory of the motives and process of this strategy. This theory will prove central to

understanding how an authorial motive contingent on “identification,” combined with a

politically charged creative and critical process, unite to produce texts that function as both post-

colonial drama and post-colonial criticism of Shakespeare’s plays.

To date, scholars have not fully developed aspects of “writing back” that pertain to texts

that function both critically and creatively. Post-colonial critics like Reed Way Dasenbrock

thereby deem the paradigm of “writing back” a simplistic descriptive model (104).5 However, I

argue for the complexity of the strategy of “writing back” in a post-colonial context. Evidence

7
for the sophistication of the model includes the contingency of the motive, process, and product

on the post-colonial author’s dramatized interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as his or

her intention to reconfigure the plot and characters so that the implicit features of the original

play become explicit in the appropriation. Moreover, the act of appropriation amplifies the irony

of the contingency of the author’s motivation on his or her identification with characters of the

original canonical play that the author interprets and contests yet also assimilates into the

appropriative text; this irony points to a complex, rather than a simplistic, technique.

In discussing “appropriation” and “adaptation,” I acknowledge my use of slippery terms

that have yet to be agreed upon amongst scholars. Ashcroft et al. define appropriation in post-

colonial writing as “the process of capturing and remoulding the language to new usages,”

thereby marking a separation from the site of colonial privilege (37). To complicate this

definition, in their Introduction to Adaptations of Shakespeare, Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier

eschew the use of the word “appropriation,” insisting that this terms suggests a “hostile

takeover” or politicized “seizure of authority” that they are certain does not do “justice” to

“other, more respectful aspects of the practice” (3). However, the third definition of the verb

form of “appropriate” that The Oxford English Dictionary Online provides, “to take possession

of for one’s own, to take to oneself,” is not contingent on the “hostile” motive that Fischlin and

Fortier attribute to the practice of “appropriation.” Additionally, the image that Fischlin and

Fortier’s description of appropriation engenders—an image of an entity on the margins of, or

external to, an “authority,” or center—reifies the prejudicial premise of colonial ideology: that a

privileged center exists outside of which everything else is “other.” Finally, the irony of Fischlin

and Fortier’s assertion is that most post-colonial authors encountered Shakespeare through

colonial education, which oftentimes entailed the British Empire’s “hostile takeover” of a Non-

8
European country. I thus propose that the motives of these post-colonial authors render their

textual processes and products more akin to appropriation than adaptation. These authors make

Shakespeare their “own”; and yet these acts of appropriation prove more similar to the concept

of a strategic assimilation than to a “hostile takeover” (3). Additionally, an act of strategic

assimilation may simultaneously involve adaptation, whether culturally or literarily. Thus the

focus of this dissertation precludes privileging the term “appropriation” over “adaptation,” and

this dissertation uses the terms interchangeably while simultaneously recognizing the contentious

debate regarding the use of these terms.

This concept of strategic assimilation proves particularly evident in Not Now, Sweet

Desdemona, A Tempest, and A Branch of the Blue Nile, which all stage rehearsals of their

original Shakespearean counterparts, making the canonical site a feature—and target—of the

rewritten play. Joanne Tompkins designates this device as counter-discourse that “rewrites (or

re-represents) a ‘classical’ text (or part thereof)” (“Spectacular Resistance’: Metatheatric in Post-

Colonial Drama” 42-43). Coined by Richard Terdiman, the term “counter-discourse”

characterizes the theory and practice of symbolic resistance (Ashcroft et al. 56). According to

Terdiman, who analyzes nineteenth-century French writing, “confrontation between constituted

reality and its subversion” occurs at the point where cultural and historical change occurred (13).

Post-colonial critics have adapted Terdiman’s concept of “Counter-Discourse” to describe ways

in which particular post-colonial authors mount challenges to dominant discourses, though these

critics theorize “counter-discourse” less in terms of historical processes and literary movements

than in terms of challenges posed to imperial ideologies inculcated, stabilized, and specifically

maintained through texts employed in colonialist education systems (Ashcroft et al. 56).

9
 To develop her specific conception of counter-discourse in metatheatre, Tompkins adapts

Helen Tiffin’s discussion of counter-discourse in the post-colonial novel.6 Tiffin observes that

post-colonial writing interrogates discourses and discursive strategies, and that re-reading

European historical and fictional records enables scholars to pinpoint the subversive maneuvers

that post-colonial writers use to subvert notions of literary universality. Tiffin focuses on the

counter-discursive strategies of post-colonial novels within the field of canonical counter-

discourse, asserting that canonical counter-discourse is a strategy “in which a post-colonial

writer takes up a character or characters, or the basic assumptions of a British canonical text, and

unveils those assumptions, subverting the text for post-colonial purposes” (22). In Tiffin’s

theoretical framework, post-colonial authors do not just “write back” to a text but to a whole

discursive field within which a text originally operated. Tiffin also notes that some subversive

strategies employed in canonical counter-discourse, a form of “writing back,” may involve

multiple ironic inversions which pervade the text or draw attention to major effects of

colonialism (32).

I draw on Tompkin’s theory of counter-discourse in metatheatrical post-colonial drama to

assert that counter-discursive metatheatre functions as a specific type of “writing back.” This

dissertation therefore develops a theory of “writing back” and explores applications of the theory

within drama that employ canonical counter-discursive metatheatre. I opt to focus on plays that

utilize the strategy of counter-discursive metatheatre because this technique encourages the

characters (and actors) and audience to engage the play(s) both critically and creatively. In

Tompkin’s words, counter-discursive post-colonial metatheatre assists in the re-reading, re-

structuring, and re-situating of the larger “base” play (44-5). These three purposes, or functions,

cannot be conflated. I suggest that re-reading—and sometimes re-structuring—correlates with

10
the function of offering a critical interpretation. These post-colonial authors re-read, and thereby

offer critical commentary on, Shakespeare’s plays; and yet they also re-structure the plays to

emphasize their critical re-readings. “Writing back” in a post-colonial context therefore does not

prompt the question of imitation versus contestation; rather, “writing back” entails a process of

identification, imitation, assimilation, and contestation. Although critics may plausibly argue that

other literary forms, such as satire, possess a multi-faceted function as well, the fact that these

post-colonial plays also “write back” to Shakespearean plays differentiates the purpose of these

subversive dramas even further, since these plays foreground and thus resonate with post-

colonial criticism of Shakespeare’s plays.

In pondering how post-colonial authors “write back” to Shakespeare, critics tend to

overlook the fact that many post-colonial authors identify with “othered” figures in

Shakespeare’s plays—characters such as Othello, Cleopatra, and Caliban—and, in contesting

how the plights of these characters remain implicit rather than explicit in Shakespeare’s plays,

use counter-discursive metatheatre to amplify issues concerning race, gender, and colonialism.

This dissertation therefore emphasizes “identification” as a strategy for “writing back.” Rob

Nixon initially signaled the importance of “identification” to the process of Shakespearean

appropriation in “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest.” Nixon contrasts

Eurocentric interpretations of the play with the “sympathetic identification with Caliban”

expressed by George Lamming (567),7 and he contextualizes these post-colonial interpretations

that rely on “sympathetic identification” within a larger political context: between the fifties and

early seventies of the twentieth century, a feud between the cultures of the colonizer and

colonized occurred, and as a result, The Tempest emerged as a metaphorical Trojan horse

through which the dominated cultures could “win entry” and “assail global pretensions” from

11
within (578). Although they do not discuss “identification,” Ashcroft et al. also relate the

technique of “writing back” to the political conflicts between a dominated and dominating

society (32). Additionally, Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer designate Kenneth Burke as the

central theorist of the rhetoric of identification in types of Shakespearean appropriation in which

actors possess a personal or political relationship to the drama they perform (8). A Rhetoric of

Motives also addresses relationships between literary authors and their works, however,

particularly in producing “literature for use” (A Rhetoric of Motives 5), and Burke’s text thus

provides an apt theoretical framework through which to analyze the subject of writing back to

Shakespeare.

According to Burke, the function of rhetoric is to persuade, and a speaker persuades his

audience by “the use of stylistic identifications” (46) since one persuades another only in so far

as one talks the other’s language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, and idea

(55). In each of the Shakespearean plays this dissertation examines, identity is constructed in

contrast to an “other”: The Duke and the Court of Venice distinguish themselves from “the

Moor,” Prospero’s authority rests on his view of Caliban as inferior, and Caesar and other

principal characters in Antony and Cleopatra describe Cleopatra and her court as contrasting

with Roman values and culture. Thus, in drawing on Burke’s theory of identification, I am first

proposing that Shakespeare encoded his plays with arguments concerning the social perception

of what Englishness was not by tapping into xenophobic attitudes pertaining to the topic of

England’s relationship with the non-European world. To his audiences, then, his plays were

thought-provoking, but they also reified spectators’ identities as English, not because

Shakespeare necessarily viewed England as superior, but because he implicitly illustrated the

dialectical tension that underscored the burgeoning construction of England’s national identity.

12
This proposal receives critical support from Greenblatt, who in Renaissance Self-Fashioning

from More to Shakespeare, explores how Renaissance aristocratic and upper classes formed their

identities at least partly against the images of the newly discovered “natives” of the New World

(9). Unpersuaded that common ground existed between them and the other, they constructed an

identity around disassociation.

Burke successfully tests his theory in A Rhetoric of Motives, in which he re-reads John

Milton’s Samson Agonistes to argue that it evokes a relationship between Milton’s and Samson’s

blindness, or between the poet’s difficulties with his first wife and Delilah’s betrayal of a secret

(4). In connecting Milton’s personal circumstances with those of Samson, Burke thereby

contends that Milton identifies with Samson, a “self-destructive hero” (4). Additionally, Burke

proposes that by positing that a blind Biblical hero did conquer, he (Milton) is “substantially”

saying that, in his blindness, he will conquer, and that Milton thus produces “literature for use”

(5) by encoding implicit personal and political experiences into Samson Agonistes. This process

of identification operates similarly in the post-colonial plays this dissertation examines. Nixon

observes in his analysis of post-colonial appropriations of The Tempest that a “sympathetic

identification” with Caliban informs post-colonial authors’ motives to appropriate Shakespeare’s

The Tempest; a similar “identification” with Othello, Caliban, Cleopatra, and even Antony,

motivates Carlin, Césaire, and Walcott to “write back” to Shakespeare’s Othello, The Tempest,

and Antony and Cleopatra, suggesting through reinterpretations of these characters and changes

to these plots that an alteration of colonial structures is possible.

The concept of division also plays a critical role in Burke’s theory of identification; thus

these post-colonial authors retain the aspects of the characters and plays with which they identify

yet alter those qualities from which they disassociate. As Burke explains, properties define

13
entities (A Rhetoric of Motives 23) and human beings surround themselves with properties that

establish their identity (24). Human beings exist in relation to one another, however, forming

their identities in terms of differing properties. In Burke’s words, “in pure identification there

would be no strife (25); identification inherently involves division, however (45), and rhetoric

thereby entails faction” (45). This dialectical relationship between identification and division

proves apparent in all three of these post-colonial plays. Carlin, Césaire, and Walcott identify

with “othered” characters—Othello, Caliban and Cleopatra—and therefore make the otherwise

implicit (and thus debatable) plights of the Shakespearean characters explicit; however, these

post-colonial authors also disassociate from the European representations of these “othered” or

“colonized” figures and thus reconfigure the Shakespearean characters within the context of

decolonization. To quote Nixon, “some Caribbean and African intellectuals anticipated that their

efforts to unearth from The Tempest a suppressed narrative of their historical abuse and to

extend that narrative in the direction of liberation would be interpreted as philistine” (558;

emphases added). Nixon’s observation underscores the identification of Carlin, Césaire, and

Walcott with suppressed narratives as well as intimating the disassociation from some aspects of

the Shakespearean narratives that these authors experience, particularly those elements that

oppose independence, thus explaining why these authors desired to “extend” the Shakespearean

narrative “in the direction of liberation” (558). Nixon’s viewpoint also amplifies the urgent

rationale these post-colonial authors evinced for attuning to plays by Shakespeare during the era

of decolonization.

Although I am building on both Nixon’s brief reference to and Burke’s elaborate theory

of “identification,” it strikes me that I ought not use Burke’s theories from A Rhetoric of Motives

while ignoring his theoretical and critical work on the whole, particularly since Burke has

14
contributed substantially to Shakespearean scholarship.8 In the application of Burke’s theory of

identification to these post-colonial plays, two key questions arise: 1.) Can Burke’s theory be

applied to examine both intrinsic and extrinsic elements of these post-colonial plays; 2.) Does

this process of identification work consciously or unconsciously in these occasions of “writing

back?” In Burke’s view, the pentad of “dramatism” (agent, act, scene, agency, purpose) offers a

schematic approach by which discourse can be analyzed. Thus Burke’s purpose in A Grammar of

Motives is to demonstrate how the designated functions of these terms operate in the imputing of

motive. Burke, therefore, was influenced by Aristotle; as M. Elizabeth Weiser notes in Burke,

War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism, some scholars have dismissed Burke’s theory of

dramatism for purportedly restating Aristotle’s four causes of natural objects (118).9 And yet

Burke eschewed the reduction of human behavior to motion (Lindsay 2). Thus Aristotle

influenced Burke, but Burke also diverted from Aristotelean theory.

It is also significant to observe that Burke produced both theory and criticism. Burke is

often, though not always, deemed a “New Critic.” And yet for Burke, biographical information

may pertain to the relationship of an act (writing) and to an author (poem); and historical

information may pertain to scene and act. As Desmet points out in her review of Kenneth Burke

on Shakespeare, Burke is most interested in how Shakespeare’s plays work (126); however, like

other New Critics, he does not altogether reject the influence of an author’s biography. Even T.S.

Eliot, in “The Tradition and the Individual Talent,” remarked on the relationship of a poet’s

biography to his work, yet this approach emphasizes a writer’s experiences, not his or her

personality traits, as what he or she brings to an external object. Certainly, Shakespeare is among

the “experiences” of these post-colonial authors in a distinct way that differs from even Burke’s

general conjecture of Shakespeare as surpassing epochs, centuries, whole populations and

15
cultures (Grammar of Motives 84). I am, therefore, asserting that these authors “labored”10 to

procure a consciousness of their relationship to Shakespeare, the type of laboring Eliot refers to

in “The Tradition and the Individual Talent.” I propose that their labor is conscious; however, the

influence of the unconscious cannot be denied.

My conjecture above aligns with the type of tension between the conscious and

unconscious that emerges from remarks by Aimé Césaire. For example, in one interview, Césaire

posits that it seemed evident to him that Prospero was a totalitarian, and that “what is most

obvious, even in Shakespeare’s version, is the man’s absolute will to power” (Césaire qtd. in

Frassinelli 175);11 and yet, by his own admission in Un poéte politique, Césaire originally

intended to translate Shakespeare’s play into French, but, he [Césaire] notes, “When the work

was done, I realized there was not much Shakespeare left” (qtd. in Franssinelli,174).12 This latter

quote highlights the unconscious nature of aspects of appropriating Shakespeare, contrasting

with the former assertion in which Césaire evinces that he is conscious of his view of Prospero.

Thus this dissertation acknowledges the uncharted psychological territory of whether these

instances of “writing back” are either altogether conscious or unconscious, choosing to focus on

the works themselves and how they re-read, re-structure, and re-situate Shakespeare’s plays,

thereby offering both literary criticism and creative adaptations.

Thus historical data, biographical criticism, and post-colonial criticism all prove critical

to the analysis of each play this dissertation examines. Each chapter draws on biographical

criticism, inclusive of pertinent historical information, to build a case for the operation of a

dialectical relationship of “identification” and “division” between the post-colonial author and

particular characters in the Shakespearean plays. This dialectical relationship compels select

post-colonial authors to highlight and alter particular aspects of a character and a play. Each

16
chapter, therefore, also refers to post-colonial criticism of the plays by Shakespeare in order to

demonstrate the correspondence between the criticism and the critical function of the post-

colonial plays, thus illustrating the similarity of their views to critical views.

Chapter One analyzes Murray Carlin’s Not Now Sweet Desdemona, proposing that by

identifying with his West Indian Actor who evinces a relationship to Shakespeare’s Othello as a

male victim of racism, yet by disassociating with what Carlin views as the European “liberal”

view of the “black” Othello, Carlin “writes back,” by deploying counter-discursive metatheatre

and by using the Actor-Othello to argue that racism is the central theme of the play. Carlin also

reconfigures Othello as a black man who confronts racism within the context of apartheid

politics. I posit that Carlin thus employs the Actor-Othello to advance criticism of Shakespeare’s

play, to dramatize the psychological effects of colonialism and racism in both the early modern

and contemporary eras, and to illuminate the power of the theater to both construct and to

deconstruct representations of the “other” in Shakespeare’s plays.

Chapter Two treats Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest to assert that by identifying with Caliban

as colonized yet disassociating from Caliban’s use of language to “curse”13 Prospero, Césaire

“writes back” to Shakespeare by explicitly identifying Prospero as a colonizer and Caliban as a

colonized figure while also reconfiguring Caliban as a character who “talk backs” to Prospero.

Césaire thus transforms Caliban from a character who occupies a position of constructed alterity

into a figure who asserts agency and his psychological independence from Prospero.

Additionally, Césaire presents Miranda as less dependent on Prospero than in Shakespeare’s The

Tempest. Césaire critically interprets Shakespeare’s The Tempest and also creatively appropriates

the play in order to engage contemporary global politics that span the Caribbean to Great Britain

to the United States.

17
 Chapter Three analyzes Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile to argue that Walcott’s

protagonists identify with both Cleopatra and Antony as constructed figures of alterity; and yet

Walcott also alters Cleopatra’s lack of subjectivity and Antony’s inability to overtly challenge

sexist and racist hegemonic ideals. Walcott thus “writes back” by using counter-discursive

metatheatre, engaging the critical debate surrounding the orientalist construction of Cleopatra,

depicting the complicity of the British in the construction of her role and the pejorative

associations of that construction, and commenting on Antony’s ultimate refusal to affirm the

hegemonic ideals of the center. Additionally, Walcott creatively appropriates Shakespeare’s play

to extend the characters of Antony and Cleopatra into post-colonial afterlives that span the

Caribbean to Great Britain to the United States, and dramatize the politics of race and gender in

the theater of contemporary Trinidad and the United States.

The conclusion of this dissertation emphasizes appropriation as interpretation and

magnifies this interpretive act in a post-colonial setting. By appropriating Shakespeare’s plays

through a process that involves both identification and division and by using strategies of post-

colonial counter-discursive metatheatre, these post-colonial authors compose “post-colonial”

interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays while also recovering submerged and oft-debated

narratives within the original plays. We must further expand the boundaries of post-colonial

criticism of Shakespeare’s plays by examining more literary texts that “write back” to

Shakespeare, yet I propose that scholars use both an explanatory and a descriptive approach,

suggesting that merging the heretofore segmented fields of post-colonial theory and Shakespeare

and Appropriation makes this task possible.

18
Notes

1. See Meredith Skura in “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in the
Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 42-69. JSTOR. Web. 15 Aug. 2012.
2. See Toni Francis in “Imperialism as Devilry: A Postcolonial Reading of Doctor Faustus.”
Doctor Faustus: A Critical Guide. Ed. Sara Munson Deats 111-123. Print.
3. The term “escheat” referred to the practice wherein land could be acquired as a marketable
commodity without reciprocal feudal duties and services binding landlord and tenant (11).
4. I have opted to treat the plays in the order in which they were composed and produced, even
though Martinique had become a department of France before South Africa, Uganda, and Saint
Lucia gained their independence. Additionally, this sequence enables me to analyze in successive
order the two plays from the Caribbean, in which French colonization played a role.
5. Reed Way Dasenbrock proposes that post-colonial criticism has proved much more invested in
the concept of “writing back” from an oppositional stance than have post-colonial writers. In her
view, the emphasis on “writing back” as a form of contestation depicts the paradigm as
simplistic. Reed proposes that the manner in which post-colonial writers rewrite classical texts
entails a “complex mixture of emotions” that is “in crucial respects a continuation of the heritage
of modernism” (104). I concur with Dasenbrock regarding the complexity that “writing back”
entails; as a theory of the method will propose, the process involves more than contestation. I
disagree, however, with viewing these post-colonial plays as continuation of a heritage of
“modernism” that is largely European.
6. See “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourses” in Kunapipi 9.3 (1987): 17-34.
7. Although Rob Nixon briefly refers to Lamming’s “identification” with Caliban, it can be
properly inferred that this process of identification applies to other authors as well, including
Aimé Césaire, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, among others.
8. As a Review of Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare in Rhetoric Society Quarterly points out,
Kenneth Burke exerts a durable influence in the field of Shakespearean studies, but “scholars of
Shakespeare often cite Burke solely in footnotes and less often engage him by name or quote him
directly in the main text of their books and essays” (308). I can attest to this curious fact
regarding Burkean scholarship of Shakespeare: in my reviews of criticism of these
Shakespearean plays, Burke does not emerge as a central—or even a minor—player within the
field.
9. See Physics, Book II, Chapter III.
10. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot speculates that tradition cannot be
“inherited”; rather, it is obtained through labor (34).
11. See S. Belhassen, “Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest:” Radical Perspectives in the Arts 175-4.
12. Pier Frassinelli directs the reader to Un poéte politique (31) for the original text of his
translation.
13. Caliban’s use of language to “curse” Prospero (see 1.2.366-367 in The Tempest) has been the
subject of much scholarship, including Stephen Greenblatt’s Learning to Curse: Essays in Early
Modern Culture (1990), among other books and essays.

19
 CHAPTER ONE:

“A PLAY ON THE THEME OF RACE1”: RACE, GENDER, AND

COLONIALISM IN NOT NOW, SWEET DESDEMONA

Murray Carlin’s play Not Now Sweet Desdemona (1967), written in 1967 by a white

South African playwright living in Uganda,2 shares a kinship with the Anglo-American post-

colonial criticism of Othello (1604) that developed in North America in the mid- to late-1980s.3

During the same year in which G.K. Hunter delivered his landmark lecture “Othello and the

Color Prejudice” (1967) as the British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, South African author

Murray Carlin decried a lack of race-focused criticism of Othello in the introduction to his

memorable dramatic adaptation Not Now, Sweet Desdemona.4 Hunter persuasively argued that

Iago reduces the “white” reality of Othello to the “black appearance of his face” (54).Two years

earlier, in 1965, Eldred Jones had argued that Iago uses the racial difference between Othello and

Desdemona as a weapon against Othello (99-100) to incite jealousy. Jones also contended that

Shakespeare turned a Moor with unfavorable associations into a hero (109), a dramatic feat that

had not previously been accomplished in early modern drama. One year before Jones commented

on race in Othello, in 1964, G.M. Matthews had offered his striking race-based critique, devoting

the first line of his essay to declaring that “The most important feature of Othello is the colour of

the hero’s skin” (qtd. in Kettle 123). Carlin’s adaptation, however, sharply censures the racism

that operates in Othello, admonishing this early form of xenophobia, connecting it to the

contemporary issue of racism, and abasing the abject institution of apartheid. And yet although

20
Matthew’s essay, Eldred’s book, Hunter’s lecture, and Carlin’s play all emphasize the relevance

of race to Othello, only the work of Matthews, Jones, and Hunter has been lauded as the first

race-based criticism of the play. For example, Emily Bartels describes Jones as the “first to

challenge the otherwise whitewashed Elizabethan picture” and credits Hunter for addressing the

“colour prejudice” in Othello (Speaking of the Moor 10). Bartels does not mention Carlin’s play.

But the proximity of the dates and the motivations of these approaches to Othello raise

significant questions that challenge the boundaries of genre: do Matthew’s essay, Jones’s

analysis of Othello, Hunter’s lecture, and Carlin’s play share something significant, particularly

given the disparity of their genres and audiences? Do differences in genre and audience take

precedence over authorial motive, even when both authors seek to explore the same critical line

of inquiry?

This chapter proposes that Carlin’s play, race-based criticism of Othello, and post-

colonial criticism of Othello overlap in their critical inquiries, despite their generic differences. I

assert that Carlin takes an implicit and thereafter much-debated issue in the play—race—and

demonstrates how that issue may be viewed as explicit, or as central, to the play’s plot.

Moreover, this chapter also analyzes Carlin’s treatment of race, gender, and colonialism in

Othello, thereby demonstrating how his post-colonial interpretation of Shakespeare’s play

“writes back” to the critics that, in his view, had neglected the theme of race in the play. Carlin

also “wrote back” to a British Empire that, through literature and theater, had propagated a

stereotypical representation of a jealous “Moor” who lost his temper and tragically murdered his

innocent wife.5 Thus Carlin’s play foregrounds the large-scale explorations of the last three

decades that address how race, gender, and colonialism operate concomitantly in Othello. Not

Now, Sweet Desdemona, therefore, initiates a critical debate regarding the roles of race, gender,

21
and colonialism in Shakespeare’s Othello, an intriguing venture considering the meticulousness

with which the tenability of a case for colonialism in Othello has been tested.6 Carlin, who sides

with his West Indian actor’s view of race as the play’s central theme, dramatically articulates his

argument through the use of post-colonial counter-discursive metatheatre,7 demonstrating a

rhetoric of motives that distinctly differs from other popular postmodern forms of intertextuality.

Questions remain regarding how Carlin was introduced to Shakespeare and

Shakespearean criticism; yet, critics can speculate that Carlin encountered a laudatory version of

Shakespeare in South Africa. No source definitively pinpoints where and when Carlin was born.8

However, based on information provided by a former friend and academic colleague of Carlin’s,

I surmise that Carlin was born and educated in South Africa, where he may have been expelled

for his radical beliefs before accepting a teaching post at Makerere University in Uganda. In

Brokie’s Way: An Anthropologist’s Story, David Brokensha, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa

Barbara, avers that he attended the then all-white Rhodes University College9 with Carlin in

South Africa during the late 1940s. In Shakespeare and South Africa, David Johnson notes that it

was taken for granted that in the 1950s Shakespeare was a part of the syllabus (172). Johnson’s

observation applies to the curriculum in South African high schools; yet, one can deduce that the

curriculum at Rhodes in the late 1940s also included Shakespeare. Hunt Hawkins speculates,

“Shakespeare would have almost certainly have been on the curriculum at Rhodes” (“Question

about Interview Procedures for University Dissertations.”). In the Introduction to Shakespeare

and South Africa, Johnson juxtaposes two different “versions” of Shakespeare that he

encountered in South Africa in 1989: The first type was based on the presupposition that

Shakespeare was a genius and could enhance one’s pleasure in life (1-3). In contrast, the second

version of Shakespeare represented a site of contestation for post-colonial critics such as Rob

22
Nixon, who discusses the contentious nature of appropriations of Shakespeare in “Caribbean and

African Appropriations of The Tempest” (3). As addressed in the introduction to this dissertation,

Nixon contrasts Eurocentric interpretations of the play with the “sympathetic identification with

Caliban” expressed by George Lamming, Aimé Césaire, and Roberto Fernández Retamar (567).

According to Johnson, the majority of students in South Africa encountered the first version of

Shakespeare, which venerates the figure institutionalized in English teaching during the second

half of the nineteenth century (3). We can thus hypothesize that Carlin encountered this first

laudatory version of Shakespeare.

The political climate of South Africa during the late 1940s affected Carlin’s view of

Shakespeare and the British Empire, thereby influencing Not Now, Sweet Desdemona. In May of

1948, white South Africa went to the polls, resulting in a victory for the National Party10 under

Dr. D.F. Malan, in alliance with the Afrikaner party11 of N.C. Havenga, a party which essentially

remained faithful to J.B.M. Hertzog’s legacy12 (Ross 114). As Robert Ross notes in A Concise

History of South Africa, the party won the election under the slogan “apartheid”—literally

meaning “separateness” (115). Ross observes that in its origins apartheid entailed the recognition

and separation of specific groups of people, but that the criteria by which the National Party

demarcated these categories was not “racist” in the formal sense of the word (116). Ross situates

the National Party’s ideologies within a broader context that emphasized the importance of

ethnicity13 and viewed the various nations of South Africa as God-created entities, on the model

of their own self-image of Afrikanderdom (116). The National Party sought to preserve these

entities in their “purity” (116), a task the state accomplished by assigning everyone to one of the

national categories in South Africa14 and, in theory, “freezing” these categories through the

Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Act of 1950 (116). However, the Immorality

23
Act regulated sexual relationships across colored, not ethnic, lines; the undertones of the criteria

that the National Party used to separate groups of people in South Africa thus contained racist

ideologies. Moreover, one of the programmatic documents that the National Party endorsed in

the elections of 1948 entailed a vision of full “disassociation between whites and Africans” (Ross

116), aiming to reverse the process by which South Africa had become an economically

integrated country (117).

Carlin did not participate in the disassociation between white South Africans and

Africans; rather, he identified the plight of Africans forbidden from attending Rhodes University

College as an unjust practice. Brokensha asserts that both he and Carlin challenged policies at

Rhodes that proved deleterious to black Africans, specifically, that he and Carlin disputed Ian

Smith,15 then President of the Students Representative Council (SRC) at Rhodes, on the

proposed admission of two black African postgraduate chemistry students from Fort Hare

College. Smith had argued that the white Rhodes students would not accept black African

students, and the Senate had sided with Smith (Brokensha). According to Brokensha, he and

Carlin organized a meeting of students and gained approval for the admission of the black

African students to Rhodes (Brokensha). Additionally, Brokensha asserts that he and Carlin

maintained a critical stance toward General Smuts, the South African Prime Minister, because of

Smuts’s brutal repression of the (white) miner’s strike in 1922 and his government’s treatment of

black Africans (Brokensha).

Scholars have discovered only a few details about the circumstances of Carlin’s departure

(or expulsion) from South Africa. For example, Carlin appears in the diary of Patricia Ann

Naipaul, the first wife of V.S. Naipaul. In The World is What It Is: A Biography of V.S. Naipaul,

Patrick French refers to the diary entry that indicates, “He [Sir Vidiadhar Suraiprasad Naipaul,

24
sometimes known as V.S. or Sir Vidia Naipaul] recalls Murray Carlin and his poor wife >she

killed herself< [sic] sitting on the step of their dreadful bungalow and [with] their rather common

daughters, expelled from South Africa for his liberal stance, discovering where Vidia stood and

[secretively] showing him his [Carlin’s] (anti-African, anti-Negro) cartoons” (qtd. in French

255).16 Naipaul met Carlin during the nine months Naipaul spent in Africa in 1973, and although

French does not indicate the specific African country in which their rendezvous occurred, prior

to discussing the meeting, French refers to the attempt of Patricia Ann Naipaul to work in

Uganda as a journalist. Since Patricia Ann’s diary describes Carlin and his family as “expelled

from South Africa” (225), the encounter between Naipaul and Carlin most likely took place in

Uganda.

Carlin held a teaching post at Makerere University in Uganda, as documented by Carol

Sicherman in Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922-2000. His students included Peter

Nazareth, author of In a Brown Mantle (1972), The Social Responsibility of the Third World

Writer (1978), and The General is Up (1991), among other works. Nazareth avers that Murray

Carlin was his favorite professor at Makerere University, particularly since Carlin encouraged

Nazareth to write about his own interpretation of literature, even if those views differed from

Carlin’s perspectives (“Query: Professor Murray Carlin”). According to an interview with

Nazareth, Carlin also served as faculty advisor to Penpoint, Makerere’s literary magazine

(Lindfors 193). Sicherman recalls that only few of the staff members at Makerere independently

sought to teach there (most teachers were recruited), the most noteworthy of whom were white

South African academics who, after the apartheid government took office in 1948, were attracted

to a nonracist institution in Africa (269), and she estimates that twenty five of the staff members

at Makerere University in the 1950s derived from South Africa, including those such as Hannah

25
Stanton and Peter Rigby, who had suffered persecution (288).17 One may, therefore, plausibly

deduce that the politically tumultuous circumstances that entailed disassociation from South

Africa’s apartheid government preceded Carlin’s arrival at Makerere, and that these events also

undoubtedly influenced Carlin’s criticism of apartheid in his appropriation of Shakespeare’s

Othello.

Understanding the significance of Carlin’s position at Makerere University during the

late 1960s requires some knowledge of the political climate of Uganda during both the late 1960s

and early 1970s. Uganda achieved independence from Britain on 9 October 1962 (Ofcansky 38),

but the immediate period of decolonization involved considerable political turmoil. After

defeating an attempted coup, Prime Minister Milton Obote suspended the 1962 Constitution,

declared a state of emergency, and ordered army units to attack the Kabaka’s (King’s) palace on

Mengo Hill (41). Earlier, Obote had ceremoniously designated the Kubaka from Buganda as

President after Uganda became a Republic, since no government could reasonably hope to

achieve stability without Buganda’s support (37).18 The attack on and removal of the Kabaka

from the presidency thus proved punitive towards Buganda. In Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship

Across Four Continents, Makerere lecturer Paul Theroux recalls the attack, noting that he could

see smoke from the confrontation at Lubiri from his office desk at Makerere University (Theroux

68). After the attack, a curfew was imposed (69), Theroux temporarily stopped teaching, and he

considered writing a novel like Albert Camus’s The Plague in order to describe the deterioration

of a city under a siege and a curfew (70). Although Mutesa II (the Kabaka) escaped to London,

Obote’s military crackdown, led by Deputy Army Commander Idi Amin, resulted in

approximately 100 deaths (Ofcansky 41). Following the attack in 1967, Prime Minister Obote

introduced a new constitution (41), abolished Uganda’s four kingdoms (41), and drifted apart

26
from Amin (42).19 Aside from this political turmoil, the staging of Carlin’s play at Makerere

University in 1968 is also significant because Makerere had hosted the first African literature

conference—the Conference of African writers of English Expression—in 1962 (Sicherman

335). Additionally, Transition Magazine was based in Kampala from 1961-1968, when Obote

closed it. In 1963, Makerere became part of UEA, the University of East Africa; and,

significantly, in 1968, Makerere students protested the hanging of three dissident Africans in

Rhodesia (336).

Yet, understanding the relationship between Carlin and Shakespeare requires more than

recounting facts from either the history of South Africa or Uganda. Prior to offering an

interpretation of Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, one must speculate on how Carlin’s experiences

with segregation and apartheid in South Africa influenced his view of Shakespeare. Johnson

asserts that the arguments concerning the relationship between Shakespeare and apartheid can be

divided in two loose groups: one that insists on a Shakespeare opposed to racism and one that

sees a Shakespeare implicated in the links between Afrikaner racism and English humanism

(173). Although Carlin appropriates Shakespeare’s Othello to explore the connection between

Shakespeare’s plays and apartheid, Carlin’s play does not neatly align with either of the two

camps that Johnson describes. From one perspective, Carlin viewed Shakespeare

sympathetically, as a man who “foresaw all the problems of the Age of Imperialism” (Not Now,

Sweet Desdemona 671-3). Additionally, by suggesting that Shakespeare’s Othello focuses on

Othello’s blackness, Carlin invites critics to read Shakespeare as attentive to the issue of race.

Yet, Carlin also depicts Desdemona as a “White Liberal” who makes Othello her black slave,

intimating a potential relationship between her association with English humanism and the

Afrikaner racism that supported the enslavement and exploitation of black Africans even after

27
the 1833 emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, an act that Ross sees as inciting the Dutch

to adopt the name Boer, and later Afrikaner, to distinguish themselves from the English (171). I

insist on a reading that puts the contradictions in Carlin’s play in dialogue with both Carlin’s

identification with and disassociation from particular aspects of Shakespeare’s play.

Carlin chose canonical literature such as Shakespeare’s Othello20 to highlight, challenge,

and rewrite dominant narratives about race that, in his view, were precursors to deleterious race

relations in the twentieth century. In the introduction to his play, Carlin queries, “Why, indeed, is

Othello black?” (2). According to Carlin, his Actor-Othello, a black West Indian character, asks

that question, “a question that has not been answered by any of the Shakespeare critics I have

read” (2), while “rehearsing that [Othello’s] part” (2). In Carlin’s view, “the question of negro

male sexuality is something that has been skirted and avoided by critics of Othello—and, until

recently, by producers and actors too” (3). Moreover, Carlin asserts that the reactions of many of

the characters in Shakespeare’s play are unconsciously controlled by the fact that Othello is

black (3), thus adding to the perplexity regarding the dearth of race-based criticism of the play.

Carlin views the conditions of racism in the early modern and his own contemporary era

similarly, stating that “in those conditions of the modern world which had already begun to

prevail in Shakespeare’s time, the presence of such a [black] man is felt as a threat” (3). A

number of commentators, including Michael Neill and Emily Bartels, have since persuasively

argued that the emerging imperialistic enterprises in which the English engaged in the late

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries led to cross-cultural encounters with societies

displaying very different customs and mores from the English, and these events led to the

emergence of a conception of racial identity that is surprisingly akin to our contemporary

concept.21 Moreover, scholars now also recognize that early modern forms of xenophobia evoked

28
aversion to many types of “aliens,” including Blackamoors, Spaniards, Turks, and Jews, as well

as Africans, suggesting the presence of color prejudice during this historical period.22 Sensitive

to this xenophobic thinking, Ania Loomba argues that even early modern racial thinking could

be pernicious, without being based on a biological understanding of race (Shakespeare, Race,

and Colonialism 38). Significantly, Carlin asserts that if his play is a play about Othello’s

blackness, then it is “a play about race conflict in the twentieth century” (5); and he hopes that

his play will make some contribution to the solution of that [racial] conflict (5). Carlin’s

authorial motive is thus three-fold: to appropriate Shakespeare’s play to critically comment on it,

to appropriate Othello to alter its dominant narratives, and to appropriate the tragedy to intervene

in the broader social issue of racism. By identifying with and retaining some aspects of the play

while altering others, Carlin’s play “writes back” to Shakespeare, to Shakespearean critics, and

to Eurocentric dramatic representations of the “other.”

For instance, Carlin opted to appropriate Shakespeare’s generic dramatic form but to alter

its structure and elements in order to emphasize the theme of race. As David Bevington

comments, Shakespeare did not structure his plays in five acts with multiple scenes; editors later

imposed this structure onto his plays (Bevington xciv). Critics can thus plausibly speculate that

Carlin encountered an edition of Othello structured in five acts, such as those edited in the Arden

Shakespeare series beginning in 1899, even though Carlin’s play consists of one act, comprising

over 1,613 lines. Carlin also altered the play’s dialogue from verse to prose. The changes Carlin

makes in appropriating and adapting Othello for a post-colonial stage amount to other striking

additions and subtractions from Shakespeare’s original play. The subtractions include the Duke,

the Senate, Cassio, Emilia, Bianca, Roderigo, Gratiano, Montano, and the subplot concerning

Iago’s manipulation of Roderigo. Significantly, Carlin also omits Iago from the play, enabling

29
Carlin to focus on his interpretation of Desdemona’s role in constructing Othello’s race. In his

“play on the theme of race” (592), Carlin strips Shakespeare’s play to its principal elements and

two of its principal characters. Carlin also adds one minor character, Harry, who serves as a

lighting technician during the couple’s rehearsal of Shakespeare’s play. According to Nazareth,

the focus on two characters and the inclusion of one additional character is characteristic of a

dramatic “Carlinist,” or “Carlinian” style: Carlin is interested in presenting a dialectic between

two opposite ways of looking at issues but since it is difficult to write a play with only two

characters, and since a third character would interfere with the dialectic, Carlin creates an

“invisible third participant” (An African View of Literature 28-9). Carlin’s play thus focuses on

Othello’s relationship to his adopted European culture and European wife by presenting two

ways of interpreting the theme—jealousy versus racism—of Shakespeare’s play.

Carlin’s play also contains an overtly metadramatic dimension that affects his re-reading,

re-structuring, and re-situating of Shakespeare’s canonical play,23 and this metadramatic facet

allows Carlin to carefully critique the relationship between Othello and Desdemona while also

re-situating their relationship in a post-colonial context. Analyzing Carlin’s play, Helen Gilbert

and Joanne Tompkins aver that “the staging of the ‘intact’ [Shakespeare’s] play offers one kind

of counter-discourse which might, through a revisionist performance, articulate tensions between

the Anglo script and its localized enunciation” (16). Carlin’s play proves even more distinct,

however. His play revolves around a rehearsal of Shakespeare’s play, but during the breaks

between their rehearsal segments in the framing narrative, Carlin’s Actor-Othello and Actress-

Desdemona debate whether jealousy or race is the main theme of Shakespeare’s play. Through

staging this debate, Carlin’s play appropriates Shakespeare’s drama to offer “literary” criticism,

or commentary. Although critics may plausibly argue that other literary forms, such as satire,

30
also possess a multi-faceted function, the fact that these post-colonial plays “write back” to

Shakespearean plays differentiates their purpose even further, since these plays foreground and

thus resonate with post-colonial criticism of Shakespeare’s plays.

As such, in his re-reading of Shakespeare’s play, Carlin launches a critique of the still

oft-debated issue of race by identifying Othello’s blackness, rather than his jealousy, as the

explicit focus of Shakespeare’s play. Carlin’s Actor-Othello first emphasizes this argument by

refuting the actress’s assertion that “Othello is a jealous man. That’s the theme—it’s what

Shakespeare wrote. She is faithful, and loving and innocent. And he’s jealous. And there’s your

play” (Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 28). Carlin’s Actor-Othello insists that there is something she

has forgotten in the play: “Othello is a black man. He’s like me” (28). According to the actor, if

Desdemona’s argument is valid and jealousy is the theme of Shakespeare’s play, then

“Shakespeare didn’t need a black man for the play” (28). The actress counters his point by

suggesting that Shakespeare’s play is about “Love” (29), yet this perspective prompts the actor to

insist that Shakespeare’s play concerns “War” (29), is “a play about the Colour Conflict” (29),

and is the first play ever written about Colour (29). The actor also conjectures that Shakespeare’s

Othello would have been the only black man on stage, that all the white people in the play are

concerned with Othello in one way or another, and that they either love or hate him, or at least

think that they do (32): “Here stands Othello, the negro, the black man—the only black man

among hundreds of white people. If the play Othello isn’t about race and color—then tell me—

can you tell me, what the hell is it about?” (33). To bolster his argument for race as the theme of

the play, the actor points out that Othello is called “the thick lips” in Shakespeare’s play.

Originally, the actor asserts that Desdemona calls Othello “the thick lips” (34), but the actress

corrects him and confirms that Roderigo uses the slur “the thick lips” in act one, scene one

31
(34).24 Carlin’s West Indian actor thus relies on dialogue (albeit misquoted) from the play as well

as his assertion that Othello is cast as black to argue for race as the central theme of

Shakespeare’s play.

Other readers and commentators of Othello had also noted the significance of race within

the play prior to Carlin, and also to Hunter.25 To complicate this critical history, many critics

customarily view G.K. Hunter’s lecture as among the precursors to post-colonial critics’

emphasis on race. Hunter’s landmark lecture “Othello and the Colour Prejudice” (1967) utilized

G.B. Giraldi Cinthio’s narrative, which was Shakespeare’s source,26 as a point of departure,

noting that Cinthio’s Moor was also black, a point that Carlin’s Actor-Othello does not mention.

Hunter stresses the need to focus on what the idea of a black man suggested to Shakespeare,

while also considering what reaction the appearance of a black man on the stage was calculated

to produce (249). According to Hunter, Shakespeare reversed Jacobean audiences’ expectations

of encountering a “Moor” on stage by depicting him as a “great Christian gentleman” (254); and

yet when viewing blackness and whiteness as states of morality, as Shakespeare’s audiences

would undoubtedly have done, Iago transfers his blackness to Othello (259). Hunter thus focuses

on race as a central issue, emphasizing the connection of appearance and morality within both

the play and the mindset of Shakespeare’s audience.

Shakespeare’s development of Othello offered a discernable departure from stage

tradition by integrating the dual stereotype of the Moor that existed when Shakespeare wrote

Othello. By the time that Othello first appeared on the London stage, most likely in either 1604

or 1605, Moors had become a familiar figure of the London theater. A dual stereotype of the

Moor existed in the stage tradition preceding Othello—one villainous and bestial; the other

aristocratic and exotically “other.” Othello stems from the latter, with Iago taking on the

32
characteristics of the former. Shakespeare creates a round tragic hero, who, throughout most of

the play, represents the polar opposite of the traditional stereotyped Moor;27 yet the ubiquitous

use of the term “Moor” by many characters in the play, especially Iago, who almost always

refers to Othello as “the Moor,” functions to remind the audience of Othello’s status as an alien

in Venetian society. Iago only employs Othello’s Christian name once, during his ironic toast to

“black Othello” as the Ensign stands on the parapet in Cyprus with Cassio (2.3.27-29).28

Additionally, throughout the play, a host of characters employ racial epithets to refer to Othello

as “the Moor,” an “old black ram” (1.1.90), a “Barbary horse” (1.1.114), a “lascivious Moor”

(1.1.129), “the thick lips” (1.1.68), “black” (1.3.292-93), “the blacker devil” (5.2.135), and a

“Malignant and Turbaned Turk” (5.2.363); although once, the Duke describes Othello as “far

more fair than black” (1.3.293). Moreover, in act one, scene one, Iago tells Brabantio that “an old

black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.90-91), that Brabantio will have his daughter

covered with a Barbary horse (1.1.114), and that Desdemona has been transported to “the gross

clasps of a lascivious Moor” (1.1.129). Iago thus depicts Othello’s racial identity and Othello and

Desdemona’s sexual relationship as repugnant. Roderigo also indulges in racial slurs when

referring to Othello, describing Othello as “an extravagant and wheeling stranger / of here and

everywhere” (1.1.134-5),29 as the “lascivious Moor” (1.1.129), and as the “thick lips” (1.1.68).

Even Brabantio makes reference to Othello’s “sooty bosom” (1.2.71). However, Neill (Putting

History to the Question) insists that Shakespeare’s audience(s) would have viewed Othello as a

representation of a Moor, and thus as a conflation of the ideological and theatrical, asserting that

Othello’s blackness was underpinned by the audience’s pleasurable consciousness that it was

only a cosmetic illusion (282). Loomba also observes that Shakespeare depicts Othello as more

than a representation of stereotypes (Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism 92). Iago himself

33
admits that Othello is not the jealous type; instead, he “is of a constant, loving, noble nature”

(qtd. in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism 98).

Despite developing Othello as a tragic hero, the Anglo-American theatrical tradition

demarcated race as a category that could be reduced to performable traits and attributes; yet, over

time, ideologies regarding the representation of race on stage evolved, signaling a cultural

movement towards realist modes of representation—modes that included the audience’s

identification of a black body on stage, rather than a white actor’s attempts to imitate, or

perform, “blackness.” This cultural evolution is illustrated by the significant American theatrical

event of the 1940s, Margaret Webster’s production of Othello with Paul Robeson in the title role,

though Robeson had already played Othello in London in 1930 (Vaughn 181-82). Certainly,

race-based casting comments on race itself through casting decisions made by the director. This

shift from “playing” a Moor to “casting” a Moor,” a change that informed even the decision of

the director in Not Now, Sweet Desdemona to cast Othello as black, was accompanied in the

Anglo-American tradition by fresh critical approaches to literature.

Carlin also emphasizes the significance of how an audience would perceive a black

Othello in the late 1960s, and Carlin’s decision to cast Othello as black also highlights his view

of the centrality of race to the play. Carlin refers to the faults of traditional approaches that rely

on white actors performing in blackface30 by assigning lines to his Actor-Othello that criticize

this style of representation, such as when his Actor-Othello imitates Sir Laurence Olivier’s

famous rendering of Othello in 5.2.7: “Put out de light, and den put out de light” (Not Now,

Sweet Desdemona 13).31 Carlin implicitly suggests that, though not intended to be comic,

Olivier’s performance evokes blackface minstrelsy, a comic form of drama in which white actors

in blackface perform “blackness” based on racial stereotypes, as made famous by entertainers

34
like Thomas Dartmouth (“T.D.”) Rice. Carlin’s casting decision thus “writes back” to the

reductive view of race as a performable set of attributes.

Carlin’s critique also connects Othello’s race to imperialistic ideology: Carlin writes

back” to what he views as the implicit nature of the theme of imperialism in Shakespeare’s play,

relating racism and imperialism to a post-colonial framework. For example, Carlin’s actor

follows his argument about the centrality of race in the original play with his assertion that

Shakespeare’s play comments on Imperialism. Carlin’s actor highlights historical aspects of

early modern geography to elucidate the colonial discourse in Shakespeare’s play and to form a

connection with the post-colonial geography and discourse of his own milieu. According to

Carlin’s Actor-Othello, the Age of Imperialism had already begun when Shakespeare wrote

Othello (32); in fact, Carlin’s Actor-Othello designates Othello as the “first play of the Age of

Imperialism” (32). As evidence, the actor points out that Fort Jesus in Mombasa, “the bastion of

the Portuguese Empire in the Indian Ocean for hundreds of years” (31), was built just ten years

before Shakespeare wrote Othello (31-32). Thus Shakespeare obviously “understood and

foresaw all the problems of the Age of Imperialism” (32), since the Age of Imperialism had

already commenced.

Unlike post-colonial scholars, Carlin does not make a clear distinction between

“colonialism” and “imperialism”; he prefers the term “imperial,” however, for his Actor-

Othello’s discussion of the theme of Shakespeare’s play. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward

Said uses the term “imperialism” to mean “the practice, theory, and the attitudes of a dominating

metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory” (8), a practice he describes as distinct from

colonialism, which entails the implantation of settlements on a distant territory. By identifying

race as the central theme of Shakespeare’s play and by re-situating the original text within the

35
context of the apartheid politics of South Africa, Carlin evokes the attitudes and practices used

by Great Britain in dominating South Africa from the metropolitan center.

Carlin also connects the historical geography of Shakespeare’s drama to his own text by

setting his play in London, suggesting a return of the repressed—or the colonized in the case of

his black actor from Trinidad—to the “Motherland.” Significantly, as numerous scholars such as

John Springhall document, Trinidad had gained its independence from Great Britain in 1962

(141), the same year as Uganda. Carlin does not set his play in Uganda, Trinidad, or South

Africa, however; the play suggests that the actor’s and actress’s rehearsal takes place in England,

the “motherland” of South Africa, Uganda, and Trinidad. Evidence for the geographical setting

includes Actress-Desdemona’s reference to herself and Actor-Othello as refugees (Not Now,

Sweet Desdemona 43), her insistence on being “sick of this bloody island” (43), the actor’s

reference to a boycott of wine from South Africa (48), his description of Actress-Desdemona as

having been away from home for a long time (55), and Actor-Othello’s reference to himself as

having been “new” there when he first met her (60). Carlin’s alteration of the setting of

Shakespeare’s play thus underscores Carlin’s motivations for positioning the dominated culture

as confronting the dominating culture. Carlin reverses the trope of “invasion” even while the

colonized appears to be integrated into the dominating culture.

Carlin’s primary argument for the connection of Shakespeare’s play to the age of

Imperialism, however, rests on his assertions that Venice was an Empire (35), that Desdemona

was the first of the “White Liberals” (37), that she longed for power over Othello (35), and that

she obtained power by making Othello “her personal black man” (37). Carlin does not specify in

either his introduction to the play or the play itself what precisely he means by “White Liberals,”

but since he capitalizes “Liberals” four out of the six times he utilizes the term in lines 852 to

36
884, one can deduce that Carlin is partly referring to the South African Liberal Party (SALA).

The SALA was officially formed on May 9, 1953 (Vigne 19) and dissolved, unrecorded, in 1968

(223). Although the SALA did not officially develop politically until 1953, it existed prior to

1953 in nascent forms beginning as early as 1853 in Cape Town. The liberal tradition originated

with the introduction of the non-racial Cape franchise, which extended franchise to all adult

males of the Cape Colony, regardless of race and qualification (e.g., literacy) (Vigne 1). The

tradition progressed into one whose principles gained the attention of both whites and blacks in

Pietermaritzburg, Durban, Natal, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, and East London (13). Units

from Cape Town, Natal, and Johannesburg united in 1953 to form the SALA, which made

apartheid its prime target (17).

As Vigne explains, the SALA encountered contention both before and after its official

formation. The liberals and the SALA “aimed to plead for fuller knowledge, or more

consideration, of Non-European needs and interest” (ix) and to take aim at apartheid; but

opponents, including the South African Congress of Democrats, argued against the plausibility of

the SALA’s efforts to speak for non-European peoples: “Unlike the Liberal Party, it [the South

African Congress of Democrats] claims to speak not for but with the non-European people as

represented by African and Indian Congress (qtd. in Vigne 23).32 Yet, the Party maintained its

focus on enfranchisement and non-racialism from the early 1950s until 1965, at which time a bill

was introduced to prevent the interference by whites in non-white politics (Vigne 20). Nelson

Mandela and others campaigned to turn the African National Congress (ANC) against the

liberals, both black and white, and the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) contended that

“the concept of liberalism was anathema” (9). In September of 1966, the SALA agreed to

dissolve upon the signing of the Bill, titled the Prohibition of Political Interference (207). On 19

37
May 1968, the Prohibition came onto the statute book (222) and the SALA subsequently

dissolved, after which no formal body of members remained in an organized form (225).33

However, “White Liberal” was (and still is) a term generally used to describe a white individual

who supports racial equality in a patronizing way. As Hunt Hawkins avers, Carlin almost

certainly was using the term in this general way and only secondarily thinking of the South

African Liberal Party” (“Chapter 1: Revised”).

According to Carlin’s Actor-Othello, “White Liberals” tell themselves that they are on

the side of the black man but unconsciously want to dominate him: “That’s how they feel—how

they really feel. They tell themselves they’re on the side of the black man—they are fighting for

him against his oppressors (37)—but what they really want is to tell him what to do” (37), so

they obtain power through love instead of force (37). Carlin’s Actor-Othello associates

Shakespeare’s Desdemona with South African White Liberals and emphasizes Othello’s race to

propose that Desdemona’s true desires did not differ from those who obtain power over black

men through violence, suggesting that false or patronizing sympathy undergirds Desdemona’s

attraction to Othello. In the actor’s interpretive paradigm, Desdemona may have told herself that

her love for Othello proved that she saw him as a viable marriage partner, but this self-assurance

did not negate her true desire to dominate him. According to the actor, the “power” Desdemona

wishes to wield over Othello manifests itself through her control of him. The actor thus insists

that Desdemona attempts to lead Othello away from himself: “All he [Othello] wanted was to

fight, and go to war, and enjoy a little politics—and take his Venetian into bed, in between—and

be left alone, to be himself—to act, to be a man, to be! All he wanted was to be left alone—and

she wouldn’t leave him alone” (36). Ironically, the actor defends Iago, insisting that Iago was a

38
man (36), that he loved Othello (36), that he wanted to save Othello from Desdemona and “all

her crew” (36), and that he sought to “bring Othello back to himself—to the Army” (36-7).

The actor’s defense of Iago and defamation of Desdemona proves perplexing: either

Carlin and his Actor-Othello maintain a sexist approach to Shakespeare’s play, or Carlin has

political reasons for associating Desdemona with White Liberals. In my view, the truth of this

puzzle involves embracing both possibilities. The primary problem with the Actor-Othello’s

defense of Iago is its reliance on inaccurate information. In Shakespeare’s play, Iago does not

love Othello or want to save him; Iago himself explicitly informs other characters in the play as

well as the audience that he hates Othello (Shakespeare 2.1.368, 2.1.387) and that he intends to

use Desdemona to ensnare and destroy Othello (2.3.353-56). Additionally, Iago masterfully

displays false sympathy for Othello, consistently informing the audience of his deleterious view

of Othello while simultaneously pretending to be on Othello’s side. These facts prove

particularly significant in act three, scene three, when after Desdemona pleads on Cassio’s behalf

for his reinstatement, Iago duplicitously warns Othello to “beware . . . of jealousy” (3.3.178) and

to accept proof of Desdemona’s infidelity from him, since the words he speaks derive from his

love for Othello (3.3.210, 3.3.233-4). The displacement of this false sympathy by Shakespeare’s

Othello and Carlin’s Actor-Othello onto Desdemona may be unconsciously sexist. And yet

Carlin may have associated his Desdemona with White Liberalism since she is the only other

character in the play. The Actor-Othello’s defense of Iago nonetheless depicts women in a

negative light, offering credence to Nazareth’s view of the conflict between Carlin’s Actor and

Actress as one not only one of race but of the conflict of man and emancipated woman (An

African View of Literature 28).

39
 Analyzing Othello through the lens of post-colonial theory, other post-colonial critics

also later identified Othello’s race as central to the play and, like Carlin, they connected race to

colonial ideology. As Charles Bressler observes, the terms “postcolonial” and “postcolonialism”

first appeared in scholarly journals in the mid-1980s, as subtitles in texts such as The Empire

Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (Ashcroft et al. 1989) and in Ian

Adam and Helen Tiffin’s Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism

(1990) indicate. For example, Loomba maintains that the black presence in early modern

England was perceived and constructed as a threat to the state (Gender, Race, Renaissance

Drama 43). Analyzing the roles of racism and patriarchalism in the play, Loomba describes

Othello as a colonized subject who internalizes the ideologies of the society that affects his

exclusion: “Othello moves from being a colonised subject existing on the terms of the White

Venetian society and trying to internalise its ideology, towards being marganialised, outcast and

alienated from it in every way, until he occupies its ‘true’ position as its other” (49). Later,

Loomba emphasizes the connection between Othello’s race and his exclusion from Venetian

society upholding the view that Othello is about “a black man trying to live in a white society,

assimilating yet maintaining his identity while he is isolated from other black people, his history,

and culture” (Colonialism/Postcolonialism 15). Jyotsna Singh further reasons that African and

Turkish audiences would have perceived of Shakespeare’s Othello as a figure in an “Orientalist

landscape, both erotic and violent, a composite [European] fantasy” (“Othello’s Identity, Post-

Colonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings” 298-9).34 Certainly, the publication of

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) influenced Singh’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s famous

protagonist. Additionally, Singh also applies theories from both Frantz Fanon and Homi

Bhabha—two notable post-colonial theorists—to consider the role of Othello’s race in the play.

40
 In 2000 Arthur Little remarks that “a black body was not an anomaly in early modern

England” (22), asking, “What would happen to Othello were we to consider it a drama taking

place not at a critical juncture of London’s inclusion of black bodies but its exclusion, its

deportation of them?” (22). Kim Hall also amplifies the relationship of Othello’s race to the

construction of blacks in early modern England as a threat to the state, relating Othello to Queen

Elizabeth I’s expulsion of “Blackamoors” from England to promote the welfare of her own

“natural subjects” (194). As Hall observes, in 1596 Elizabeth issued a proclamation licensing

Dutch Captain Casper Van Senden to transport “Negars and blackamoors” from England in

exchange for English prisoners he delivered from Spain (Othello: Texts and Contexts 194)

although Van Sanden complained that English citizens refused to give up their slaves, thus

prompting Elizabeth to write a warrant in 1601 requiring the transportation of “Negars and

blackamoors” out of the realm (194). Sara Munson Deats applies an Althusserian approach to

posit that Iago uses techniques similar to those of a colonizer to hail, or interpellate, Othello and

Desdemona into the subject positions endorsed by their racist and sexist society (196-7). Each of

these critics thus thoroughly analyzes Othello to emphasize the centrality of race in the play and

to interpret race as an aspect of colonial ideology. Singh’s analysis explains how select audiences

would have viewed Othello as a racialized, exotic figure with whom they partially (yet not fully)

identify; Hall’s study illuminates the relationship between Othello’s blackness and his exclusion

from elite Venetian society; and both Loomba’s and Deats’s treatments consider the roles of

sexism and racism in the construction of Othello as a colonized subject.

Carlin’s play can thus be viewed as a precursor to post-colonial criticism that connects

race and colonial ideology, including gender-focused criticism that addresses the implicit and

less-debated issue of Desdemona’s culpability. As previously discussed, Carlin’s play

41
antagonistically targets Shakespeare’s Desdemona, insisting that “she demands on [sic] her black

husband to reinstate her white protégé, Cassio” (Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 3-4), that she is so

“terribly persistent” in her efforts, and that a power “outside of her control” urges her to force her

husband to accede (Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 4). The fact that the framing narrative revolves

around the actor’s and actress’s rehearsal of act three, scene three35 of Othello, the scene in

which Desdemona pleads for Cassio’s reinstatement on his behalf, emphasizes Carlin’s point.

The actor’s and actress’s debate commences after Carlin’s Actor-Othello, frustrated by the

English producer’s vision of the play, stops their rehearsal and almost quits the production. The

actor’s aversion to performing the role and script according to the English director’s vision

prompts the actress to ask the actor how he sees the plays and its characters. The actor agrees to

share his marvelous ideas about the “real way” to perform the play, but the actress demands to

know what he plans to do with her part (23). He insists that she appear full of sweetness, yet act

confidently and commandingly, determined to be on top, and unrelentingly persistent about

getting back her Cassio (25-26). Carlin’s actor interprets this scene in Shakespeare’s play as

Desdemona’s attempt to dominate Othello, and he suggests that her desire to maintain Othello as

her “personal black man” (37) prevents her from respecting Othello’s request to postpone white

Cassio’s reinstatement. Certainly, Carlin’s interpretation relies on a view of a “white” Cassio and

Desdemona that Shakespeare’s audience would have not shared,36 yet Carlin’s audiences would

have viewed whiteness as a signifier of race.

While critics divide in their perspectives regarding Desdemona’s degree of complicity,

some post-colonial critics see Shakespeare’s Desdemona as complicit in Othello’s demise. Philip

C. Kolin aptly summarizes these divergent critical views: Desdemona has been polarized,

“valorized as a saint or vilified as a strumpet” (16). Her “fractitious naysayers” have assailed her

42
for a host of wrongdoings, including disobeying her father, backchatting with Iago, lying to

Othello about the handkerchief, pleading Cassio’s case, admiring Lodovico, and absolving

Othello of her death in act five, scene two (18). She has been “maligned by critics who search for

her culpability to the end” (20).

Emily Bartels offers an interpretation of Desdemona’s role that proves similar to Carlin’s

view: Bartels contends that Desdemona’s insistence on her will and way are unorthodox from an

early modern perspective (“Improvisation and Othello: The Play of Race and Gender” 74), and

that Desdemona’s intervention on Cassio’s behalf in act three, scene three “seems to catalyze the

forthcoming change of mind [in Othello] that Iago has plotted” (73). Bartels further asserts that

after Othello initially resists Desdemona’s attempts to “name the time” (3.3.68) for Cassio’s

reinstatement, but then finally surrenders to her entreaties (72), Desdemona, in “a seemingly

extraneous moment,” defers accepting her “victory” (73) while chastising Othello for

misinterpreting her request, retorting that it is not a “boon” (73).37 Addressing this scene within

an important wider context, Bartels posits that the dialogue between Desdemona and Othello in

act three, scene three proves pivotal in its inclusion of the improvisational underpinnings of the

play (74), asserting that “characters and actions are defined first and foremost by particular

interactions inside the play, even as those characters and actions take shape against codes and

values that circulate outside” it (74). Thus the dialogue in this scene amplifies the domestic

complications of the play, implies that Desdemona exerts force as a participatory subject, and

demonstrates that a crisis in gender roles significantly contributes to the conflict of race in the

play (75).

I concur with Bartels regarding the assertion that Desdemona’s intervention on Cassio’s

behalf leads to the success of Iago’s plot to change Othello’s mind, but I view Iago, rather than

43
Desdemona, as responsible for the deleterious narrative about Desdemona that Iago co-opts

Othello into constructing. Moreover, Iago and Othello begin to shape this narrative after the

domestic dispute in act three, scene three. Othello reinstates Cassio, but Desdemona asserts that

her case for his restoration is not a “boon,” or a request, but an effort to sway Othello into

making an appropriate decision: “Tis as I should entreat you to wear your glove, / or feed on

nourishing dishes, or keep you warm” (Shakespeare 3.3.84-5). Bartels refers to this part of

Desdemona’s request as a “coda”—a “superfluous chiding that Desdemona voices after Cassio’s

suit is resolved” (“Improvisation and Othello: The Play of Race and Gender” 73). This “coda”

presents Desdemona as concerned for her husband’s welfare, however, and might be paraphrased

as, “This is not a personal request; I am encouraging Cassio’s reinstatement for your benefit.”

However, although by the end of the scene Othello seems mollified, Iago soon sways Othello’s

attention back to Cassio, the subject Iago had been focusing on prior to Othello’s domestic

disagreement with Desdemona. The domestic dispute, therefore, not only interrupts but

apparently contributes to Iago’s efforts to persuade Othello to construct a narrative in which

Cassio and Desdemona are guilty of betrayal and infidelity.

Singh (1994) also feels ambivalent toward Shakespeare’s Desdemona: in Singh’s view,

Desdemona “remains an idealized, virtuous woman—keeping alive the image of a besieged

white femininity that is so crucial to the production of the black man as a ‘savage’ to the end”

(290). Singh’s argument, which focuses on Othello and Desdemona in both Shakespeare’s and

Carlin’s plays, hinges on how Desdemona is cast—as a pure and devoted heroine (294). Thus,

according to Singh, by her very innocence and purity, Desdemona unwittingly helps to construct

Othello as a barbarian and sexual predator. Although Singh does not discuss Desdemona’s

internal psychology, she implies that casting Desdemona as innocent contributes to how Othello

44
is judged according to a civilization/barbarism dichotomy (299).38 Moreover, Singh approaches

Actor-Othello from a Fanonian perspective, analyzing both Othello and Carlin’s Actor-Othello

as black men whose desires for white women symbolize their wishes to be white (Singh 295).

However, an analysis of Othello’s psychosexuality does not explain Carlin’s construction of both

Shakespeare’s and Carlin’s Desdemonas as women unconsciously wishing to dominate black

men.

Significantly, Carlin’s Actress-Desdemona disagrees with the actor’s interpretation of

Desdemona, yet the actor convinces her to play the role according to his interpretation, revealing

the irony of his insistence on acting out the very accusation he launches against Shakespeare’s

Desdemona—her persistent efforts to get her way. Actress-Desdemona’s view of the drama

starkly contrasts with that of her lover’s / fellow actor’s. The arguments that Carlin’s Actor-

Othello advance stem from his belief that there is only one play for every play by Shakespeare

(Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 16). According to the actress, however, there is no “real play” to

interpret: “Real play—that’s a contradiction. Every production—every performance—is what the

producer and the actors make of it. They’re all different” (26). Carlin’s Actress-Desdemona

views the role of Shakespeare’s Desdemona as innocent, proudly identifying with Shakespeare’s

Desdemona: “Desdemona? . . . Everyone sees her in their own way. She’s very loving . . . She’s

very generous . . . She’s completely selfless . . . She’s beautiful. As a matter of fact, she’s a lot

like me” (27). Nonetheless, because the actress recognizes the play as unstable, impermanent,

and open to interpretation, she agrees to play Shakespeare’s Desdemona the way Carlin’s Actor-

Othello views her: “They act the scene. She is now entirely ‘his’ Desdemona—pressing, insistent,

almost suffocating” (39). Carlin thus uses the framing narrative—the relationship between his

“unnamed West Indian character” (2) and “his ‘Desdemona’” (5)—to dramatize a critical re-

45
reading of the roles of race, gender, and colonialism in Shakespeare’s play, appropriating and re-

reading Shakespeare’s Desdemona as a white woman who desires and obtains control of Othello.

The debate between the Othello-Actor and the Actress-Desdemona crescendos into a

climax when Carlin’s Othello slaps Desdemona while they are still rehearsing act three, scene

three, rather than act four, scene one (in which Shakespeare’s Othello strikes his Desdemona),

thereby affecting both the re-structuring and re-situating of Shakespeare’s play.39 The blow is so

severe that Carlin’s Actress-Desdemona staggers backwards and collapses (41). The stage

directions ask, “Was this a mime, or a real blow? Or a little of both? And what is ‘real’” (41). In

Shakespeare’s play, Othello strikes Desdemona after Iago convinces Othello that Desdemona has

committed adultery. In the next scene, Othello subsequently avows to “let her rot and perish”

(Shakespeare 4.2.181), be “damned / tonight” (4.2181-82), hang her (4.2.187), “chop her into

messes” (4.2.199),” and poison her (4.2.203); and yet Iago persuades Othello to strangle

Desdemona in the bed she has allegedly contaminated (4.2.206-7). In Carlin’s play, however, his

Actor-Othello strikes Desdemona during their rehearsal of act three, scene three, when

Shakespeare’s Desdemona entreats Othello to restore Cassio to his former position. Moreover,

Carlin’s Actor-Othello calls his fellow actress “Devil!” (Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 41),

suggesting that, as she states, he is “in the wrong part of the play” (41). “Yes” (41), he matter-of-

factly agrees, signaling the convergence of his identification with Shakespeare’s Othello (as he

sees him) and the complexes he has inherited from imperialism.

This climax also functions as the juncture where the tendency of Carlin’s Actor-Othello

to displace his anxiety onto Shakespeare’s Desdemona becomes most apparent: his violent

explosion illogically follows her performance of the role of Shakespeare’s Desdemona precisely

as he had prescribed it. Applying Fanon’s documented experiences with French colonialism,

46
Singh contends that the hostility and attraction that the actor directs towards the Actress-

Desdemona is typical of the psychic divisions experienced by black men during colonial rule in

places such as Fanon’s native Martinique (295). Singh argues that Carlin’s Actor-Othello

recognizes the colonized persona of both his and Shakespeare’s Othello, but that the actor does

not wholly identify with the European “liberal” version of the black Othello. Singh further

describes Carlin’s Actor-Othello as a self-pitying neurotic who is full of contradictions, who sees

race as the central issue of Shakespeare’s play, and whose sexism can be explained by Fanon’s

analysis of a black man’s desire for a white woman as symbolic for his wish to be white (295).

Peter Dickinson advances a similar view: that Not Now, Sweet Desdemona “really only serves as

a pre-text—both literally and metaphorically—to the more pressing cultural matter of

dramatizing a theory of Black subjectivity as it relates to the history of imperialism” (194).

Elaborating, Dickinson states that Carlin is “responding as much to the psychological roles of the

colonizer and the colonized as discussed by Octave Mannoni and Frantz Fanon as he is to the

theatrical incarnation of those roles” (194). Considering Carlin’s intentions to re-read, re-

structure, and re-situate Othello, Loomba perceptively offers an interpretation of Shakespeare’s

Othello that shares characteristics of Singh’s and Dickinson’s views. Loomba compares

Desdemona with a gateway to white humanity by using Chapter Three of Fanon’s Black Skin,

White Masks to analyze Othello’s desire for Desdemona (Gender Race, and Renaissance Drama

63). Fanon opens this chapter with the metaphor of a white woman’s breasts as symbols for

white civilization—a civilization that can be grasped, conquered, and possessed. Fanon intends

to psychoanalyze a black man’s desire for a white woman within a colonial context, but violence

undergirds the metaphor he chooses to introduce his relevant psychoanalytical theories. This

violent metaphor resonates with the “hostility” Singh ascribes to Carlin’s Actor-Othello (295),

47
and the metaphor also relies on the reversal of the deep-seated cultural fear of a black man

possessing a white woman in a European culture.

Carlin engages the dialectical interplay between hostility and attraction to which Singh

refers by “writing back” to and reversing aspects of the myth of the black rapist—a myth

predicated on a premise of miscegenation as a violation of natural law reified through the

metaphor of sexualized racial violence. According to Little, the black rapist myth is deeply

rooted in gendered anxieties: European men strived to make sense of the desires of European

women for black men and thus inverted the desire by depicting black men in subversively

dominant positions over white women (75). This prejudice complicated perceptions of black

male sexuality in culture and literature. For example, Shakespeare’s Iago antagonistically reveals

racial anxieties in scenes of horrifying sexuality (75), leading Othello to identify with Iago’s

repugnant view of Othello’s sexual relationship with Desdemona. Iago frequently couches his

salacious depictions of both Othello and Desdemona in animal imagery, describing Othello as

“an old black ram” (1.1.90) and a Barbary horse” (1.1.114) to reduce Othello to the level of a

beast. Iago later degrades Desdemona and Cassio to the level of animals, referring to their lust

with the offended slur, “It is impossible you should see this, / Were they as prime goats, as hot as

monkeys . . . ” (3.3.418-19), a phrase that Othello will echo in 4.1.270-71. Iago’s narration to

Othello of Cassio’s dream (3.3.410-23) perverts the coupling of Desdemona and Othello into

sexual copulation between Cassio and himself (Iago), insinuating that Othello and Desdemona’s

sexual relationship conjures up the homosexuality associated with Venice’s loose sexual mores

(Little 85). This subversive association propels Othello to identify his relationship to Desdemona

with Iago’s (mis)representation of it as a perverted liaison. As Kenneth Burke contends in his

treatment of ingenuous and cunning identifications, Iago’s words and actions were “designed to

48
build up false identifications [in Othello]” (36).40 By re-reading and re-situating Shakespeare’s

play, however, Carlin reverses the psychosexual dynamics of Othello’s and Desdemona’s

relationship.

In the framing narrative, Carlin also focuses on the racial coding of Desdemona’s desire,

as hinging on her love for Othello. And yet in other parts of the play, particularly when the actor

attempts to persuade the actress to accept his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Desdemona, he

inverts the gendered coding of hierarchical difference to associate white female sexuality with

domination and monstrosity, reiterating his interpretation of Desdemona as emasculating

Othello, and further illustrating the actor’s displacement of the complexes he inherited from

colonialism onto Desdemona. The conclusion of the play upholds this inversion, as Carlin’s

Actress Desdemona states: “I felt like a wanton—an abandoned woman. I wanted to flaunt

myself in front of you . . . I wanted to arouse you . . . to make you want me—in a savage sort of

way” (Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 60). Carlin does not leave his confrontation with the black

rapist myth at the level of a hierarchical reversal:41 he re-structures Shakespeare’s play so that his

Actor-Othello and Actress-Desdemona deconstruct the racialized order on which their sexual

desire is based. The self-perceptions of the actor and actress thereby change from “savage” and

“devil” to “ordinary” (60, 61): “[Carlin’s Actor-Othello] Our bodies stopped being strange and

became real; and real, they were more wonderful than before . . . There were no more savages,

angels, and devils. And we became man and woman” (61).

Carlin also engages the dialectical interplay between hostility and attraction through the

rehearsal of a play the actress proposes that the actor write, a play called Desdemona. After

vehemently quarreling and accusing the Actor-Othello of indulging in self-pity, agonizing,

posturing, and melodrama (43), Carlin’s Desdemona proposes that the Actor-Othello write a play

49
titled Desdemona, set it in a black court in Central Africa, and cast Desdemona as the only white

character (44). She also suggests that he cast Othello as a “black liberal” whose white wife

Desdemona becomes jealous, is poisoned by a villainous friend, goes mad, kills her black

husband, and then kills herself (45). She and the actor initially laugh about the absurdity of

reversing the racial and gender hierarchies of Shakespeare’s Othello, but she nonetheless

convinces the actor to act out part of “her” play. The actress commences the rehearsal in act five,

scene two of Shakespeare’s play with Othello’s lines: “That handkerchief which I so loved and

gave thee Thou gavest to Cassio” (45). Omitting lines 53-73 of the original scene, the actress

resumes performing her version of Othello’s lines in 5.2.74: “He hath confessed” (45). After the

actor responds by citing 5.2.80 of Shakespeare’s play with Desdemona’s lines: “Alas, he is

betrayed and I undone!” (45), they continue with their reversals of roles, and the Actress-

Desdemona tells Harry to “Put out the lights” (45). Although the actress is on top of the actor, he

struggles out from under her, tells Harry to put the lights on, and uses a prop knife to simulate

the act of slitting her throat, thereby symbolically shedding her blood and scarring that “whiter

skin of hers than snow” (Shakespeare 5.2.4) that Shakespeare’s Othello had vowed to leave

untouched (5.2.3-5). Although Carlin’s actress does not express offense in response to this

horseplay, the actor’s behavior provides further evidence of the displacement of his anxiety onto

his relationship with the actress. Carlin’s actor aptly views race as the theme of Shakespeare’s

play, but he persistently focuses on Desdemona—a white woman—as the source of racism. The

play Desdemona consequently functions as another means by which the actor and actress debate

their views of the play. The actor’s perspective persistently emphasizes race as the central theme

of the play while re-reading and re-situating the myth of the black rapist, whereas the perspective

of the actress focuses on jealousy as the primary theme of Shakespeare’s play.

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 The parable of the Prime Minister, a story that Carlin’s Actor-Othello tells the actress

about a White Prime Minister of South Africa who turns black during an act of sexual

intercourse with his white wife in a whites-only area of South Africa, also confronts and re-

situates the black rapist myth. Lemuel Johnson points out that Carlin’s Actor-Othello and

Actress-Desdemona negotiate meaning out of the absurd parable about the trial of the Prime

Minister of the Republic of South Africa. As Johnson describes, the Prime Minister stood trial

for “changing, with no warning, from apartheid white to kaffir black” during an act of sexual

intercourse with his white wife in a whites-only residential area (160). As previously discussed,

Apartheid’s Law of sexual circulation as codified in the Immorality Act made sexual intercourse

between the black and white races illegal. The Law, therefore, renders the Prime Minister’s

marital thrust a crime. The case concludes with the ex-Prime Minister sentenced, hoisted, as it

were, on the petard of the law’s absurd logic: the judge determines that the ex-Prime Minister

must have been psychologically aware that he had turned black during the act of sexual

intercourse, after which he should have subsequently withdrawn from his wife and apologized

(162). Key to the legal logic in the case against the White Prime Minister is that his “turning

black” immediately strips him of privileges otherwise afforded to him as a white male. After he

turns black, his wife suddenly fears violence, screaming, “Help! Murder! Police! Help! My

husband has turned into a Kaffir, he’s going to murder me!” (Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 50).

The Parable of the Prime Minister of South Africa thus also “writes back” to the concept of

“turning Turk,” or turning “black” in the Prime Minister’s case. Although the Prime Minister

rules a country that discriminates against blacks, the Prime Minister turns black and becomes the

enemy within, thereby turning into that which he fears, the stereotypical black South African

male.

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 Additionally, the parable implicitly comments on one of Othello’s most memorable lines

from Shakespeare’s play, “Put out the light and then put out the light” (Shakespeare 5.2.7). In

Shakespeare’s play, both blackness (skin color) and darkness signify immorality and danger,

particularly since Othello murders Desdemona in the darkness of the night. The relationship

between blackness and darkness are, therefore, ideologically related in Shakespeare’s play. The

parable in Carlin’s play, however, emphasizes blackness as a legal category; thus the darkness

works in favor of the Prime Minister’s Wife (she could not have known that her husband turned

black), but darkness does not help the case of the Prime Minister (he must have known that he

had turned black). The parable functions to deconstruct the parallel between blackness and

darkness in the original play, and Carlin enhances this deconstructive technique when prior to

spontaneously performing a mock version of the murder scene from Shakespeare’s play, the

Actor-Othello tells Harry to put the stage lights back on: “Wait a minute! Put them [the lights] on

again, Harry— not yet . . . when I tell you . . . now!” (Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 46). This

scene functions to deconstruct the parallel of blackness and darkness in Othello by illustrating

how playwrights (Shakespeare and Carlin) and directors (Carlin’s Actor-Othello) can turn lights

(and darkness) off and on, thereby exposing the illogical presupposition of the association

between darkness/light and immorality/innocence.

While interracial union as a violation of natural law registers as a legal infraction in both

Othello and Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, Carlin’s play emphasizes the punishment administered

for such a violation in a legally segregated society. As recorded in the Fifth Volume of The

British Commonwealth; The Development of Its Laws and Constitution, the Immorality Act was

passed in 1927 to minimize miscegenation (317). Originally applicable to “illicit carnal

intercourse” between “Europeans and Natives,” the scope of the Act was extended in 1950 to

52
cover intercourse between “Europeans” and “non-Europeans,” wherein “appearance” and

“repute” determined one’s designation as belonging to the former or latter category. The South

African police initially debate about whether to beat the Prime Minister since, “If you are a

member of the South African Police, and you find a Kaffir, you must beat that Kaffir. That is part

of your duties. It’s normal” (Not Now, Sweet Desdemona 50). The police subsequently attempt to

determine which jail to put the Prime Minister in, since the jails are also segregated (50). After a

close physical examination, the Prime Minister is assigned to a tribal area and, although his wife

is not initially charged with a crime, the confession of his wife to a violation of the Act prompts

both of their arraignments. A judge acquits the Prime Minister’s white wife; the judge holds her

blameless because she had not turned on the light and recognized her husband as black before he

penetrated her. The judge therefore declares her as not guilty since after turning on the light, she

“behaved in a manner which any white woman might have been proud of” (55). In contrast, the

Judge decided that the act of culpability would not have been a matter of appearances for the

Prime Minister—that the instant he turned black, “his whole psychology must have changed . . .

he must have felt like a Shangaan” (55). The judge thus sentences the ex-Prime Minister to one

year in jail (56). Although it contains comic features, the parable of the Prime Minister reveals

solemn dimensions of societal laws that were institutionalized in apartheid and the Immorality

Act. By having the judge consult the Immorality Act and attempt to determine if the Prime

Minister knew that he had turned black while having sex with his white wife, Carlin emphasizes

the legal aspects of an operative law with roots in deep-seated cultural fears that manifested

themselves even in Shakespeare’s English Renaissance plays.

Additionally, since Carlin’s Actor-Othello tells the actress about the parable in the form

of a “story,” the parable also functions to “write back” to Othello’s notoriety for “storytelling” by

53
re-reading and re-situating this element of Shakespeare’s play. Despite the actor’s persistence in

telling the story to the actress, Carlin’s Actress-Desdemona, unlike Shakespeare’s heroine,

initially evinces little to no interest in hearing Othello’s narrative, even though, in this case, it is

described as “dirty” and “political” (17). The parable proves important in Carlin’s play because

in Othello, the only explicit reference Othello makes to why Desdemona loves him occurs when

he declares that “She [Desdemona] loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that

she did pity them” (Shakespeare 1.3.169-70). According to Othello, the tales of “Cannibals that

each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders”

(1.3.145-47) attracted her to him. The Duke summarily refers to everything that Othello

reportedly told Desdemona as a “tale” (1.3.173), but Othello calls it “the story of my life”

(1.3.131). Significantly, in his narration of these tales, Othello identifies with the European

traveler by differentiating himself from the savage monsters he reports to have observed. The

actor’s recounting of the plight of the Prime Minister of South Africa evokes a re-reading and re-

situating of an “Othello” who cannot easily be categorized by himself or others as either a

European or an “other.”

The critical views presented in Carlin’s play consequently also align with those offered in

Vivian Comensoli’s Fanonian-based critique of Shakespeare’s Othello. Drawing on the post-

colonial, psychoanalytic theory of Fanon as well as the contemporary psychoanalytic theory of

Diana Fuss (who also refers to Fanon), Comensoli concludes that “Othello is constructed as

neither subject nor other” (93), but, in Fanon’s words, as “an ‘object’ cut off from his ‘own

presence’” (Fanon qtd. in Comenseli 93). Relying on Fuss in Identification Papers, Comensoli

insists that Othello experiences “objecthood” (qtd. in Comensoli 95) versus “real alterity”

(Comensoli 95), which “blocks the migration through the other necessary for subjectivity to take

54
place” (95). Significantly, Comensoli argues that Othello lacks a “self” or consciousness capable

of action (92). By suggesting that Shakespeare’s Desdemona leads Othello away from himself

(823-30), Carlin’s Actor-Othello also proposes that Othello subsequently lacks subjectivity. If, as

the actor asserts, Desdemona makes Othello her “personal black man” (869), then Othello’s

experience of himself is constructed accordingly, as neither a subject nor as an “other,” but as an

object whose path to subjectivity is thwarted. And yet through his play, Carlin alters Othello’s

“objecthood” to alterity.

Thus in the conclusion of Carlin’s play, the actress and actor share a more authentic

relationship with one another, offering a significant alteration of Shakespeare’s conclusion of

Othello while also illustrating Carlin’s interest in dismantling the effects of the nefarious

institution of apartheid. As previously discussed, in the play’s conclusion, the actor and actress

begin to see themselves as man and woman rather than “savages, angels, and devils” (Not Now,

Sweet Desdemona 61). Yet, Carlin’s Actor-Othello decides to drink the South African wine

despite the boycott (62), to accept dividends from South Africa (61), and to buy a ring made

from gold from South Africa (61-2). Additionally, neither the actor nor the actress indicates that

they intend to resign from the production of Othello that relies on stereotyped casting. The

conclusion, therefore, leads one to question Carlin’s commitment to altering colonial structures.

However, in my view, Carlin successfully protests against apartheid through Not Now, Sweet

Desdemona. Eight years after the staging of Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, Nazareth observed that

many South African writers were concerned with “fighting” apartheid to illustrate its monstrosity

because in South Africa apartheid was the force that made the social system unjust, and which

affected a person’s life “like a virulent form of cancer” (An African View of Literature 2).

According to Nazareth, unless the African writer is fully satisfied with the status quo, he will be

55
“committed,” whether explicitly or implicitly (2). Moreover, the committed African writer may

not necessarily provide solutions; “we are to draw our own conclusions about what must be

done” (5). Carlin should thus be recognized for his commitment to challenging what was then the

status quo in South Africa, through his political protest at Rhodes University College in South

Africa as well as his dramatic resistance through Not Now, Sweet Desdemona in London and

Uganda.

In the introduction to his play, Carlin attempts to distance himself from his Actor-

Othello, perceiving his character (as many authors would) as a creation that stands apart in its

own distinct alterity. For example, Carlin states that when people ask him if his view of

Shakespeare’s play corresponds with the perspective of his Actor-Othello, he replies, “It isn’t

what I think—it’s what my character thinks!” (2). Carlin further asserts that his “character’s

opinions are part of his personality” (2), and he maintains that West Indians are “volatile”—

“they are quick, like quick silver” (4)—and that South Africans are “slow moving” (4-5).

Significantly, Carlin does not identify himself with South Africans. Moreover, he does not

identify with either “blacks” or “whites” when he asserts that “the poisons of race are, still: pity

and self-pity. The blacks must stop being sorry for themselves. The whites must stop feeling

false sympathy” (5). If Carlin identifies with whiteness in the way that he describes in his

introduction, then his play simply serves as an example of his own “false sympathy.” If his play

is about race and features characters who embody pity and self-pity, then they do not need to

discuss Shakespeare’s Othello; nor does Carlin’s West Indian actor need to argue that Othello

was a victim of Desdemona or, more broadly, racism. Although he only intimates it, Carlin

partially identifies with his black West Indian actor. As such, Carlin asks the reader in his

introduction whether or not they agree “that there is something in what he says” (2).

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 Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, therefore, “writes back” to the assumption that only Anglo-

American criticism of Othello provides valid commentary on Shakespeare’s play. As discussed

in the introduction, Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, Patrick Murphy, and Christy Desmet all

advocate plays as both creative and critical works. Hall aligns with this theory as well: In her

chapter titled “Encounters as Criticism” in Othello: Texts and Contexts (2008), she includes both

critical and dramatic texts, contending that readers should think of all encounters—including

their own—as interpretations of both Shakespeare’s play and the artist’s vision (344). My

reading interprets Carlin’s play as dramatic commentary that “writes back” to Shakespeare and

Shakespearean critics through the use of post-colonial counter-discursive metatheatre that re-

reads, re-structures, and re-situates Shakespeare’s play. Singh aptly argues that Not Now, Sweet

Desdemona should be read in tandem with Othello, since this and other related post-colonial

texts “question whether Shakespeare’s Othello can be read and appreciated (as conservatives

would insist) without the interventions of its non-European revisions” (209). I concur, and I

propose that this new interpretation of Not Now, Sweet Desdemona enables critics to consider

how the dramatic post-colonial tradition of Shakespeare’s Othello provides specific post-colonial

interpretations of Shakespeare’s play that have heretofore remained unknown.

Notes

1. Carlin’s Actor-Othello explicitly refers to Shakespeare’s play as a “play on the theme of race”
(29).
2. According to Carlin in his introduction to The Thousand, the first reading of Not Now Sweet
Desdemona was staged in London in 1968; the Ngoma Players later performed Not Now, Sweet
Desdemona at Makerere University in the same year.
3. There have been numerous other post-colonial appropriations of Shakespeare’s great play
from the early-Jacobean period—Blake Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963), Tayeb Salih’s
Season of Migration to the North (1969), Caryl Phillips’ The European Tribe (1987) and The

57
Nature of Blood (1997), Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Dancing Girls (1994), Paula Vogel’s
Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief (1994), Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh
(1995), and Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (1997). These appropriations share similarities with
Carlin’s play: they re-read Othello and appropriate it in order to discuss the relevance of race,
gender, and colonialism to contemporary, post-colonial concerns. However, Not Now, Sweet
Desdemona has not received much critical attention. Additionally, since it overtly targets a play
by William Shakespeare, a discussion of it proves effective alongside the other adaptations
chosen for treatment in this dissertation.
4. Very little has been written about Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, and in “Duets, Dialogues, and
Black Diasporic Theatre: Djanet Sears, William Shakespeare, and Others,” Peter Dickinson
attributes the neglect of Carlin’s play to the “massive critical attention” given to Aimé Césaire’s
1969 adaptation of The Tempest (195).
5. Significantly, in “Lenin, Hitler, and the House of Commons in Three Plays by Terence
Rattigan: A Case for the Author of French without Tears,” Murray Carlin states that “one of the
most difficult tasks of any dramatist is to represent cliché, or hyperbole . . . without perpetuating
either” (7).
6. See Meredith Skura: “Reading Othello’s Skin: Contexts and PreTexts” 299-334.
7. As discussed in the introduction, in Joanne Tompkins’s words, counter-discursive post-
colonial metatheatre re-reads, re-structures, and re-situates a larger “base” play (44-5).
8. At present, literary critics have not devoted a full-length article or book to Carlin or his literary
works. This chapter references all known sources that address Carlin’s life and work.
9. At that time, the University of Fort Hare was the only institution of higher learning open to
African students (Ross 112).
10. Robert Ross notes that The National Party formed in 1914 (84-5).
11. As Robert Collins confirms in Africa: A Short History, the Dutch adopted the name Boer,
and later Afrikaner, to distinguish themselves from the British (171).
12. Ross explains that J.B.M. Hertzog formed the National Party of South Africa, which claimed
to propagate a white South African Nation. The corollaries of the National Party included a
movement to set the Dutch and English on equal footing in terms of access to power and
resources, to improve the status of the Dutch within government business, to exclude blacks from
the body politics, and to permanently oppress blacks (84-5).
13. Scholar Werne Sollors avers that ethnicity is typically based on contrast, negativity, or
antithesis, which the ethnopsychoanalyst Georges Devereux has termed “disassociative”
character; thus, ethnic identity rests on the proposition that “A is an X because he is not a Y”
(qtd. in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin 288).
14. The Population Registration Act of 1950 played a large role in this regard.
15. Ian Smith later became the Prime Minister of Rhodesia (1964-1979) when the whites there
declared unilateral independence from Britain and took over the country. Not Now, Sweet
Desdemona would have been written during this period.
16. A few points in this diary entry raise questions that cannot be easily answered. Since the
passage recalls Murray Carlin, his wife, and their daughters, it can be inferred that some or all of
them were expelled from South Africa because of Carlin’s radical stance. Additionally,
considering the racial theme of Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, the suggestion that Carlin showed
V.S. Naipaul anti-African cartoons proves curious. A few things must be considered: first, this
diary entry is the only known source that associates Carlin with anti-black-African sentiments.

58
Second, the recollections in the diary entry should be considered alongside the account of Carlin
that Brokensha offers, specifically, that he and Carlin organized a meeting of students and gained
approval for the admission of the black African students to Rhodes (Brokensha).
17. It is unfortunate that critics do not know more about the potential persecution or expulsion of
Carlin from South Africa.
18. Thomas Ofcansky explains that British colonial rule in Uganda started in Buganda, one of
the four kingdoms of Uganda, and gradually spread throughout the rest of the country (21). The
British preserved Buganda’s traditional ruling hierarchy, which included the Kabaka, or King
(22), though the British also retained authority over the activities of such offices with the help of
Bugandan allies and the use of a subimperial governmental system (23). As British power
consolidated in Buganda, a sense of Bugandan separatism emerged. This separatism precluded
the emergence of a spirit of mass nationalism prior to independence (34). Additionally, Buganda
separatism positioned the kingdom as the most politically influential entity, to the degree that the
first post-Independence Government consisted of a coalition between Prime Minister Obote’s
Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) and Buganda’s traditionally oriented Kabaka Yekka (“The
King Alone”) movement (39).
19. Ofcansky documents the ensuing conflict that significantly affected Uganda: Amin overthrew
Obote on 25 January 1971 while Obote was in Singapore for a Commonwealth Summit
Conference (42). Aspects of Amin’s regime were ruthless and were designed to terrorize the
Ugandan population (43). By 1971, Amin pronounced a degree that allowed the military to
detain anyone on suspicion of sedition (44), resulting in the death of approximately 10,000
Ugandans during Amin’s first year of rule (44). Ofcansky asserts that Amin’s expulsion of
Uganda’s more than 70,000 Asians destroyed Uganda’s economy and administrative structure
(45); this measure also led to a deterioration of the relationship between Great Britain and
Uganda.
20. Carlin wrote three plays: Not Now, Sweet Desdemona; Man, Wife, and Friend; and The
Thousand; and in the Introduction to The Thousand, Carlin states that “the three [plays] taken
together might be called a trilogy” (2). To date, I have not located any information about Man,
Wife, and Friend, in either the form of the primary text or criticism of it. In my view, The
Thousand alludes to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to allegorically dramatize a “contest”
between representatives of both the Western and Third Worlds.
21. For strong points of view on this issue, see Michael Neill (“Unproper Beds”) 394 and Emily
Bartels (“Making More of the Moor”) 433-54.
22. See Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen; Winthrop Jordon, White Over Black; Jack
D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama; Antony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face,
Maligned Race; Kim Hall, Things of Darkness.
23. As noted in the introduction, in Tompkins’s words, post-colonial metatheatre assists in the
re-reading and re-structuring and re-situating of the larger “base” play (44-5).
24. This reference occurs in 1.1.68 of Othello.
25. For example, Gary Taylor quotes Frederick Douglass in “Colorphobia in New York!”
(1849), in which Douglass claims that New Yorkers affected by the “disease” of “colorphobia”
suffered the same delusion as Brabantio in Othello (qtd. in Taylor 4). Additional critical
forerunners of Hunter include A.C. Bradley (1904) in Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures in
“Hamlet,” “Othello,” and “King Lear (1904); Ranjee Shahani in Shakespeare through Eastern
Eyes (1932); Louis Mandin in “Etude Shakespearienne: Le mystere de la perle et du judeen”

59
(1939); H.B. Charlton in Shakespearean Tragedy (1941); Philip Butler in “Othello’s Racial
Identity” (1952); John Draper in The ‘Othello’ of Shakespeare’s Audience (1952); Bernard
Harris in “A Portrait of a Moor” (1958); Philip Mason in “The Collective Unconscious and
Othello” (1962); G.M. Matthews in “Othello and the Dignity of Man” (1964); Harry Levin in
“Othello and the Motive Hunters” (1964); Lowis Awad in “Shakespeare and Racial
Discrimination” (1965); Enamul Karim in “The East in Shakespeare’s Tragedies” (1965);
Miriam Halevy in “The Racial Problem in Shakespeare” (1966); and Sibnarayan Ray in
“Shylock, Othello, and Caliban: Shakespearean Variations on the Theme of Apartheid” (1966).
For example, Bradley (1904) contends that historical evidence and parallels between Othello and
Aaron in Titus Andronicus substantiate Othello’s blackness, that color is related to critical
conceptions of Desdemona and Othello’s union as distasteful, and that Desdemona made
“nothing of the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took part with it”
(Bradley 201-2). Mandin (1939) proposes that although Desdemona loves her husband for his
soul, not his blackness, Iago moves Othello to jealousy by stressing his blackness, thus making
his blackness the cause of his murdering Desdemona (290). H.B. Charlton (1941) asserts that
Othello’s cultural and racial differences significantly affect his character, that passion and drive
for self-mastery work in tandem to arouse a fury that Iago identifies and “with consummate
audacious artistry, dares to rely on a plot so simple that Othello alone of all mankind is the one
man certain to be caught by it” (123). In contrast, Robert Withington (1945) refutes the notion of
Othello as a play about racial prejudice.
26. As numerous commentators such as Bevington confirm, Shakespeare’s main source for
Othello was the seventh story from the third decade of G.B. Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi
(1565).
27. For some insightful discussions of the early modern construction of the Moor, see Jones,
Othello’s Countrymen; Jordan, White Over Black; D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance
Drama; Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race; and James R. Aubrey, “Race and the
Spectacle of the Monstrous in Othello.” For the degree to which Othello smashes traditional
expectations of the stereotypical Moor, see Sara Munson Deats, “The ‘Erring Barbarian’ and the
‘Maiden Never Bold’: Racist and Sexist Representations in Othello” 190-215.
28. All references to Othello derive from The Complete Works of Shakespeare (6th ed.), edited by
David Bevington.
29. This reference is not included in Q1.
30. As Carlin’s Actor-Othello avers, “white actors have [had] always played / Othello in a black
face” (165-66).
31. Sir Laurence Olivier played Othello in blackface in a film of 1965, based on a National
Theater Stage Production of 1964 with Frank Finlay as Iago and Maggie Smith as Desdemona
(Bevington 1155).
32. See Fighting Talk, July 1953, “Speaking for the Natives” 5.
33. According to Merle Lipton, the White Liberals are now represented in South Africa in
organizations such as the Liberal Party, the Progressive Party, the Democratic Party, and the SA
Institute of Race Relations, and they are ideologically opposed to the communists and socialists
organized in the SA Community Party and the Congress of Democrats (333).
34. Significantly, Jyotsna Singh also points out that such audiences make “both an identification
with and disavowal of ‘The Moor,’ recognizing that Othello’s claims to identity— either as a
‘savage’ or as a Christian and a tragic hero—are tenuous and derivative” (298-9).

60
35. Specifically, the rehearsal in Carlin’s play focuses on the domestic dispute in Othello (3.3.42-
100).
36. In Buying Whiteness (2005), Taylor re-reads Othello to incorporate the view that “he
[Shakespeare] did not use ‘white’ in a generic sense” (39), since “white” did not signify in the
early modern period what we now call “race” (32-38).
37. Shakespeare’s Words clarifies the meaning of “boon” as a petition, entreaty, or request; one
meaning of “suit” denotes the same cluster of associations, though “suit” also refers to wooing
and courtship. Although “entreaty” also meant “supplication” or “plea,” Desdemona uses the
word as a verb to form an analogy between her entreating Othello to “wear your gloves, / or feed
on nourishing dishes” (84-85) as she would “sue” to him to do anything that would profit his
“own person” (3.3.85-86).
38. Other post-colonial critics, such as Loomba (1989) and Deats (2003), adopt a sympathetic
approach to Desdemona, contextualizing Desdemona’s character within the socio-historic
circumstances that, from a contemporary view, exacted sexist ideologies that restricted women.
For example, Loomba (1989) contends that Desdemona’s fascination with Othello “indicates her
desire to break the claustrophobic patriarchal confine” of her daily life (55), that her desire is
politically subversive—especially because its object is black (56)—and that her transformation
from a bold woman who confronts both her father and the Senate into a submissive wife is a
“manifestation of the contradictions imposed on her by a racist, patriarchal, and bourgeois
society” (58). Deats (2003) presents Desdemona as subject to sexist stereotypes, even as Othello
is subject to racist ones, thereby demonstrating both Othello’s and Desdemona’s victimization by
a racist and sexist society.
39. In act four, scene one, Othello publicly slanders and slaps Desdemona.
40. Although Burke clearly identified Iago as the villain of Othello in his 1951 essay titled
“Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,” he did not discuss Iago’s efforts to build up “false
identifications” in Othello until he briefly treated Othello in A Rhetoric of Motives.
41. As Bill Ashcroft et al. note, these instances of post-colonial writing do not simply reverse the
hierarchical order of the canonical tradition; they also interrogate the philosophical assumptions
on which that order is based (32).

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 CHAPTER TWO:

“UHURU!”: CALIBAN’S SELF-CONSCIOUS COUP IN AIMÉ

CÉSAIRE’S UNE TEMPÊTE

One of the most debated post-colonial appropriations of Shakespeare, Une Tempête [A

Tempest], penned in 1969 (translated in 1985) by Aimé Césaire, a black Francophone writer

from the Caribbean, uses the French language, for the first time in the performance history of the

play, to recast Ariel as a mulatto slave, Caliban as a black slave, and Prospero as a capitalist

colonialist on an island in the Caribbean. Césaire’s adaptation exposes and subverts the colonial

practices Shakespeare’s Prospero uses in The Tempest. The Caliban of A Tempest confronts

Prospero for exploiting language to project a savage image of Caliban, enforcing slavery to

exploit Caliban for labor, and using “civilization” to justify his colonial practices. In 1985, Paul

Brown made colonial practices in The Tempest and in early modern England the subject of his

analysis of Shakespeare’s play,1 and Peter Hulme and Francis Barker called for a historical

contextual analysis of The Tempest.2 However, although Césaire’s play first analyzed colonial

practices in The Tempest, critics have not recognized him for making this important critical

intervention. This chapter explores A Tempest to consider its creative, political, and critical

dimensions.3

Drawing on the literary source The Tempest, Césaire wrote A Tempest as the third

installment of a dramatic trilogy. The first play in the trilogy, La tragédie du roi Christophe

(1963, 1970; trans. 1969) [The Tragedy of King Christophe], presents a study of the forces that

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led to the failure of Haiti, the first black independent state. Césaire based The Tragedy of King

Christophe on the career of Henri Christophe, a Haitian military leader in the wars against the

French, who established monarchial rule in the northern region of the island of Saint Dominigue

(as it was then called) between the years 1807-1820 (Davis 137). The Tragedy of King

Christophe dramatizes the King’s grandiose building projects, increasingly despotic rule, and

eventual suicide in the wake of popular uprising (137). In “Aimé Césaire's Lesson about

Decolonization in La tragédie du roi Christophe,” Hunt Hawkins asserts that Césaire’s purpose

in writing the play was “at once didactic and hortatory”: the play takes several liberties with

historic fact to demonstrate the similarity of problems involved in the independence of Haiti and

the ongoing decolonization of Africa at the time that the play was published in 1963 (144).

Gregson Davis describes the action of Une saison au Congo (1966; trans. 2010) [A

Season in the Congo], the second play in the trilogy, as based on the historical imbroglio that

accompanied and defined the transition of the Belgian Congo from a colony into an independent

nation (152); this play analyzes the circumstances that led to the demise of Patrice Lumumba,

whom Gayatri Spivak describes in the introduction to her translation of the play as committed to

the idea of freedom evoked by the Kiswahili word “Uhuru” (freedom) rather than “dipenda,” a

type of independence that maintains colonial structures even after independence (xii).4 Unlike

King Christophe, Lumumba is not satisfied simply to leave colonial structures in place after

independence.

When viewing these two plays by Césaire as dramatic texts that address historical events,

one is perplexed by Césaire’s decision to turn to literature—Shakespeare’s play The Tempest—as

a source for the third play in his trilogy. The Tragedy of King Christophe and A Season in the

Congo dramatically explore historical problems of decolonization and black liberation within the

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French and Belgian Empires, but A Tempest re-assesses The Tempest, re-reading a literary

account of a colonized figure’s fight for liberation from a despotic Italian would-be-colonialist in

order to address problems of decolonization and black liberation within both the British and

French Empires.

Césaire’s purpose in writing A Tempest, therefore, was at once critical, creative, and

political. This chapter, therefore, treats A Tempest, proposing that Césaire “writes back” to

Shakespeare because he identifies with Shakespeare’s Caliban as a colonized figure yet he is also

disassociated from, and therefore alters, Caliban’s use of the colonizer’s language exclusively to

curse the colonizer and to plot a violent overthrow of Prospero. Césaire deploys counter-

discursive metatheatre to re-read, re-structure, and resituate Shakespeare’s play. As noted in the

Introduction, counter-discursive post-colonial metatheatre assists in the re-reading, re-

structuring, and re-situating of the larger “base” play (Tompkins 44-5). Re-reading The Tempest

through a post-colonial lens, Césaire identifies and analyzes the colonialist undertones in

Shakespeare’s play and writes back to the concept of Caliban as dependent on Prospero, a

presupposition that Octave Mannoni had also identified and adapted to create his theory of the

“dependency complex.”5 Césaire also re-structures The Tempest, particularly its dénouement, to

depict a vision of decolonization that had not come to fruition in Martinique—a vision in which

the improvement of socio-economic conditions for Martinicans would exist without their

dependency on France. Like Lumumba, Caliban is not satisfied to retain colonial structures after

independence. Yet, the Caliban that Césaire creates does not use martyrdom as a form of

resistance,6 nor is he willing to kill Prospero. Although Césaire leaves the audience with some

uncertainty about the outcome of the type of freedom his Caliban pursues, the audience

witnesses Prospero’s power decline, evoking a nascent sense of optimism for the future.

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Additionally, in re-situating Caliban as a dramatic hero of négritude, Césaire exploits aspects of

classical theater to incite audiences to identify with Caliban and, by association, to question the

white supremacist presuppositions that undergirded the goal of assimilating alien cultures into

the French Empire. Césaire’s text thus takes its place in an ongoing controversy concerning

critical re-readings of The Tempest. From the point of view of the colonized, this deliberation has

evoked questions regarding the extent to which The Tempest and its implicit narratives can be

appropriated to reconceive the idea of freedom in an era of decolonization.

Although Césaire turned to drama as a source for A Tempest, he employs metatheatre in

the play to blur the otherwise overt distinctions between the stage and history. In the Prologue,

the Meneur de Jeu [Master of Ceremonies] instructs the actors to don the masks of their

characters, emphasizing the stage as a world that is constructed by a play and its actors: “Allons,

Messieurs, servez-vous . . . A chacun son personage et à chaque personage son masque . . . Il faut

de tout pour faire un monde” (Une Tempête 9) [“Come gentleman, help yourselves. To each his

character, to each character his Mask . . . It takes all kinds to make a world”] (A Tempest 7).7

Césaire’s concern for conflating the stage with the world also arises in Cahier d’un retour au

pays natal [Journal of a Homecoming]: after designating himself as a “mouth of those calamities

that have no mouth” (13), the speaker states that his body and soul “beware of assuming the

sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle” (13).8 Davis speculates on these lines,

asking whether the poet is repudiating the dramaturgical trope “as such (‘life is not a show on

stage’ versus Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’)?” (30). Davis conjectures that, through

Césaire’s subtle rhetoric, the speaker “warns himself against confounding the figurative stage

with the real stage” (30). As Gerhard Fischer and Bernard Greiner observe, metatheatre affirms a

self-conscious subject (“the actor”) that transcends the masks of social roles, operating as a

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strategy of self-reflection (xiii). Césaire’s use of this self-reflexive strategy thus highlights the

critical and political impetuses that inform A Tempest, insisting on composing—to borrow from

Kenneth Burke—“literature for use,”9 or, more properly, theater for use.

Yet, I wish to proceed with caution before building my argument which asserts that

Césaire re-reads The Tempest through a “post-colonial lens.” I recognize the problematic nature

of the use of “post-colonial” as a modifier within this context because Césaire played a role in

the implementation of France’s law of departmentalization, which led to the incorporation of

Martinique into the country of France. However, in Césaire’s speech10 at the Second

International Congress of Black Writers in Rome, he delineated the responsibilities of black

intellectuals and advocated revolutionary decolonization and the obliteration of harmful

institutions (Pallister 105). Jane Pallister observes that Césaire’s comments can be viewed as

somewhat paradoxical, since at the time he delivered the speech, he occupied a seat in the

National Assembly of France, an organization that Pallister asserts was “surely a hallmark of

French imperialist establishment and very likely a ‘harmful institution’” (105). Yet, Davis

associates Césaire’s motives for incorporating Martinique into France with his desire to alleviate

the poverty, disease, and inadequate social and educational services that characterized the

Martinican island society in the 1940s (94), revealing the complexity of Césaire’s motivations as

a politician.

In pondering the significance of Césaire’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, critics tend

to overlook the circumstances involved in Césaire’s encounter with Shakespeare; yet, I view

these conditions as not only relevant to the task of interpreting Césaire’s play but also as

necessary to explaining why Césaire identified with Caliban. Césaire encountered “Shakespeare”

in a manner similar to that of post-colonial critics: as a name that designates a cultural institution

66
that, along with the English language, the British represented as superior to non-European

languages and literature and thus transported throughout the world. Born in 1913 on the French

Caribbean island Martinique (Blackman qtd. in Fischer and Greiner 297), Césaire focused the

intellectual attention of his early years on the French language and canonical French authors such

as Victor Hugo and Voltaire. Davis recounts that Ferdinand Césaire, Césaire’s father, conducted

supplementary classes at home by waking his children every day at 6 a.m., tutoring them until

7:45 a.m., encouraging them to perfect their French, and instilling in them an admiration for

literary models of the traditional canon (5). James Arnold further explains that acquiring the

French language and culture (and repressing the Creole language and culture) was “the

paramount social goal” for black children born in circumstances such as Césaire’s (Modernism

and Negritude 10). Césaire also won a scholarship to attend the Lycée Schoelcher in the capital

of Martinique, Fort-de-France and was later awarded a scholarship to continue the next phase of

his education in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1939 (6). At the Lcyée Schoelcher, Césaire

studied under Mannoni (Pallister xi), though Mannoni did not write Prospero and Caliban: The

Psychology of Colonization until 1950 (trans. 1956). Césaire studied European philosophy there,

and his experience at the Lycée Schoelcher also entailed his absorption of the masterpieces of

French and European culture (Modernism and Negritude 10). He then gained entrance into the

prestigious École Normale Supériure in the Rue d’Ulm, where he remained enrolled until he

returned to his native island on the eve of the Second World War (6).

Two significant facts plausibly suggest that Césaire encountered Shakespeare at École

Normale Supériure, if he has not already discovered the playwright. First, at the École Normale

Supériure, Césaire studied artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and political

movement that proved instrumental in transforming Césaire since Césaire viewed writers of the

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Harlem Renaissance as speaking of blacks in a way that gave them dignity (Davis 9). Poets of

the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee

Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown, strived to record the Black experience in

America. One group of writers, inclusive of Claude McKay, fused formal, European verse with

the content of the Black American experience. For example, McKay’s poem “Harlem Dancer,” a

Shakespearean sonnet with perfect rhyme, depicts an African American dancer in Harlem. In

addition, during the second year at the École Normale, Césaire wrote a research paper for his

diploma of English11 bearing the title “The Theme of the South in the Negro-American Poetry of

the United States” (Davis 9). The curriculum that existed at École Normale Supériure during the

time that Césaire studied there as well as the paper Césaire wrote during his second year thus

suggest that Césaire encountered Shakespeare at École Normale Supériure. Additionally, Arnold

confirms that Césaire read and spoke English from his days at the Lycée Schoelcher (“Inquiry

regarding Aimé Césaire”), so Césaire almost certainly read The Tempest in English. Moreover,

when Arnold edited Césaire’s paper “Culture et colonization,” [“Culture and Colonization"] for

the Paris genetic edition of his literary works in 2012, he confirmed that Césaire sometimes did

his own translations from English (“Inquiry regarding Aimé Césaire”).

Although Césaire translated and adapted The Tempest into the French language, he

adapted it not only to entertain audiences—initially an audience at an international cultural

festival in Hammameth, Tunisia, in July 1969 (Aimé Césaire: Poetry, Theatre, Essays and

Discourse: Critical Edition 1200)—but also for black actors to explore themes of colonialism,

imperialism, racism, capitalism, master-slave relationships, and decolonization. Césaire,

therefore, wrote for both the colonizer and the colonized, creating “theater for use” in which he

and the actors confront the colonizer. Significantly, Jean-Marie Surreau, a leading French

68
director at the time, directed the company of black actors for whom Césaire wrote A Tempest; as

Arnold points out, “It was Césaire's theater director, Jean-Marie Serreau, who proposed that

Césaire write an anti-colonial adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest” (“Inquiry regarding Aimé

Césaire”). Yet, consciously or unconsciously, Césaire himself also desired to create an anti-

colonial adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Scholars including Pier Frassinelli aver that, by his

own admission, Césaire originally intended to translate Shakespeare’s play into French

(Frassinelli qtd. in Dionne and Kapadia 174), but, he [Césaire] notes, “When the work was done,

I realized there was not much Shakespeare left” (Césaire qtd. in Dionne and Kapadia 174).12

A consideration of Césaire’s political career may also help to sharpen our perception of

Césaire’s purpose in writing A Tempest: Césaire identified with Caliban as a colonized figure

who had become disenchanted with the idea of collaborating with Prospero to cooperatively

shape the structure of their society. Proposing that Césaire identifies with “Caliban” requires a

brief discussion of both Shakespeare’s and Césaire’s Calibans since to apply Burke’s theory of

identification one must first note that Césaire’s identification with Shakespeare’s Caliban is

contingent not only on shared, common characteristics but also on a disassociation with certain

characteristics and values of Caliban. In The Tempest, the relationship between Prospero and

Caliban indisputably hinges on a master-slave dialect, as Prospero stresses in addressing Caliban:

“Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself / Upon thy wicked dam, come forth!”

(Shakespeare 1.2.322-3).13 Prospero enforces his relationship with Caliban by using several

strategies: controlling the land, manipulating its material conditions, directing its property

relations, and enforcing its class structure. However, Caliban upholds his ownership of the

island, insisting: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me” (334-

5), thereby suggesting that Caliban has a legitimate claim to the island through matrilineal

69
descent. Taking Césaire’s biography into account, I suggest that Césaire identifies with these

facts: Caliban’s land was usurped (the French nation usurped Martinique), Caliban was forced

into a master-slave relationship by the country that acquired control over his land (Césaire’s

ancestors were slaves in Martinique), and Caliban did not control the material conditions or class

structure of the island (France controlled these aspects in the “colonial” and even the

“departmental” Martinique). Additionally, at one period of time, Caliban had attempted to

collaborate with Prospero:

When thou cam’st first,

Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst

Give me

Water with berries in’t, and teach me how

To name the bigger light, and how the less,

That burn day and night. And then I loved thee

And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,

The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and

fertile. (1.2.334-42)

Prospero’s response to Caliban, “I have used thee, / Filth as thou art, with humane care, and

lodged thee / In mine own cell, / till thou didst seek to violate / the honor of my child” (1.2.347-

51), confirms Caliban’s account of their original relationship, but Prospero’s reply also illustrates

the prejudicial power structure that undermines their relationship. Césaire may have identified

with these aspects of Caliban’s relationship with Prospero since early in his political career

Césaire adopted an assimilationist perspective, joined the French Communist Party (PCF), and

co-sponsored the law that created departmental status for the former colonies of Martinique and

70
Guadeloupe in 1946 (Davis 2). Additionally, Caliban was forced to learn Prospero’s language,

and Césaire had to learn the French language. Certainly, Césaire attempted to collaborate with

France while also strategically placing himself in a position to affect the material conditions in

Martinique. Just as the cooperative relationship between Prospero and Caliban broke down,

Césaire resigned from the PCF in 1956 because of the party’s indifference to the colonial

question (96). As Burke theorizes, “identification inherently involves division” (45). As I will

discuss later in this chapter, it is unlikely that Césaire identified with Caliban’s attempt to have

Prospero killed and to replace Prospero’s power with the authority of Stephano and Trinculo

because Césaire did not advocate violence like his Martinican compatriot Frantz Fanon in The

Wretched of the Earth (1961; trans. 2004), and Césaire started the Parti Progressite Martiniquais

(PPM) to alter, rather than reinforce, the material conditions and class structure of Martinique.

Based on this type of identification that involves relating to and disassociating from

certain characteristics of an individual, Césaire creates a Caliban with whom he identifies and

who resists Prospero and his colonial strategies, and I insist on a reading that puts Césaire’s

identification with Shakespeare’s Caliban in dialogue with his alterations of the original play’s

structure. Césaire’s dramatic re-structuring of Shakespeare’s play enables him to comment on the

colonialist overtones of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban. The altered list of

characters, the first and most instantly recognizable change that Césaire makes, immediately

signals Césaire’s desire to highlight the colonial theme. Césaire identifies his characters as

follows:

Ceux de Shakespeare.

Deux précisions supplémentaires

ARIEL esclave, ethniquement un mulâtre

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 CALIBAN esclave nègre

Une addition

ESHU dieu-diable nègre (Une Tempête 7)

As in Shakespeare, with:

Two alterations:

ARIEL, a mulatto slave

CALIBAN, a black slave

An addition:

ESHU, a black devil-god (A Tempest 3)

By omitting the names of the European characters and classical goddesses from Shakespeare’s

dramatis personae, Césaire successfully emphasizes the importance of the three non-European

characters by explaining that they have been altered or, in Eshu’s case, added.

Césaire also re-structures the earliest portions of Shakespeare’s play by adding a

Prologue, re-assigning the first words of the play from the “Master” of the ship in Shakespeare’s

version to the “Master” of Ceremonies in Césaire’s play. A Tempest commences with the Master

of Ceremonies instructing the actors to take up their masks and roles, overtly drawing attention

to theater as a mode of representation while also calling for a “storm to end all storms” (A

Tempest 7): “Il me faut une tempête à tout casser” (Une Tempête 9). Significantly, Césaire’s

“Master” demonstrates command over the creation of the storm that Shakespeare’s Prospero

conjures, which subsequently ensnares Shakespeare’s “Master” of the Boat and its crew. The

Prologue, therefore, functions not only as an addition that stresses the metatheatrical features of

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A Tempest but also as an alteration that gives the first lines of Shakespeare’s play to a “Master”

of Ceremonies who usurps Prospero’s—and Shakespeare’s—mastery.

Additionally, Césaire alters the setting of The Tempest, using metatheatre to set the play

in the present, omitting the reference to a specific “uninhabited island,”14 and evoking a

geographical setting that figuratively interweaves Martinique and the Greater Caribbean, Africa,

and the United States into the dramatic demythification15 of the master-slave relationship. Davis

argues that the action of A Tempest takes place on a distinctly Caribbean island (157), Arnold

avers that Césaire’s island is a model of Caribbean society (“Césaire and Shakespeare: Two

Tempests” 242), and Lucy Rix asserts that the play was “clearly written with the politics of

Martinique in mind” (237). References to “the islands” (A Tempest 45) and “the coconut palm”

Une Tempête 46; A Tempest 33) support these assertions. The play also evokes the flora and

fauna of Africa, including the baobab tree and calao bird (A Tempest 16), and alludes to the

Black Power movement in the United States. In his Introduction to Une Tempête, Arnold

explains the significance of Césaire’s relationship of the United States to the setting of the play:

Césaire fixed the ethnic classes of the characters of Ariel and Caliban to refer to segregation in

the United States (“Césaire dans Une Tempête fixa a, dans les personnages d’ Ariel (<<esclave,

ethniquement un mulâtre>>) et Caliban (<<esclave nègre>> des ethnoclasses qui renvoient a une

segregation de type états-union” 1203). Arnold also addresses the cultural implications of the

Caribbean setting, asserting that Césaire also shaped the two slaves of Prospero in the same

relationship as forces in Toussaint Louverture, where the mulattos are the worst enemies of the

Negros of Saint Dominique: “Césaire campa le deux esclaves de Prospéro dans le même rapport

des forces qu’il envisagea dans son Toussaint Louverture, où les mulâtres sont les pires ennemis

des nègres de Saint Dominigue” (1203). The setting of Césaire’s play thus undoubtedly includes

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the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States.16 His alteration of the setting enables him to

address racism and colonialism in the present, as countries including Martinique and the United

States struggled to change colonial structures that remained in place even after slaves in both

countries had been freed and after both countries had purportedly achieved a form of

independence from the French and British Empires.17

Césaire also re-structures the original play by revising its classical five-act structure,

facilitating his purpose of chronologically dramatizing Caliban’s confrontation with Prospero

and Prospero’s colonial strategies. The compression of the original play’s events and the scenes

that Césaire adds also highlight the colonial, master-slave conflict. Césaire uses act one to

introduce the principal characters of the play and to illustrate their relationships, while

simultaneously emphasizing Shakespeare’s colonial theme. For example, in act one, scene two,

Prospero recounts to Miranda that he had succeeded in discovering the exact location of the

lands that he would later colonize and that he had made preparations to take possession of them,

but that Antonio and the King of Naples hatched a scheme to steal his “as-yet-unborn empire”

from him” (A Tempest 13): “Quoi qu’il en soit, quand ils surent que par mes calculs, j’avaid situé

avec precision ces terres qui depuis des siècles sont promises à la quête de l’homme, et que je

commencais mes préparatifs pour en prendre possession, ils ourdirent un complot pour me voler

cet empire à naître” (Une Tempête 20).

In any event, when they learned that through my studies and experiments I had managed

to discover the exact location of these lands for which many had sought for centuries and

that I was making preparations to set forth to take possession of them, they hatched a

scheme to steal my as-yet-unborn empire from me. (A Tempest 13)

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This dramatic exposition provides important information about what led to the conflict between

Prospero and Caliban, and Césaire makes that contention central to his play.

Act two of A Tempest re-structures the original play by exclusively emphasizing colonial

and political themes, re-structuring the relationship between Ariel and Prospero and Ariel and

Caliban so that Césaire’s Ariel still carries out Prospero’s orders while also subverting

Prospero’s authority. Act two of The Tempest presents four instances of collaboration among the

dramatis personae of the play: the bantering among Gonzalo, Sebastian, Antonio, Alonso, and

Adrian about the possibility of creating a Commonwealth on the island (Shakespeare 2.1.150);

the united efforts of Sebastian and Antonio to usurp the throne of Naples; the cooperation of

Prospero and Ariel to prevent the coup against the King of Naples; and Caliban’s attempt to

convince Stephano and Trinculo to overthrow Prospero. Each instance of conspiracy and

collaboration significantly engages political questions of power: Gonzalo aims to become king of

the Commonwealth (2.1.148); Sebastian and Antonio want to remove Alonso to prevent Claribel

from becoming the next heir of Naples (they assume that Ferdinand had drowned); Prospero

plans to keep the King of Naples alive to unite Miranda and Ferdinand and, arguably, to re-

establish his dukedom; and Caliban desires to overthrow Prospero.

However, Césaire re-structures two of these cooperative projects. First, he depicts

Sebastian and Antonio’s motivations for planning to murder the King as contempt for the King

as well as a desire for personal power; as Antonio scoffs: “C’est n’avoir pas de sang dans les

veines que de voir dormer un roi sans que ca vous donne certaines idées…(Une Tempête 45)

[“You’re a really bloodless lily-liver if you can see a king asleep without getting ideas. . .”] (A

Tempest 33). Insisting that “le moment est venu de secouer le cocotier” (Une Tempête 46) [“it is

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time to shake the coconut palm”] (A Tempest 33), Antonio proposes that it is time to “grab” an

opportunity offered to them (Une Tempête 46; A Tempest 33).

Secondly, as in Shakespeare’s play, Césaire’s Ariel warns the King and thwarts the

conspirators’ plans (Une Tempête 47; A Tempest 34), but, in Césaire’s play, Ariel also informs

Caliban of Prospero’s plans for revenge and attempts to collaborate with Caliban to gain their

freedom, thereby re-structuring the relationship between Ariel and Caliban as one that is

potentially cooperative. I quote the relevant dialogue at length here in order to fully illustrate the

degree to which Césaire alters the relationship between Ariel and Caliban:

ARIEL. Salut, Caliban! Je sais que tu ne m’estimes guère, mais

après tout nous sommes frères, frères dans la souffrance et

l’esclavage, frères aussi dans l’espérance. Tous deux nous

voulons la liberté, seules nos methodes diffèrent.

CALIBAN. Salut à toi. Ce n’est quand même pas pour me faire cette

profession de foi que tu es venu me voir! Allons, Alastor!

C’est le vieux qui t’envoie, pas vrai? Beau métier : exé-

cuteurs des haute pensées due Maître!

ARIEL. Non, je viens de moi- même. Je suis venu t’avertir. Prospero

Médite sur toi d’épouvantables vengeances. J’ai cru de mon

devoir de te mettre en garde. (Une Tempête 36)

ARIEL. Greetings, Caliban. I know you don’t think much of

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 me, but after all we are brothers, brothers in suffering

and slavery, but brothers in hope as well. We both want

our freedom. We just have different methods.

CALIBAN. Greetings to you. But you didn’t come to see me

just to make that profession of faith! Come on, Alastor!

The old man sent you, didn’t he? A great job: carrying

out the Master’s fine ideas, his great plans.

ARIEL. No, I’ve come on my own. I came to warn you.

Prospero is planning horrible acts of revenge against

you. I thought it was my duty to alert you. (A Tempest 26)

This dialogue between Ariel and Caliban illustrates Césaire’s success in realigning the

relationship between Prospero’s two servants from The Tempest, in which Ariel only attempts to

secure his own freedom and does not seem to care about Caliban’s plight, to A Tempest, in which

Ariel endeavors to cooperate with Caliban to subvert Prospero’s authority and obtain freedom for

both of them.

Césaire’s allusions to the Black Power Movement in the United States enhance this

aspect of Césaire’s play. As Césaire’s play reveals, and as commentators point out, Césaire

aligns Caliban’s and Ariel’s identities with Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.;

moreover, Césaire’s references to the Black Power Movement are not unconscious allusions. In

his Introduction to Une Tempête, Arnold explains that in 1967, “Césaire projecta, des 1967,

d’écrire une pièce sur les noirs des États-Unis, afin de boucler la trilogie commence with La

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Tragédie du roi Christophe (1200) [Césaire planned to write a play about the blacks in the

United States in order to finish the trilogy that commenced with the Tragedy of King

Christophe]. According to Arnold, this play would be titled “A Hot Summer” (1200). The

historical circumstances of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—and the parallels drawn

between King and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—influenced Césaire in writing A Tempest,

which dramatizes Caliban’s confrontation with Prospero by alluding to the different strategies of

Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X for confronting colonialist structures such as racism,

thereby re-presenting the alternative methods for challenging the colonizer that Césaire had also

dramatized in A Season of the Congo. Later in this chapter, I will discuss how Césaire’s re-

structuring of the original play enables him to re-situate the confrontation between Caliban and

Prospero within the context of decolonization.

These alterations and additions prove significant to Césaire’s transformation of the

structural framework of Shakespeare’s play into a contemporary frame through which Césaire re-

reads and re-situates the colonial theme of The Tempest to dramatize Caliban’s confrontation of

Prospero. Although Caliban curses Prospero in The Tempest, Caliban never challenges him; nor

does Caliban ever demand his freedom. Césaire thus grants Caliban subjectivity and agency.

Césaire re-reads Caliban as a character explicitly colonized by Prospero, even though the

reification of colonialist projects through master-slave relationships was only burgeoning during

Shakespeare’s era, and despite the fact that Anglo-American critics later disputed the existence

of a colonial theme in the original play.18

The primary means by which Césaire represents Caliban as colonized is as follows: act

one, scene two includes Prospero’s insistence that Caliban, a savage, should be grateful that

Prospero taught him language, educated and trained him, and pulled him up from the “bestiality”

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that still clings to him: “Un barbare! Un bête brute que j’ai éduquée, formée, que j’ai tirée de

l’animalité qui l’engangue encore de toute part!” (Une Tempête 25) [“You savage . . . a dumb

animal, a beast I educated, trained, dragged up from the bestiality that still clings to you”] (A

Tempest 17). Prospero is so full of pride in his perceived benevolence that he haughtily poses a

rhetorical question to Caliban, “Sans moi, que serais-tu?” (Une Tempête 25) [“What would you

be without me?”] (A Tempest 17). Through this dialogue, Césaire comments on Shakespeare’s

play, in which Miranda insists that she “took pains” to make Caliban speak: that she “taught thee

each / hour / One thing or other” (Shakespeare 1.2.356-7), and when “thou [he] didst not, savage,

/ Know thine own meaning” (358-9), “endowed” his “purposes” with “words that made them

known” (360-1). Editors sometimes assign these lines to Prospero; Stephen Orgel points out that

the speech is often, still, not Miranda’s but Prospero’s (“Introduction” 17).19 Césaire’s purpose,

to highlight the colonial theme of the play and Caliban’s position as a figure colonized by

Prospero, thus proves similar to the interpretations of editors who have made these emendations.

However, Césaire’s interpretation proves even bolder than the editors’: rather than

straightforwardly assign Miranda’s lines to Prospero, Césaire includes dialogue in which

Prospero depicts an image of his raising Caliban through education, as well as insisting that

Caliban should show gratitude to him.

Other post-colonial commentators have interpreted act one, scene two of The Tempest

and the significance of language and education in the play similarly, emphasizing Shakespeare’s

inclusion of education in the master-slave dialect as evidence for the play’s colonial theme and

for Caliban as a colonized figure. Lamming refers to Miranda’s speech concerning her education

of Caliban as a “cantankerous” assertion, spoken by her, but obviously reflecting “the thought

and vocabulary of her father” (109). Paul Brown also analyzes Shakespeare’s stressing of

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language, education, and colonialism, observing, “colonialist discourse voices a demand both for

order and disorder, producing a disruptive other in order to assert the superiority of the

colonizer” (58). Significantly, Caliban is produced through language as an “other” (61);

similarly, the political conversion of Gaelic customs into their “civil” counterparts and the

introduction of English as the sole official language were policies exercised by the British in the

vast discursive production of the Irish (55). Eric Cheyfetz also underscores the relationship

between language and colonialism by identifying parallels between Prospero as a dictator of an

official language and the ways in which official languages are used in the conquest of native

people. Kim Hall echoes Cheyfetz by observing the correlation between many colonial travelers

who denigrate the language of other cultures with the “lessons” Miranda gives Caliban in an

attempt to reform or civilize him (144). Similarly, Ania Loomba concentrates on the role of

language in the colonial theme of The Tempest, noting how the linguistic and cultural aspects of

colonialism highlighted by Lamming, Mannoni, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Césaire, and Frantz

Fanon later became central to postcolonial debates about early modern colonial encounters in

The Tempest (163-4). Loomba contends that, to some extent, critics during and after the 1980s

“were simply catching up with and complicating the debate that had been inaugurated outside the

academy” (163) by Lamming, Césaire, and others. Césaire thus foregrounds the critical purposes

of post-colonial critics who, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, recovered and

analyzed the colonial theme in The Tempest.

In addition to explicitly re-reading Caliban’s role as a colonized figure, by casting Ariel

as a mulatto slave and Caliban as a black slave, Césaire explicitly evokes the black diaspora in

the Caribbean and the United States; this strategy of appropriation enables him to extend

Caliban’s character into an era of decolonization. Césaire resituates Caliban by retaining his role

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as a slave, casting him as black, dramatizing him as distinctly choosing to speak either his native

language or the language of the colonized, and depicting him as aware of the fact that his identity

has been constructed. Lucy Rix confirms Césaire’s motivation to connect A Tempest to post-

colonial (or post-departmental) politics in Martinique: “Césaire believed that it was crucial for

the colonized Martinican people to relocate themselves at the centre of the stage” (qtd. in Hulme

and Sherman 236). As evidence, Rix translates and quotes Césaire: “The Martinican malaise is

the malaise of a people that no longer feels responsible for its destiny and has no more than a

minor part in a drama in which it should be a protagonist” (Césaire qtd. in Burton 1).

Recognizing Césaire’s desire to make Martinique a “protagonist” supports the view that Césaire

targeted the black diaspora in the Caribbean when he wrote A Tempest.

Césaire undoubtedly wrote A Tempest to foreground the black diaspora in the United

States, particularly by associating Caliban with Malcolm Little, who later replaced what he

regarded as his slave name with the letter X to represent his lost African name. The most explicit

allusion to Malcolm X occurs in act one, scene two, when Caliban insists that he will no longer

answer to the name of Caliban: “Appelle-moi X. Ca vaudra mieux. Comme qui dirait l’homme

sans nom. Plus exactement, l’homme dont on a volé le nom” (Une Tempête 28) [“Call me X.

That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or, to be more precise, a man whose name has

been stolen”] (A Tempest 20). Chantal Zabus confirms that Caliban’s strategy of calling himself

X aligns him with the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, and the 1960s U.S. Black Muslim movement

led by Elijah Muhammad (47). According to Louis E. Lomax, when seeking to be admitted to

membership in the Nation of Islam, the applicant supplicates Allah to give him his “Original

name”: “the convert [is] allowed to drop his ‘slave’ name . . . the ‘x’ is the Black Muslim’s way

of saying that his own origins—before the white man—and name are a mystery; it is also the

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Muslim’s shout that he is an ‘ex,’ and ‘no longer what I was when the white man had me deaf,

blind, and dumb’” (30-31).

And yet I assert that the association between Césaire’s Caliban and Malcolm X is much

more complex than has previously been acknowledged: in pondering why Césaire aligns his

Caliban with Malcolm X, critics tend to overlook the two figures’ use of the colonizer’s language

to reject the colonizer’s image of the colonized. In his Autobiography, Malcolm X explains that

learning to read in the Norfolk Prison Colony (a prison near Boston, Massachusetts) gave him

more “sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race of

America” (179). Malcolm X also describes how his reading helped him to understand the genesis

of the white man’s view of non-whites: “I perceived, as I read, how the collective white man had

been actually nothing but a piratical opportunist . . . First, always ‘religiously,’ he branded

‘heathen’ and ‘pagan’ labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations. The stage thus

set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons of war” (177). Malcolm X asserts

that after learning to read, he would never again be caught with a free fifteen minutes in which

he was not studying something he felt might be able to help the black man (179). Similarly,

Césaire’s Caliban uses the language of the colonized to challenge Prospero and the deleterious

image of himself that Prospero impresses upon him. Caliban’s confrontation with Prospero in act

three, scene five, illustrates Caliban’s mastery of the master’s logo-linguistic narrative in which

he had been imprisoned:

Et tu m’as tellement menti

mentis ur le monde, mentis ur moi-même,

que tu as fini par m’imposer

une image de moi-même :

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 Un sous-dévelopeé, comme tu dis,

un sous-capable,

voilà comment tu m’as oblige à me voir. (Une Tempête 88)

And you lied to me so much,

about the world, about myself, that you ended up imposing on me

an image of myself: underdeveloped, in your words, undercompetent

that’s how you made me see myself! (A Tempest 62)

Critics have also overlooked the fact that although Césaire’s Caliban and Ariel discuss

the philosophies of violence and nonviolence,20 Césaire’s Caliban neither advocates violence nor

chooses to kill Prospero when he has the opportunity, as might be expected by the alignment of

Caliban with Malcolm X.21 Caliban’s relationship to language and his rejection of violence prove

particularly important when considering his use of the word “Uhuru,” a term that most certainly

would have evoked the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya as well as the violent strategies on which

the revolution relied. The fact that Césaire’s Martinican compatriot, Fanon, had used the French

language to advocate the use of violence against the colonizer in The Wretched of the Earth22

adds to the importance of analyzing the attitude of Césaire’s Caliban towards violence. Césaire’s

Caliban uses a Kiswahili word for freedom, “Uhuru,” a word Caliban must have “known” before

Prospero enforced his language on Caliban, even as it is unlikely that Shakespeare’s Prospero

taught Caliban the word “Setebos,” which Caliban uses to refer to one of his gods (Shakespeare

1.2.376). Significantly, the word “Uhuru” is Caliban’s first word in the play (Une Tempête 24; A

Tempest 17); it is also the word that Caliban repeats at the end of his initial dialogue with

Prospero (Une Tempête 28; A Tempest 20), and the word that Prospero acknowledges as

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Caliban’s “langage barbare” (Une Tempête 24) [“native language”] (A Tempest 9). Caliban’s use

of the word proves significant: Césaire refuses to gloss it, forcing the audience to consider the

peculiar significance of the word. Ashcroft et al. discuss the integration of untranslated words as

a strategy used in post-colonial literature for conveying a sense of cultural distinctiveness (63):

the technique registers cultural peculiarity but also elicits the reader to actively engage with the

culture in which the terms have meaning (64). Césaire’s use of the word “Uhuru,” therefore,

compels the reader to consider the various meanings—violent and non-violent—of the African

term. Steve Almquist points out that each native African possesses his own conception of

“Uhuru”: the word may signify a round-the-corner Utopia, the expulsion of the white man from

Africa, or, to the willfully lawless, a license to rob, steal, and kill without punishment (599).

Additionally, to the white man in Africa, “Uhuru” is regarded as a threat (599). In Caliban’s

case, “Uhuru” connects Caliban to Africa, gives Caliban an African voice, and thereby

recuperates his African lineage. The fact that Caliban also insists on being called “X” illustrates

Césaire’s depiction of Caliban as a hero of négritude: Caliban’s articulation of the word “Uhuru”

connects him with a claim to Africa’s cultural distinctiveness and, by association, to a personal

assertion of distinct racial identity. However, as I will discuss later in this chapter, Caliban

disassociates himself from any aspects of the concept of “Uhuru” that would connect him with

violence, particularly murder; rather, Caliban insists on being recognized for his racial

distinction. Césaire’s reference to Malcolm X in A Tempest, therefore, connects the histories and

struggles for self-identification from Shakespeare’s Caliban to Césaire to Malcolm X to

Césaire’s Caliban. Although Césaire’s re-situating of Caliban in this respect illustrates Césaire’s

identification of Caliban with himself (Césaire repressed Creole to learn the French language and

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used the French language to resist the colonizer), it also demonstrates the complexity of his

identification with Malcolm X.

Césaire also explicitly re-reads Ariel as a slave of Prospero, who desires to obtain his

freedom but who, unlike Caliban, believes he can obtain it by reasoning with the colonizer. In act

one, scene two of A Tempest, Ariel declares that he is disgusted with obeying Prospero’s orders

because Prospero has never fulfilled his promise of freeing him (Une Tempête 23; A Tempest

16). As in Shakespeare’s play, Prospero deflects Ariel’s observation by reminding him that he

has freed Ariel from the tree in which Sycorax had imprisoned him (Une Tempête 23; A Tempest

16). Ariel thus carries out Prospero’s orders, but he only capitulates to Prospero’s commands in

order to obtain his freedom. Additionally, although Césaire explicitly interprets Ariel as

Prospero’s slave, Césaire does not alter Shakespeare’s depiction of Ariel as non-human. In act

two, scene three of A Tempest, after preventing the murder of Alonso, Ariel identifies himself as

a god who can fly to Alonso’s aid, and in the same scene he identifies with “les esprits qui

peuplent l’air que vous respirez” (Une Tempête 48) [“the spirits of the air you breathe”] (A

Tempest 34). In re-reading the character of Ariel, therefore, Césaire not only interprets Ariel as a

slave who desires to obtain the freedom that Prospero promises him, but also as an androgynous,

non-human figure, who underscores the extensive scope of Prospero’s power but who also

deconstructs this power by maintaining a self-conscious theatricality in depictions of

supernatural effects.

Other post-colonial critics view the relationship of Shakespeare’s Ariel to the power of

his Prospero similarly: for example, Lamming describes Ariel as one of “the two agents of labour

and public relations” without whom Prospero would be helpless” (114). Yet, Lamming does not

identify with Ariel. Lamming considers Ariel a “servant” (97) of Prospero, a “lackey” who “has

85
been emancipated to the status of a privileged servant” (99). More sympathetic to Shakespeare’s

Ariel than Lamming, Brown underscores Prospero’s reliance on repetition to keep Ariel in

bondage: “Ariel is, paradoxically, bound in service by this constant reminder of Prospero’s gift

of freedom to him . . . That bondage is reinforced by both a promise to repeat the act of release

when a period of servitude has expired and a promise to repeat the act of incarceration should

service not be forthcoming” (60).

These critical re-readings reveal two key features of post-colonial interpretations of

Shakespeare’s Ariel: some, though not all, notable post-colonial critics view Ariel as a servant,

rather than a slave, of Prospero; yet, few besides Césaire address Ariel’s ironic reliance on

repetition and rationality in his attempt to secure the freedom that Prospero withholds from him.

Timothy Scheie argues that Césaire reveals the addiction of colonial ideology to the repetition of

racist discourse, relating colonial ideology to “power” understood in a Foucaldian sense: not a

privilege wielded by someone who has power, “but a diffuse network of institutionalized

constraints that coerce the performance of identity into nationalized configurations and that

include mechanisms for censuring performances that do not comply” (19). Scheie’s analysis

elucidates Césaire’s potential rationale for depicting Ariel as a mulatto slave. Since Ariel’s and

Caliban’s roles differ, what keeps them in “their place”—at least in Shakespeare’s play—is

Prospero’s repetition of racist discourse. As Brown insists, “Prospero utilises the previous regime

of Sycorax as an evil other. Her black, female magic ostensibly contrasts with that of Prospero in

that it is remembered as viciously coercive, yet beneath the apparent voluntarism of the white,

male regime lies the threat of precisely this coercion” (61). Césaire’s interpretation of the

character Ariel, therefore, does not easily align with any of these other post-colonial views;

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although, like Brown, Césaire recognizes, retains (and resists) Prospero’s reliance on repetition

to keep Ariel in bondage.

Césaire also alters Ariel’s role to relate to his audience, employing allusion to evoke Dr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. in dialogue with Malcolm X, thereby re-drawing the spatio-temporal

coordinates of Shakespeare’s play and dramatizing two philosophies of engaging racial conflict.

Zabus observes that if Caliban is “like a Malcolm X figure or the Stokely Carmichael of the

Black Panthers . . . Ariel is more like a Martin Luther King, who preached non-violence . . . yet

met a violent end with his assassination in 1968” (47). Although Césaire intentionally alludes to

King’s resistance to racism in the United States, King’s political and social actions also extended

to Africa. For example, Chinua Achebe comments that in preparation for his work in the United

States, King made a substantial commitment to the future of Africa, traveling with his wife to

Africa in 1957 to be present at the independence celebrations of Kwame Nkruman’s Ghana and,

in 1957, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Bishop James Pike, sponsoring a document signed by

130 world leaders urging the international community to protest against apartheid (132).

Césaire’s Ariel, therefore, alludes to the peaceful yet unswerving commitment of King to social

justice.

In addition to re-presenting both Ariel and Caliban as slaves within a colonial system,

Césaire re-reads Prospero as a colonizer in the Prologue to A Tempest, associating Prospero with

the Nietzschean concept of the will to power: “Toi, Prospero? Pour-quoi pas? Il y a des volontés

de puissance qui s’ignorent!” (Une Tempête 9). Richard Miller translates the second sentence as,

“He [Prospero] has reserves of willpower he’s not even aware of” (A Tempest 7); Frassinelli

translates the same sentence as, “Sometimes the will to power is unconscious” (qtd. in Dionne

and Kapadia 180). Other explicit evidence for Shakespeare’s Prospero as a colonizer that Césaire

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retains includes Caliban’s claim that Prospero stole the island from him (Shakespeare 1.2.35),

Ariel’s insistence on calling Prospero “Master” (1.2.190, 219), Prospero’s references to both

Ariel and Caliban as his slaves (1.2.172; 322), Prospero’s admission of using violence to

dominate Caliban (1.2.347), Prospero’s exploitation of Caliban for labor (1.2.369), and

Prospero’s ultimate appropriation of Caliban, “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine”

(5.1.278-79). Significantly, Shakespeare’s Prospero also links Caliban’s labor to the production

and maintenance of power that Prospero does not possess: it is Caliban who fetches their wood,

makes their fires, and performs duties that “profit” both Prospero and Miranda, even when

“[Caliban] There’s wood enough within” (1.2.317), and Césaire retains these aspects of

Prospero’s character from the original text. In act one, scene two of A Tempest, Caliban claims

that without Prospero he would be “King of the Island” given to him by his mother, Sycorax:

“Sans toi? Mais tout simplemente le roi! Le roi de lîle! Le roi de mon île, que je tiens de

Sycorax, ma mere” (Une Tempête 25) [“Without you? I’d be the king, that’s what I’d be, the

King of the Island. The King of the Island given to me by my mother, Sycorax”] (A Tempest 17).

Additionally, in act one, scene two, Césaire’s Ariel still refers to Prospero as “Maître,” [Master],

Ariel and Caliban are explicitly cast as “slaves” in the dramatic personae of the play, Prospero

uses violence to dominate Caliban (Une Tempête 27; A Tempest 19), and Prospero exploits

Caliban for labor (Une Tempête 27; A Tempest 19). Prospero also designates Caliban as his

creation: “Mieux! De la brute, due monstre, j’ai fait l’homme” (Une Tempête 63) [“Better yet—

from a brutish monster I have made man!”] (A Tempest 63).

Césaire’s explicit re-reading of Prospero as a colonizer also contributes to his depiction

of Prospero as a capitalist; Césaire may have had Martinique and the greater Caribbean in mind

when he re-situated Prospero in this role. Antonio Benitez-Rojo observes that “the history of the

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Caribbean is one of the main strands in the history of capitalism” (5) and that without material

resources from the Caribbean, Western capitalism would not have developed from the

Mercantilist Revolution to the Industrial Revolution (5). In Shakespeare’s play, Caliban performs

labor as Prospero’s slave, and Prospero consequently owns the means of production of the island.

Prospero himself admits that Caliban “serves in offices” (Shakespeare 1.2.316). Bevington

glosses “offices” as “functions and duties” (Bevington 1580), and these obligations “profit” both

Prospero and Miranda (1.2.316). Shakespeare’s Words clarifies the meaning of the word “profit”

when used as a verb in Shakespeare’s play: “benefit, be of use to, do good to” (349), a definition

that complicates an economic reading of Prospero’s statement in 1.2.316. Yet, according to

Shakespeare’s play, Caliban gathers wood and builds fires even when there is “wood enough

within” (Shakespeare 1.2.317). Caliban’s comment, therefore, points to Prospero’s attempt to

maintain a means of production that operates on a system that promotes surplus and growth.

However, in analyzing the critique of capitalism that Césaire’s play poses, critics have

failed to note that although Césaire emphasizes Prospero’s commitment to capitalism, he

simultaneously undercuts it. Rather than simply claim ownership of the island and, by

association, its commodities, such as wood, Césaire’s Caliban critiques the idea of nature as a

commodity and a means to production. Additionally, Césaire disrupts Prospero’s control over the

mechanisms of the theater through the Prologue and employment of the Brechtian technique of

alienation.23 In the Prologue, Césaire’s use of metatheatre calls attention to the actors’ and

audience’s awareness that the players are about to act out events that have already taken place—

in this case the performance of The Tempest as well as colonization. This particular use of

metatheatre also makes the theater’s representational qualities explicit, thereby negating the

power over illusion that Prospero maintains in Shakespeare’s play. Césaire further deconstructs

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Prospero’s power over illusion in act three, scene three, when Eshu forcefully disrupts the

engagement masque Prospero coordinated for Miranda and Ferdinand. Thus there is something

very right and very wrong with such arguments as the one advanced by Roxanna Curto, which

assert that in Césaire’s version of the story, Prospero is “at once a capitalist entrepreneur, an

inventor, and an illusion-maker,” and that his “ownership of the means of production, which he

refuses to share, constitutes the basis of his power on the island” (161). Césaire’s Prospero is a

capitalist entrepreneur, but Césaire’s use of counter-discursive metatheatre undercuts Prospero’s

illusion-making abilities, alienating the audience from the otherwise natural events of the

original play, and encouraging the audience to question and critique Prospero, the magician,

colonialist, and capitalist. Curto herself identifies a Brechtian paradigm operating in the play and

observes that Surreau directed Brecht’s 1936 The Exception and the Rule immediately before

beginning work with Césaire on production of Une Tempête (161). Yet, Curto neglects the role

that the Brechtian paradigm plays in deflating Prospero’s illusion-making abilities.

In addition to his success in decentralizing Prospero’s power over illusion-making,

Césaire also critiques the idea of nature as a means of production, thereby exposing as an illusion

the capitalist ideology that the exploitation of nature is “natural.” In act one, scene two, Caliban

insists that Prospero considers Sycorax as dead because Prospero views the earth as dead,

suggesting that he [Caliban] respects both Sycorax and the earth because they are both alive:

“C’est tellement plus commode! Morte, alors on la piétine, on la souille, on la foule d’un pied

vainqueur! Moi, je la respecte, car je sais qu’elle vit, et que vit Sycorax” (Une Tempête 25-6)

[“It’s so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with

the steps of a conqueror. I respect the earth, because I know that Sycorax is alive”] (A Tempest

18). Here, Césaire’s Caliban explicitly connects Prospero’s enterprises with the pollution and

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exploitation of nature which, like his mother, he deems as alive, thereby setting himself in

opposition to Prospero’s capitalist initiatives.

Christopher L. Miller has focused on Césaire’s resistance to capitalist initiatives in his

analysis of the recent discovery of physical evidence for the thesis of négritude, employing the

French term “marxisant” to describe Césaire’s initial concept of négritude as “conversant with

Marxism but not adhering to all aspects of the philosophy” (748). Miller explains that it was not

until 2008 that Christian Filostrat published a book explaining négritude’s missing link: an

article by Césaire in L’etudiant noir.24 This article, “Conscience raciale et revolution sociale”

(“Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution”), published in Filostrat’s Negritude Agonistes:

Assimilation against Nationalism in the French-Speaking Caribbean and Guyane (2008), is

heavily indebted to a Marxist, revolutionary discourse (Miller 744). As Miller explains, in 1935

when “Conscience raciale” was published, fascism was on the rise in France, and the Popular

Front (the alliance of the left that would govern France from 1936 to 1937) was being formed,

but the left did not view the Antilles colonies as a priority. In this essay, Césaire argues that race

and class conspire as “exploitateurs blancs” (qtd. in Miller 745) [“white exploiters”] that impose

white culture, white civilization, and white morality, “nous paralysant ainsi par mailles

invisibles” (qtd. in Miller 745) [“paralyzing us with invisible chain mail”].25 Yet, Césaire also

criticizes communism, identifying it as an anti-capitalist enterprise that exploits tension between

communism and the collective “negre,” [Negro]: “What revolution was ever made by a people

innocent of curiosities? Whoever incited a toy against its owner? However, that is the trick that

our black revolutionaries want to perform when they ask the Negro to revolt against the

capitalism that oppresses him” (qtd. and trans. in Miller 745). As previously discussed, when

Césaire wrote Une Tempête, he had already resigned from the PCF. Thus Césaire’s Caliban does

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not propose a vision of decolonization based on ideas of communism, but he presents

counterpoints to Prospero’s capitalistic ideology.

In addition to analyzing the principal characters of Shakespeare’s play within the contexts

of colonizer/colonized and master/slave relationships, Césaire critiques ethnic, social, and

religious conventions. For example, Césaire writes back to what most critics have interpreted as

Prospero’s accusation against Caliban of rape, casting doubt on the original charge itself as well

as making the perceived threat of miscegenation in the original play explicit. In Shakespeare’s

play, Prospero claims that Caliban “didst seek to violate / The honor of my [his] child”

(Shakespeare 1.2.350-1). Most critics have interpreted this accusation, as well as Caliban’s

response—that “would’t had been done! / Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle

with Calibans” (1.2.352-4)—as Caliban’s admission to attempted rape against Miranda.

Conversely, in A Tempest, Caliban denies the accusation of rape. In act one, scene two, when

Caliban confronts Prospero for throwing him out of Prospero’s house and making him live in a

filthy cave, “Le ghetto” (Une Tempête 26) [the ghetto] (A Tempest 19), Prospero insists that

Caliban’s lust forced him to get rid of Caliban: “Dame! Tu as essayé de violer ma fille!” (Une

Tempête 27) [“Good God, you tried to rape my daughter!”] (A Tempest 19). However, Caliban

repudiates the accusation of rape and blames Prospero for his lust: “Violer! violer! Dis-donc,

vieux bouc, tu me prêtes tes idées libidineuses. Sache-le : Je n’ai que faire de ta fille, ni de ta

grotte, d’ailleurs” (Une Tempête 27) [“Rape! Rape! Listen, you old goat, you’re the one that put

those dirty thoughts in my head. Let me tell you something: I couldn’t care less about your

daughter, or about your cave, for that matter”] (A Tempest 19). Additionally, while

Shakespeare’s play does not include additional scenes in which both Caliban and Miranda

appear, which would have given Caliban the opportunity to act on his alleged desire to rape

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Miranda, Césaire’s play integrates a relevant scene. In act three, scene one, after Miranda refuses

to tell Ferdinand her name because Prospero has expressly forbidden it, Caliban whispers her

name to Ferdinand: “Mi-ran-da” (Une Tempête 54; A Tempest 38). Rather than depict Caliban as

a threat to Miranda or her sexuality, however, this action illustrates Caliban’s rebellion against

Prospero’s attempts to control Ferdinand’s and Miranda’s sexuality, demonstrating how

Césaire’s Caliban intercedes in what would otherwise be a triangular relationship between

Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand.

Other post-colonial critics have also analyzed the perceivable threat of Caliban’s and

Miranda’s sexuality. Explicitly addressing The Tempest, Fanon asserts that “Prospero adopts an

attitude toward Caliban that the Americans in the south know only too well. Don’t they say that

the niggers are just waiting for a chance to jump on a white woman?” (Black Skin, White Masks

87). Critics have actively debated Prospero’s accusations of rape against Caliban in

Shakespeare’s play. In Loomba’s view, the “political effect of Prospero’s accusation and

Caliban’s acceptance is to make a political revolutionary a rapist” (Gender, Race, and

Renaissance Drama 156). Moreover, Loomba argues that Caliban’s linguistic and sexual

rebellion are related in the attempts of Caliban to break free from the boundaries of colonial

discourse, a connection she purports Lamming hints at but, as “typical of the gender-blindness of

many anti-colonial appropriations and criticism,” does not fully develop (156). Brown also

highlights the effects of Prospero’s charge against Caliban: “The first effect is to circumvent

Caliban’s version of events by reencoding his boundlessness as rapacity: his inability to discern a

concept of private, bounded property concerning his own dominions is reinterpreted as a desire

to violate the chaste virgin, who epitomises courtly property” (62). Brown elaborates by

asserting that the sexual division of the other into rapist and virgin is common in colonial

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discourse, citing as examples The Faerie Queen, in which Ireland is represented as both Irene, a

courtly virgin, and Grantorto, a rapacious woodkerne from whom the virgin requires protection,

as well as Purchas’s Virginia’s Verger of 1625, which depicts the uprising of 1622 as an act of

incestuous rape by native sons of a virgin land (62). Like Brown, Hall relates the threat of

Caliban’s sexuality to colonial discourse, remarking that interracial sex became an issue in the

Virginia colonies approximately twenty years after the performance of The Tempest (Hall 143).

The First Virginia case law involving race resulted in a white man, Hugh Davis, being publicly

whipped for fornication with a black woman (143).26 Most importantly, like Césaire, Hall

connects Prospero’s hostility toward Caliban to his compulsive attempts to control his

environment and his daughter’s sexuality (143). Like Fanon, Loomba and Hall, Césaire

contextualizes the sexual charges against Caliban within the context of colonial discourse,

casting doubt on the veracity of the very accusation upon which Prospero’s rationale for

enslaving Caliban rests, and re-situating Caliban as capable of subverting Prospero’s authority

over sexuality without also attempting to sexually violate Miranda.

Despite Césaire’s rigorous redress of this contentious aspect of Shakespeare’s play, it

should not be overlooked that Césaire’s critique of Caliban as a threat to hegemonic order also

incorporates parody by mocking the European love conventions that Shakespeare’s play

celebrates. Shakespeare contrasts the play’s “legitimate” couple, Ferdinand and Miranda, with

the three other “illegitimate” pairs—Caliban and Miranda, Claribel and the King of Tunis, and

Sycorax and Caliban’s father. Caliban’s cantankerous nature underscores Ferdinand’s courtly

manners, presenting Caliban as an unmannered savage and Ferdinand as an honorable suitor.

Shakespeare also portrays Ferdinand as a Petrarchan lover who is willing to make himself a

“slave,” a “patient logman” to Miranda’s service (Shakespeare 3.1. 65-7), in order to marry her.

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Miranda enthusiastically receives and returns Ferdinand’s flattery, weeping (3.1.75) and offering

herself to Ferdinand: “I am your wife, if you will marry me; / If not, I’ll die your maid” (83-4).

Shakespeare’s diction further highlights his adulatory depiction of the couple as well as his

value-laden description of Miranda: Ferdinand refers to Miranda as a maid (1.2.431) and

mistress (3.1.6; 3.1.11; 3.1.21; 3.1.33; 3.1.86) several times; and Prospero calls Miranda his

daughter (1.1.17; 1.1.57; 4.1.13), “my girl” (1.1.62), and a wench (1.1.139; 1.2.416); yet, he also

describes her as his rich gift (4.1.8; 4.1.13). Examining the relationship of gender and marriage,

Jennifer Higginbotham rethinks accepted concepts of early modern social hierarchies,

particularly the division of the female into the categories of the “‘maid,”’ “‘wife,’” and

“‘widow,”’ arguing that becoming a woman in early modern England did not necessarily only

entail getting married (9); rather, “boying” and “girling” in the drama of the period hinged on

highlighting reproductive ability. Applying Higginbotham’s insights helps us to see that

Shakespeare emphasizes Miranda’s suitability as material for the marriage market, and

Ferdinand serves as an appropriate recipient of Prospero’s gift (Miranda) while Caliban does not.

However, Césaire comically deflates these European love conventions that had serious

economic and gendered sociocultural implications in the early modern era. Césaire’s Miranda

immediately sees Ferdinand as “à un complimenteur” (Une Tempête 30) [a flatterer]—a young

man whose ability to pay compliments in the situation in which he finds himself proves his

courage (Une Tempête 30; A Tempest 22). As previously discussed, Césaire’s Caliban disrupts

the triangular Shakespearean relationship between Prospero, Ferdinand, and Miranda by

whispering Miranda’s name to Ferdinand, thereby enabling Ferdinand to pretend to “christen”

Miranda with a name of his own (Une Tempête 54; A Tempest 38), although Miranda describes

Ferdinand’s “christening” as a “low trick” (Une Tempête 54; A Tempest 38). Césaire also uses

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Eshu to rework Shakespearean love conventions. Arnold describes Eshu as “one of the two

names given to the Ioa who, in voodoo and in Brazilian macumba, opens the path or lifts the

barriers between the world of men and the world of spirits” (Modernism and Negritude 221).

Eshu describes himself as a God to his friends, yet the Devil to his enemies (Une Tempête 68; A

Tempest 47), and he expresses his disdain for not receiving an invitation to the engagement

masque that Prospero’s orchestrates for Ferdinand and Miranda:

PROSPERO. Qui t’a invite? Je n’aime

pas le sans genê! Même chez les dieux!

ESHU. Mais c’est que précisément, personne ne m’a invite. . . C’est

pas gentil, ca! Personne n’a songé au pauvre Shu! Alors,

le pauvre Eshu, il est venu quand même! Hihihi! (Une Tempête 69)

PROSPERO. Who invited you? I don’t like such loose behavior, even

From a god!

ESHU. But that’s just the point . . . no one invited me . . .

And that wasn’t very nice! Nobody remembered poor

Eshu! So poor Eshu came anyway. Hihihi! (A Tempest 48)

Prospero, whose power is disrupted by Eshu’s sudden arrival comically remarks that Eshu’s

behavior is “loose,” and Prospero’s reaction probably only encourages Eshu to sing a lewd song

for Ferdinand and Miranda, the final stanza of which solemnly suggests that black sexuality can

be used as a weapon to counter the “whipping” that colonial slave masters dole out:

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 Eshu est un joyeux luron,

De son pénis il frappe,

Il frappe

Il frappe… (Une Tempête 70)

Eshu is a merry elf,

and he can whip you with his dick,

he can whip you,

he can whip you . . . (A Tempest 49)

James E. Robinson avers that Eshu, who “speaks and sings in a language of merry crudities

(including a phallic obscenity)” (439), mocks and overpowers the Graeco-Roman mythology of

Prospero’s European culture (439). Indeed, Eshu’s song also irritates Juno, Ceres, and Iris, all of

whom Eshu wittily refers to as his “comerés” (Une Tempête 71) [“colleagues”] (A Tempest 49),

leaving Prospero confused and deflated (Une Tempête 71; A Tempest 50). Like Caliban, Eshu

undercuts Prospero’s authority, as well as the celebration of European love conventions.

Other post-colonial critics have also commented on the sociocultural significance of

European love conventions in both Shakespeare’s and Césaire’s plays. Discussing Shakespeare’s

play, Stephen Orgel conceives of Prospero and Caliban as embodying models of royal authority

in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods (8) and contends that Miranda’s marriage preserves

Prospero’s political authority. Jyotsna Singh observes that marriages are the most basic form of

gift exchange and that Caliban’s desire for Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, symbolizes is

desire for kinship with Prospero (199-200). By preventing Caliban from violating Miranda’s

honor, Prospero retains control over her as a sexual gift that he will give to Ferdinand (200).

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 Yet, Césaire’s Caliban does not desire kinship with Prospero or Miranda; Césaire’s

Caliban seeks recognition and freedom. Identifying with Caliban as a colonized figure, Césaire

thus writes back to representations of Caliban—and the colonized—as dependent on Prospero,

emphasizing the role of language in the creation and maintenance of Prospero’s social order.

Césaire re-situates The Tempest to target Mannoni’s theory of the dependency complex, which

he had also redressed in Discourse on Colonialism (1950; trans. 1972).27 In Prospero and

Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1950; trans. 1956)28 Mannoni appropriates the

principal characters of The Tempest to develop this theory of the dependency complex. He

borrows from The Tempest for prototypes of the colonizer (Prospero) and the colonized

(Caliban), as well as the theories of Jacques Lacan, Lucien Lévy-Brühl, Alfred Adler, Joel

Kovel, and Melanie Klein, to speculate that the colonial situation’s bringing two “types” of

personalities face to face becomes a catalyst for activating the colonized “dependency complex”

(23).

The dependency complex leads to the belief of the dependency of the colonized on the

colonizer, resulting in dependent behavior as well as the fear of abandonment. Yet, Mannoni sees

The Tempest as a backdrop for the discussion of his central theory since his analysis of the

dependency complex revolves around a study of the Malagasy people. In the foreword to

Mannoni’s book, Maurice Bloch thus remarks that Mannoni’s book is best read as an opening

speech to a debate, and that the colonial situation, or settler mentality, is not created by the

colonial situation: “Shakespeare knew it was there in human nature and drew the colonial type in

Prospero” (12).

By re-situating The Tempest to refute Mannoni’s theory of the dependency complex,

Césaire explicitly illuminates a colonial situation in which Caliban recognizes and rejects the

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false image that Prospero has projected onto him. In his Introduction to Une Tempête, Arnold

avers that Césaire viewed Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization as

a target (Aimé Césaire: Poetry, Theatre, Essays and Discourse: Critical Edition 1200) when he

wrote Une Tempête. Arnold also speculates that the role Mannoni had played in Césaire’s life, as

Césaire’s professor, made Césaire’s ideological disagreement with Mannoni more personal: “Le

fait que Mannoni fut professeur au lycée Schoelcher de Fort-de France pendant la scolarité du

futur dramaturge ne put que render le conflit idéologique plus explosive et plus personnel”

(1200-1) [The fact that Mannoni was a professor at the Lycée Schoelcher of Fort-de-France

during the schooling of the future dramatist could only make the ideological conflict more

explosive and more personal]. Moreover, Césaire’s use of the genre of drama to refute Mannoni

a second time is significant because in Discourse on Colonialism Césaire criticizes Mannoni for

reducing human problems to ideas (62). Thus in act three, scene five, Césaire dramatizes

Caliban’s predicament, its effect on Caliban, and Caliban’s confrontation of Prospero:

Prospero, tu es un grand illusionniste:

Le menson ge, ca te connaît.

Et tu m’as tellement menti,

Menti sur le monde, menti sur moi-même… (Une Tempête 88)

Prospero, you’re a great magician:

You’re an old hand at deception.

And you lied to me so much,

about the world, about myself… (A Tempest 61-2)

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Caliban, therefore, refutes the theory of the dependency complex by opposing the essentialist

notion of an inferiority complex existing a priori and by rejecting the view of Prospero’s

language as a “gift.”

Other post-colonial critics have also analyzed the role that language plays in the

development of Prospero’s and Caliban’s dependent relationship in The Tempest. Lamming

describes the gift of language as “the deepest and most delicate bond of involvement”—a gift

that has a “certain finality” (109). Additionally, “the gift of language meant not English, in

particular, but speech and concept as a way, a method, a necessary avenue towards areas of the

self which could not be reached in any other way” (109). Brown remarks that in The Tempest the

“gift” of language also inscribes power relations as the other is “hailed and recognises himself as

a linguistic subject of a master language” (61), and Hall points out that the triangulated linguistic

community (144) in Shakespeare’s play, with Prospero at its apex, serves to enforce both a racial

hierarchy and patriarchal authority (145). Lamming’s, Brown’s, and Hall’s interpretations all

underscore the bond that the “gift” of language can create between the colonized and the

colonizer.

Césaire thus resituates Caliban not only to refute the theory of the dependency complex,

but to demonstrate that Prospero depends on Caliban rather than the other way around. As

previously noted, Prospero reiterates racist discourse, demonstrating the contingency of his

colonial vocation on Caliban. According to Mannoni, European colonizers may view

circumstances that objectively rely on dependence as entailing the inferiority of the colonized

(40), thus illustrating the projection of the colonizer’s inferiority complex. Shakespeare’s

Prospero embodies this aspect of Mannoni’s theory, but Césaire’s Caliban reflects Prospero’s

mirror image back to him: “Qu’aurais-tu fait sans moi, dans cette contrée inconnue? Ingrat! Je

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t’ai appris les arbres, les fruits, les oiseaux, les saisons, et maintenant je t’en fous . . . Recette

connue! l’orange presée, on en rejette l’écorce! . . . Un viel intoxiqué, voila ce que tu es!” (Une

Tempête 26, 89).

And what do you think you’d have done without me in this strange land? Ingrate! I taught

you the trees, fruits, birds, the seasons, and now you don’t give a damn . . . once you’ve

squeezed the juice from the orange, you toss the rind away! . . . You’re an old addict,

that’s what you are! (A Tempest 19, 62)

Lamming, too, maintains that Prospero would be “helpless” without Caliban and Ariel (114).

However, Robinson reminds us that, as discussed earlier, the terms of A Tempest reflect

Césaire’s concept of négritude, an awareness of being black and taking charge of one’s destiny

as a black man” (437). One of the most significant ways in which Caliban asserts agency is by

exposing Prospero’s dependency complex. In the concluding scene of A Tempest, Caliban

predicts that Prospero will not go back to Europe, since Prospero depends on Caliban for his

“vocation”29 (Une Tempête 89; A Tempest 62). Significantly, Caliban’s prediction comes true,

illustrating what Robinson describes as the colonizer becoming bonded to the colonized (441).

Thus Césaire also writes back to the depiction of Caliban as a wild savage, re-structuring

and re-situating both the climax—at least the climax of the Caliban subplot30—and the

dénouement of The Tempest to challenge the supposition that, if given the opportunity, Caliban

would kill Prospero. In The Tempest, Caliban encounters Trinculo and Stephano, (Shakespeare

2.2.57-8), and Caliban swears that he will kiss their feet if they will be his God (2.2.147),

offering to give them his island if they will carry out revenge on Prospero by seizing his books

and beating him: “Having first seized his books; or with a log / Batter his skull, or paunch him

with a stake, / or cut his weasand with thy knife. / Remember first to possess his books” (3.2.89-

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92). Stephano vows to kill Prospero (3.3.107), and Caliban encourages him (3.2.148). In the

climax of the Caliban plot in The Tempest, however, in which Caliban plays the antagonist to

Prospero, the protagonist, Ariel warns Prospero, who refers to the plan as a “foul conspiracy / of

the beast Caliban and his confederates” (4.1.139-140). Although Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo

all participate in the plot against Prospero’s life, Prospero primarily blames Caliban, whom

Prospero describes as a “born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188-9).

Later, Prospero tells Sebastian and Alonso that Caliban, Stephano, and Caliban all conspired to

take his life, and that they must “know and own” Stephano and Trinculo (5.1.277-8) while

Prospero identifies Caliban as “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.278-9).

Césaire re-structures and re-situates The Tempest so that Caliban regrets his attempts to

“create the Revolution with swollen guts and fat faces” and approaches Prospero alone with a

weapon in his hand (Une Tempête 79; A Tempest 55). Césaire’s Prospero dares Caliban to alter

the material conditions of the island and to kill him: “[Prospero] (Bares his chest to him

[Caliban]): Strike! Go on, strike! Strike your master, your benefactor! Don’t tell me you’re going

to spare him!” (55). Caliban’s response, “Alois, defends-toi! Je ne suis pas un assassin” (Une

Tempête 79) [“Defend yourself! I’m not a murderer”] (A Tempest 55) proves significant in

suggesting that, given the opportunity, Caliban would not kill Prospero (55). Joseph Khoury

analyzes the confrontation between Caliban and Prospero as one between a slave and a master,

quoting Hegel that “it is solely through risking life that freedom is obtained” (Hegel qtd. in

Khoury 33).31 According to Khoury, by giving himself up to death, Caliban gambles that

Prospero will be forced to recognize him by not killing him” (33). Although, as I will discuss in

the conclusion of this chapter, describing Césaire as “unabashedly Hegelian in his thinking” (33)

proves problematic given the negative depiction of Africa’s role in history that Hegel espouses in

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The Philosophy of History, I agree that Césaire’s Caliban seeks to achieve recognition of his

African lineage, as well as his freedom. Khoury contends that Césaire cannot have a slave die, as

doing so would symbolize the death of all colonized peoples (33); yet, having a master die would

also signify the death of all the colonizers, and Césaire’s Caliban chooses to confront rather than

kill Prospero. In my view, Césaire understands that violence would not necessarily change the

conditions for Caliban, for Martinicans, for African Americans, or for other colonized peoples.

In Césaire’s dénouement, even though Prospero originally intends to leave the island,

Caliban still insists on confronting Prospero and exposing his vocation: “Le vieux monde foire! .

. . Ta vocation est de m’emmerder! Et voilà pourquoi tu resteras, comme ces mecs qui ont fait les

colonies et qui ne peuvent plus vivre ailleurs” (Une Tempête 88-9) [“The old world is crumbling

down! . . . Your vocation is to hassle me and that’s just why you’ll stay, just like those guys who

founded the colonies and now who can’t live anywhere else”] (A Tempest 62). Caliban’s

linguistic revolt is successful, leading Prospero to doubt himself for the first time (Une Tempête

90; A Tempest 63) and decide to remain on the island to meet his fate (Une Tempête 90; A

Tempest 64), symbolizing the change Caliban sought through his self-conscious coup. To quote

Judith Holland Sarnecki, Caliban beats Prospero at his own game by “mastering his language so

well that he can bend it for revolutionary purposes” (281). Rather than bidding farewell to

French, as Ngũgĩ Thiong’o says farewell to English in Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of

Language in African Literature, Césaire and his Caliban use the French language to alter former

colonial attitudes and structures. Césaire re-structures and re-situates Shakespeare’s dénouement

to elucidate decolonization as a process of shattering old structures. The conclusion Césaire

offers is indeterminate; yet, this characteristic should not be conflated with ambivalence on

Caliban’s part. Césaire undoubtedly depicts Caliban’s rejection of Prospero; this achievement,

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along with Césaire’s use of metatheatre, effectively explodes Prospero’s power over the creation

of illusions, including the false image of Caliban as an unintelligent, brute savage.

This chapter, therefore, demonstrates that Césaire identifies and appropriates the colonial

theme in Shakespeare’s play in order to depict a vision of decolonization that had not come to

fruition in Martinique, the greater Caribbean, the United States, or Africa. Césaire’s historical

and socio-cultural conditions originally led him to the task of translating Shakespeare’s play; and

although translation itself is arguably an interpretive act, Césaire’s interpretation explicitly

identifies a colonial theme in Shakespeare’s play, re-reading Caliban and Prospero as the

colonized and colonizer, and re-situating their relationship to expose the desire for power behind

Prospero’s rhetorical presentation of himself as a humanist, a benevolent magician, and Caliban

as a savage monster. Moreover, the conditions from which A Tempest emerged underscore what

is at stake for Césaire in critiquing The Tempest. As previously documented, when Césaire wrote

A Tempest, he had already resigned from the PCF, recognizing that expansionist economic

systems that bolster Imperialism exist in both capitalist and communist systems, and that the

PCF’s agenda did not include a type of decolonization that would alter, rather than maintain,

racial and socioeconomic structures.

The colonial question, and the African question—the question of how racial evolution

and historical destiny could once again become the temporal territory of people of African

ancestry rather than the exclusive domain of white Europeans—were the most significant

questions in Césaire’s mind when he wrote A Tempest. Yet, understandably, critics such as Singh

and Irene Lara have carefully considered the role Césaire gives the subaltern woman, Sycorax, in

this re-configured post-colonial domain. Singh argues that “Sycorax figures in the play as a

symbolic Earth mother embodied in the natural elements of the island,” thereby displac[ing] the

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sexual, maternal identity of the ‘native’ woman, Sycorax, onto the idealized abstraction of the

Earth as Mother” (196, 207). Lara espouses a similar perspective, contending that Césaire

participates in the “nationalist discourse” that idealizes women as spiritual mothers and the

source of their sons’ strength and legitimacy, ignoring their complex materiality, sexuality, and

subjectivity (88). Lara boldly asks: “If Césaire’s Caliban calls for “Uhuru,” freedom in Swahili,

we must ask: Uhuru by whom and for whom (“uhuru”)?” (87). Moreover, according to Lara,

Césaire’s play “perpetuates a masculinist tongue” (87) that, in addition to idealizing Sycorax,

androcentrically dramatizes the antagonistic relationship between the male colonizer and the

male colonized, thereby also preventing Miranda from collaborating with Caliban to set each

other free (87).

Although Singh and Lara ask important questions, their criticism of Césaire perpetuates

the cycle of depicting the male political revolutionary as sexist. In The Tempest, Prospero

amplifies Caliban’s threatening representation by depicting him as a rapist. Césaire frees Caliban

of this dubious charge, only to be challenged as a sexist author. Caliban’s and Miranda’s

complex history should not be oversimplified: Shakespeare presents Miranda as a complicit

participant in Prospero’s colonial project; the accusation that Caliban attempted to rape Miranda

further fractures the relationship between Miranda and Caliban. As critics, we should recognize

that, given the role of white women in the history of colonialism, and even in The Tempest, it is

understandable that Césaire was not ready to position Caliban and Miranda in a post-colonial

utopia in which white women and black men collaborate to set each other free. Additionally,

Caliban’s association of Sycorax with the Earth should also be viewed in light of Césaire’s and

Surreau’s use of the Brechtian alienation effect to denaturalize both the exploitation of nature as

well as the denigration of Sycorax. Caliban’s view of Sycorax as alive in the rain, lightning, and

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rushes (Une Tempête 26; A Tempest 18) illustrates Césaire’s animist, non-Christian philosophy,

rather than his trivialization of the subaltern woman. As Arnold explains, Césaire aggressively

rejected Christianity, which he viewed as the religion of colonialism (“Césaire at Seventy” 114).

In offering an animist religious dimension to blacks who can no longer believe in a white Christ

(116), Césaire subverts the Christian rhetoric that undergirds the depiction of Sycorax as a witch,

recuperates her dignity within the context of a non-Christian framework, and includes her in the

temporal territory of the present that Césaire aims to protest as the exclusive domain of white

Europeans.

Thus Césaire wrote back not only to Shakespeare but to colonialists and imperialists who

had appropriated Hegel and his views of the “African character”32 as “undeveloped” and entirely

ignorant of an individual self (93), and of Africa as “no historical part of the world” (99), and

therefore as a part of the historical past that white Europeans of the present and future could

exploit in writing a [European] historical destiny. While Fanon had begun the work of wresting

essentialist Hegelian philosophy from Europeans to appropriate it for the colonized,33 Césaire

dramatized the African’s struggle for self-consciousness in an era of decolonization that had not

signaled liberation for blacks. Drawing on Nietzsche’s concepts of will to power and “truth” and

“reality” as rhetorically constructed, Césaire’s Caliban deconstructs Prospero’s colonial rhetoric,

exposing its investment in conflating racial evolution and historical destiny to maintain power

over writing history in the present and for the future. Through identifying with Caliban, and in

re-reading, re-structuring, and re-situating The Tempest, A Tempest shares a relationship with

post-colonial criticism of The Tempest that emerged after Césaire critiqued the play.

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Notes

1. See “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of
Colonialism.”
2. See “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest” in
Alternative Shakespeaeres (Ed. John Drakakis) 191-205. Paul Brown notes that he did not learn
of Hulme’s and Barker’s collaboration, which existed in the form of an unpublished draft at that
time, until he reached a late stage in the production of his own essay.
3. A myriad of adaptations of The Tempest have been written, starting with Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1859) and Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), continuing with G.D.
Roberts’s The Heart of the Ancient Wood (1900), Robertson Davies’s Tempest-Tost (1951), W.J.
Stuart’s Forbidden Planet (1956), John Fowles’s The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1966;
1977), George Lamming’s Water with Berries (1971), Audrey Thomas’s Munchmeyer: And
Prospero on the Island (1971), Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), Phyllis Gotlieb’s O
Master Caliban! (1976), Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978), Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban
(1982), Harry Mulisch’s The Last Call (1985), Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987),
Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1987), Sarah Murphey’s The Measure of Miranda (1987), Philip
Osment’s This Island’s Mine (1988), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Marina Warner’s
Indigo (1992), Paul Voermans’s And Disregards the Rest (1992), Tad Williams’s Caliban’s
Hour (1994), Dev Virahsawmy’s Toufann (1995), and concluding with J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
(1999). Although A Tempest has received considerable critical attention, critics have not yet
analyzed how it offers post-colonial criticism of William Shakespeare’s play.
4. The sarcasm of Gayatri Spivak’s rhetorical question, “Why wouldn’t everybody be happy to
settle for dipenda?” can be easily detected and also contributes to her explanation: “The Belgian
bankers are happy when they understand that dipenda means that what truly matters, namely
economic domination, will remain the same so they join in the choir changing: ‘Hurrah! Hurrah!
Love live independence!” (xiii).
5. See Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1950; trans. 1956). Octave
Mannoni speculates that the colonial situation bringing two “types” of personalities face to face
becomes a catalyst for activating the “dependency complex” of the colonized (23). The
dependency complex leads to the belief in the dependency of the colonized on the colonizer,
resulting in dependent behavior as well as the fear of abandonment.
6. Ironically, in act three, scene one of A Season in the Congo, Lumumba rejects violence as a
solution, an assertion that is met with resistance by M’Polo, who declares that non-violence
“amounts to suicide” (129), yet then avows to make a spectacle of his death: “If I must die, let it
be like Gandhi. Come on! Let the crowd enter! I will give them an audience!” (129).
7. All translations of A Tempest derive from Richard Miller’s 1985 translation.
8. See Notebook of a Return to The Native Land, Trans. and Ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette
Smith.
9. See the introduction for a thorough discussion of Kenneth Burke and A Rhetoric of Motives.
10. Jane Pallister documents that this speech was published as the paper “L’Homme de culture et
ses responsabilités.”
11. A. James Arnold observes that on his graduation from the Lycée Schoelcher in 1931, Césaire
took prizes in French, Latin, and English (Modernism and Negritude 8).
12. Pier Frassinelli directs the reader to Un poete politique, p. 31, for the original text of his
translation.

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13. All references to The Tempest derive from The Complete Works of Shakespeare (6th ed.),
edited by David Bevington.
14. The stage directions for The Tempest (F1) note its setting as “an uninhabited island.”
15. In an interview released before the opening night of A Tempest, Aimé Césaire remarks: “I
continually broke away from the original. I was trying to ‘de-mythify’ the tale” (qtd. in
Bellhassen 176).
16. Additionally, the play’s referents evoke Shakespeare’s Old World through Césaire’s allusion
to Book VI of The Odyssey in act one, scene two: “En voyant mademoiselle plus belle qu’une
nymphe, je me suis cru Ulysse dans l’ île de Nausicaa” (Une Tempête 31) [“Seeing the young
lady, more beautiful than any wood- nymph, I might have been Ulysses on Nausicaa’s isle”] (A
Tempest 23), making a reference to the shipwrecked Odysseus’s encounter with princess
Nausicaä.
17. Significantly, according to Frassinenelli, the first performance of A Tempest was set in the
United States, using the visual climate of the Western (qtd. in Dionne and Kapadia176).
18. For example, in 1989, Meredith Skura proposes that Shakespeare could not have had access
to the records of England’s colonial ventures or forays into the Mediterranean (42-69). In 1989
Deborah Willis contends that “the play’s true threatening ‘other’ is not Caliban but Antonio
(280). According to Brian Vickers, the “normal features” of the colonialist motif—murdering the
natives, stealing their land, exporting their goods, produce, and wealth for profit back to one’s
own country”—are “conspicuously lacking” in The Tempest (246). Ben Ross Schneider’s 1995
article “‘Are We Being Historical Yet?’ Colonialist Interpretations of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest” maintains that “by choosing colonialism as a frame, and then ‘reifying’ it as if it were
coterminous with the limits of discourse in general,” new historicists have marginalized not only
a large field of pertinent contemporary discourse, but also The Tempest itself (121). In 1998,
Jerry Brotton redresses what had been, to date, the marginalization of The Tempest’s
Mediterranean contexts, contending that colonial readings of The Tempest had persistently
overlooked Prospero’s Italian identity (qtd. in Post-Colonial Shakespeares 30). Brotton also
posits that the colonial American emphasis postulated by other critics conceals the play’s direct
inversion of Aeneas’s voyage to Carthage as well as Caliban’s African lineage (40).
Additionally, Todd Andrew Borlik argues that modern critics have duplicated the mistakes of
early modern colonialists by neglecting the discourse about cultural Others within the civilized
borders of England; specifically, Borlik avers that Caliban is in part inspired by legends of
Lincolnshire fen spirits, and that Caliban’s plight “comments on the displacement of local
cottagers by lad reclamation projects” (22).
19. Stephen Orgel also points out that commentators from John Dryden to Lewis Theobald to the
Cambridge editors felt that this passage by the otherwise “passive Miranda” required emendation
(17).
20. As previously discussed, Césaire also addresses this debate in A Season in the Congo.
21. In his autobiography, Malcolm X discusses the media’s persistent attempts to associate his
philosophies with the word “violence”: “But the white reporters kept wanting me linked with that
word ‘violence.’ I doubt if I had one interview without having to deal with the accusation” (367).
In his autobiography, he states that “Negroes have the right to fight against these racists, by any
means necessary . . . I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution
to the American black man’s problem—just to avoid violence” (367).
22. See “On Violence” 1-62.

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23. See especially “The Street Scene: A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre,” a critical essay in
which Bertolt Brecht outlines his theory of the A-affect (or alienation effect).
24. See L’etudiant noir, number 3, May June 1935. Prior to 1938, Léopold Sedar Sénghor and
Léon Damas maintained that Césaire coined the word Négritude in L’Edudiant Noir; yet, lacking
physical evidence of the thesis of négritude’s birth, Edward Ako denounced the “myth of the
genesis of the négritude movement” in his 1984 essay, “L’etudiant and the Myth of the Genesis
of the Negritude Movement.” As Christopher Miller points out, Ako and others in recent decades
only had access to the initial issue of L’etudiant noir (Mar. 1935).
25. I quote Miller’s translation here (Miller received a copy of Césaire’s original article from
Filostrat).
26. See Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex
in America 35-6.
27. See 59-62.
28. Mannoni wrote this text in 1948 in Madagascar after a bloody, anti-colonial revolt that led to
the French army murdering nearly 100,000 Malagasy people.
29. I propose that by using the word “vocation,” Césaire refers to a French attitude toward
settlement and colonialism as a type of employment connected to the purported humanist
endeavor of elevating the status of “native” peoples. For example, in approximately 1900, a
practical course of instruction was instituted for young men seeking employment overseas; the
curriculum included sixteen lessons on “applied colonisation” (Robinson 126). Careers in
colonial service offered an outlet for those who were bored in their administrative grades and
desired a new professional outlet (160-1). Although the policies of French colonialism were
justified in the spirit of French nationalism, in contrast to the humanitarian grounds of British
colonialism, French nationalist policies still referred to “civilised man’s duties towards less
advanced peoples” (168). See French Colonialism 1871-1914: Myths and Realities.
Additionally, Arnold points out that Césaire aggressively rejected Christianity, which he viewed
as the religion of colonialism (114). See “Césaire at Seventy” for an intriguing discussion of
Césaire’s views on religion and spirituality.
30. Most critics who focus on the reconciliation theme of The Tempest, thereby emphasizing the
main plot, locate the climax of the play as occurring in act five, scene one, when Ariel persuades
Prospero to forgive his enemies and not to take vengeance on his adversaries and Prospero,
realizing that his power is dangerous, pledges to break his staff and drown his books. See 5.1.8-
32.
31. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Trans. J.B. Baille.
32. Hegel addresses these views in the Introduction to Philosophy of History 1-102.
33. In “The Black Man and Hegel” (Black Skin, White Masks), Fanon argues that the master-
slave analogy/metaphor Hegel used to discuss the struggle for self-consciousness is different
from the master-slave relationships of colonialism: “We hope we have shown that the master
here is basically different than the one described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here
the master scorns the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition
but work. Likewise, the slave here can in no way be equated with the slave who loses himself in
the object and finds the source of his liberation in his work. The black slave wants to be like his
master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave” (195).

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 CHAPTER THREE:

ALIENATION ON IMPERIAL AXES IN ANTONY AND

CLEOPATRA AND A BRANCH OF THE BLUE NILE

Post-colonial critics of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra have largely ignored the few

adaptations of Shakespeare’s monumental study of gender, ethnicity, and colonization in the

Roman world.1 Criticism of A Branch of the Blue Nile has typically emphasized the attitudes that

the play’s Trinidadian acting troupe and Walcott express towards William Shakespeare and

Antony and Cleopatra. Tobias Döring also explores Walcott’s motivations for adapting Antony

and Cleopatra, suggesting that the discrepancy between actor and role and person and persona in

Antony and Cleopatra may have been one source of interest for Walcott since such issues evoke

the core of post-colonial predicaments (Döring 19). I agree with Döring but also insist that A

Branch of the Blue Nile treats the issues of race, gender, and colonialism in Antony and

Cleopatra. Although Janet Adelman’s groundbreaking analysis of the significance of race in

Shakespeare’s play emerged in 1973, criticism that addresses the connection of race, gender, and

colonialism in the play did not appear until the late 1980s, in scholarship such as Ania Loomba’s

Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama. To date, however, critics have not recognized the

intervention Walcott’s play makes through its post-colonial adaptation and criticism of Antony

and Cleopatra.

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 In this chapter, I will extend Döring’s analysis, integrating and analyzing significant

aspects of Walcott’s biography that bolster the plausibility of his interest in the schisms to which

Döring refers. Additionally, I will relate Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification to A Branch of

the Blue Nile. As a result, I will speculate that the discrepancies Döring analyzes as a “source of

interest” for Walcott are aspects of the play with which he, members of the troupe, and audiences

identify. In “Writing Away from the Centre” (Post-Colonial Shakespeares), Michael Neill

briefly treats Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile, contending that Walcott’s play does not evoke

the “glad hybridity” (qtd. in Loomba and Orkin 180) that Salman Rushdie arouses in The Moor’s

Last Sigh, since a “disillusioned actor” [Sheila Harris] voices a “profound ambivalence about

what it means for Shakespeare to ‘end up’ in her West Indian mouth” (181). I will counter

Neill’s assertion regarding a lack of “glad hybridity” in Walcott’s play, contending that A Branch

of the Blue Nile espouses a pluralistic and multicultural aesthetic that fulfills Walcott’s purposes

for writing and staging Caribbean theater and that foregrounds critical post-colonial

interpretations of Antony and Cleopatra.

Walcott “writes back” to Shakespeare because he identifies with Antony and Cleopatra’s

alterity but he also disassociates from, and therefore alters, the depiction of Cleopatra as an

orientalist construct and the portrayal of Antony’s surrender to hegemonic ideals. Re-reading

Antony and Cleopatra through a post-colonial lens, Walcott explodes the colonizer/colonized

binary, re-situating Antony and Cleopatra to reflect the dual social histories of the actors and

actresses in the Caribbean troupe. Walcott also re-structures Antony and Cleopatra to articulate a

vision of decolonization that rejects mimicry while advocating a Caribbean theater that

authentically creates itself and a type of original drama for its actors, actresses, and audiences.

When synthesizing its ideas with Burke’s theory of identification in The Rhetoric of Motives, the

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theory of Ashcroft et al. in The Empire Writes Back provides a paradigm for understanding how

A Branch of the Blue Nile enacts critical reading practices that dramatically comment on

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and stress the psychological effects of colonialism.2

Walcott’s play especially resonates with Jyotsna Singh’s critical view of Antony and Cleopatra

which re-reads Shakespeare’s play as a defense of the theatrical and the feminine.

A Branch of the Blue Nile was first performed in Barbados in 1983; its production tested

the relevance of Shakespeare to the Caribbean. The love affair of Antony and Cleopatra finds its

correlation in Walcott’s play, and Walcott insisted that his wife Norline play the role of Marilyn

Lewis—Sheila’s understudy—in the 1983 Barbados and 1985 Trinidad productions3 (Derek

Walcott: A Caribbean Life 425). Certainly, Walcott had St. Lucia, Barbados, Trinidad, and the

greater British West Indies in mind when he wrote A Branch of the Blue Nile, a play that

comically yet poignantly dramatizes the struggles of a Caribbean acting troupe to “play”

Shakespeare on a Caribbean stage. Walcott’s drama is at once creative, critical, and political: it

creatively adapts what might otherwise be an irrelevant play for an audience in the Caribbean,

critically comments on the dual affinities of both Antony and Cleopatra, and decenters the

authority of the Shakespearean play to demonstrate the viability of Shakespeare in the Caribbean.

A Branch of the Blue Nile employs counter-discursive metatheatre to critique its source, a

strategy that proves particularly significant when viewed in light of Shakespeare’s appropriation

of the historical narrative4 during a period when England had imperialistic ambitions and had

begun to encroach upon Asia and Africa. Walcott’s use of metatheatre, therefore, demonstrates

his conscious relationship of the theater to imperialism and to decolonization, decentering the

authority of Shakespeare’s play. For example, Walcott’s Sheila struggles to identify with

Cleopatra, primarily because Sheila thinks her black skin and class, as opposed to the lighter,

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“Mediterranean” (A Branch of the Blue Nile 284) skin and royal status associated with

Cleopatra’s persona, create a psychological chasm that she cannot bridge. Walcott’s use of

metatheatre thus disrupts the notion of even a universal “Cleopatra,” even one of an “infinite

variety” (Shakespeare 2.4.246), suggesting Cleopatra’s persona does not easily translate to all

cultures.

In pondering why Walcott adapts Shakespeare’s play, critics tend to overlook how the

Caribbean playwright encountered Shakespeare. Significantly, Walcott’s father started the Star

Literary Club in Barbados and staged concerts at his Methodist primary school. Sources of the

staged scenes included The Merchant of Venice, in which Walcott’s mother Alix played the role

of Portia (Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life 9). Walcott studied Latin, Shakespeare, English

poetry, and Dickens at St. Mary’s College for boys which followed the model of a British public

school (25). There, Walcott also acted as a Junior Master on Speech Day, directing scenes from

Macbeth (25). As a result of his education, Walcott needed to reflect on his relationship to the

English language and to English literature, and an awareness of the differences between good

local speech and mimicry of British diction and tones became a springboard for a multitude of

Walcott’s artistic ideas (29). Walcott read Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Jacobean

dramatists as subjects that the British integrated into colonial education in order to Anglicize

their colonial subjects; and yet, like Carlin and Césaire, Walcott did not develop an altogether

antagonistic attitude towards Shakespeare.

It is, therefore, important to observe that both A Branch of the Blue Nile and Walcott’s

background are replete with social “paradoxes” that Walcott weaves into a celebratory—if not

exactly an optimistic—tapestry of Caribbean hybridization. Walcott possessed a British passport

for most of his life. He is considered a native English speaker from St. Lucia, one of a belt of

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French-speaking islands, as well as bilingual since he also speaks Creole (5). Walcott’s light-

brown father was born in St. Lucia; his light-brown mother is from Dutch St. Maarten (5); and

Walcott’s white grandfather, Charles Walcott, came to St. Lucia from Barbados, a highly

Anglicized country in the Caribbean. King asserts that Walcott imagined his grandfather’s

origins were in “Shakespeare’s country,” which would have made him an heir to the tradition of

English literature (8). King also points out that Derek’s poetry—specifically Omeros—refers to

his grandfather as a bastard (7), a claim that can be verified in Book XII of the poem when

Walcott depicts his father as foregrounding his [Derek Walcott’s] identification with English

Literature:

I was raised in this obscure Caribbean port,

where my bastard father Christened me for his shire:

Warwick. The Bard’s Country. But never felt part

of the foreign machinery known as Literature.

I preferred verse to fame, but I wrote with the heart

of an amateur. It’s that Will you inherit.

I died on his [Shakespeare’s] birthday, one April, your mother

sewed her own costume as Portia, then that disease

like Hamlet’s old man’s spread from an infected ear,

I believe that parallel has brought you some peace.

Death imitating Art, eh? (68-9)

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Thus Walcott’s social background is rife with a diversity that undoubtedly informs his advocacy

for reconciliation versus revenge, multiculturalism instead of mimicry, and pluralism rather than

pessimism.

Walcott’s experiences with the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and the Stratford Ontario

Shakespeare Festival further validate the conjecture that Walcott viewed the Bard as a beneficial

benefactor of literature rather than a bellicose influence of colonialism. These experiences, in

addition to the role that Shakespeare played in the lives of Walcott’s parents, demonstrate the

uniqueness of Walcott’s relationship to Shakespeare in comparison to either Carlin’s or Césaire’s

connections to the English playwright. The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) originally targeted

American minorities for its support in the 1960s, and it assisted Walcott as a “black” dramatist

and poet for many years. According to King, the RF first became involved with the West Indies

Theatre through Tom Patterson of the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival (“West Indian

Drama and the Rockefeller Foundation, 1957-70: Derek Walcott, the Little Carib and the

University of the West Indies” 496). In September 1957, the RF provided funding to Walcott to

go to Stratford, Ontario, where Walcott received advice from Tyrone Guthrie about a proposed

festival for West Indian drama (496-7).

The relationship between Walcott and the RF proved successful: in the late 1950s, Walcott

traveled to New York by way of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study theater (498),

leading to his advanced studies of design, acting, and theatre, and to the RF supporting the

establishment of a theater in Trinidad (497-8). The relationship also led Walcott to embrace the

Americanized Stanislavski Method of acting (498-91), and to develop the Little Carib Theatre

Workshop (499), which later became the Trinidad Theatre Workshop (TTW). The Workshop

offered its first performance in 1962, a time of substantial conflict in Trinidad since the

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Trinidadian government of the 1960s supported folk culture, leading Walcott to believe that

theater was the only true revolutionary forum of the region (503). In 1969, Walcott and his

company achieved international acclaim by performing in the United States; however, new RF

policies of the 1970s that limited funding to the United States ended the relationship between

Walcott’s theater Workshop and the RF.

Decolonization of the Caribbean during the twentieth century also immeasurably informed A

Branch of the Blue Nile; thus, as in my treatments of Carlin’s and Césaire’s plays, decolonization

is another relevant point of departure for analyzing Walcott’s play. At the time of the play’s first

two productions in Barbados and Trinidad, both countries had achieved their independence from

Great Britain. The emancipation from Great Britain of Trinidad in 1962, Barbados in 1966, and

St. Lucia in 1979 consequently made the play’s engagement with themes of national and

personal identity immediately relevant to multiple audiences in the Caribbean. During the time A

Branch of the Blue Nile was written and performed, Trinidadian society did not view the stage as

an appropriate place for black women. Joyce Green MacDonald addresses this prejudice against

black women in the Caribbean, asserting that Walcott’s Sheila—the character the play’s director

casts as Cleopatra—reflects aspects of Caribbean history that sharply delimited black women’s

performances (“Bodies, Race, and Performance in Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile” 199).

MacDonald refers to a quote by Belinda Edmonson from The Port of Spain Gazette (1884) that

declares that “The obscenities, the bawdy language, and the gestures of women in the street have

been pushed to a degree of wantonness which cannot be surpassed and must not be tolerated”

(qtd. in Edmonson 1). And yet the fact that the TTW, which Walcott founded in 1956 and led

until 1976, began as a multiracial company and remained as a predominantly black company

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including both men and women (Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama 159) complicates the

status of black women in Trinidad during the time that Walcott wrote A Branch of the Blue Nile.

Edmonson’s research does not comment on the theater in Trinidad or the Caribbean;

however, she points out that two contradictory ideologies surrounded contemporary women’s

performance in the Caribbean public sphere, and I insist that these conflicting philosophies relate

to A Branch of the Blue Nile. According to Edmonson, on the one hand, black women were

viewed as icons of respectability who supported black, nationalist ideals. In contrast, Caribbean

society also represented black women as “antiwoman, pathological and lascivious viragos who

undermine the national project” (1-2). As modernity became associated with whiteness, black

nationalists felt the need to police images of black women and to scrutinize the public behavior

of black females (4-5). The ability of black men to “rule” black women developed into the litmus

test for black leadership, further complicating these sociocultural matters. For example, in

nineteenth-century Trinidad, “jamettes,” black women associated with barracks yards, gangs, and

the streets, were viewed as a danger to the project of a white modernity (5). As brown women

entered the public sphere through carnivals and beauty pageants, an image of a “brown nation”

(6) merged with sentiments of Caribbean nationalism, even alongside the increasing acceptance

of post-independence philosophies that touted indigenous Caribbean culture as equal to cultures

of Europe and the United States (9).

Although Walcott desired to revolutionize the West Indies through drama, the theater

intersected with the social movements noted above and thus affected how society viewed both

black and mulatto women as well as how these women perceived themselves. Additionally,

Walcott held his own views of the relationship of women to West Indian theater. In “Meanings”

(1970), Walcott eschews the inclusion of women in Caribbean theater, maintaining that the

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exclusion of women will allow “a kind of style” to happen; “there will be violence, there will be

direct conflict, there will be more physical theater, and there will be less interest in sexual

psychology” (48-9). Although Chihoko Matsuda describes this view as chauvinistic, she also

maintains that Walcott used binary logic to eradicate Western theatrical conventions and to

develop Caribbean theater and drama: Walcott saw Western theater as psychological and

“feminine,” whereas he viewed Caribbean theater as physical and “masculine” and, therefore,

more able to present direct conflicts between the Western world and the Caribbean and the

colonizer and the colonized (30). I agree with Matsuda that A Branch of the Blue Nile illustrates

a positive development in Walcott’s view of women in the Caribbean theater (21). Additionally,

Sheila’s role as Cleopatra demonstrates Walcott’s efforts to test his philosophies of modernism,

nationalism, and the theater by casting a black Trinidadian woman in a play that overtly touts the

Caribbean and the European culture as equal endeavors. The fact that Sheila resists identifying

with “Cleopatra” aligns with Edmonson’s argument by demonstrating that blackness had not yet

been established as a legitimate cultural signifier in the Caribbean.

The signification of blackness during the process of decolonization in the Caribbean

would have also proved important in Barbados, where A Branch of the Blue Nile first premiered

in 1983, since, as Antonio Benitez-Rojo affirms, Barbados is not as Africanized as other islands

in the Caribbean (69).5 In 1982, Walcott lost $30,000 on a production of The Last Carnival in

Port of Spain (Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama 320), which influenced his decision to

premier A Branch of the Blue Nile in Barbados. According to King, the fact that it was less

expensive to produce a play in Barbados (a factor that became important in light of Walcott’s

recent financial loss) as well as Walcott’s recent fight with the TTW6 also affected Walcott’s

decision. Stage One7 bought the rights to the play for a year, planned a black-tie gala champagne

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opening with special guests and $40 tickets, conceded to Walcott’s ultimatum to either replace

the actress Sonya Maze with his second wife Norline—a dancer he had met in the TTW—or

have the production canceled, and finally premiered the play to an audience of invited guests that

included several government ministers, bank governors, and original members of the St. Lucia

Arts Guild. The play received excellent reviews in Barbados, with critics writing that “they were

seeing a classic play by a great author at the height of his powers” (319). The Weekend Nation

averred that the play “unearths the roots of Caribbean man and holds them up before the eyes of

a pleased and participating audience” (qtd. in King 321), acknowledging the African, English,

and American influences on the region (321).

As St. Lucia is Walcott’s birthplace, a brief discussion of its relationship to Walcott is

also necessary to analyzing A Branch of the Blue Nile. St Lucia gained its independence in 1979

(Decolonization since 1945 141), only four years before A Branch of the Blue Nile premiered in

Barbados. Walcott was living in the United States at the time, and when he left the United States

in 1980, he returned with his second wife Norline to Trinidad. As far as I have ascertained,

Walcott did not return to St Lucia until 1983, when he visited with his daughters in the summer

(their first time in St Lucia) (Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life 420). When Walcott revisited St.

Lucia in 1983, he was working again as a freelance journalist for the American publication

House & Garden, writing an article that compared the past and the present in St. Lucia (420)

from his point of view. According to King, Walcott felt like an outsider, although the island had

not changed despite some superficial modernization (420). Although there is little evidence in

this article to suggest that Walcott identified with St Lucia, the impact of both colonization and

decolonization, which led him to feel like both a native and a tourist in St. Lucia, affected his

sociological makeup and these contradictions are revealed in the psychological and professional

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conflicts experienced by the actors and actresses in A Branch of the Blue Nile. One of Walcott’s

purposes in A Branch of the Blue Nile, therefore, is to dramatize a means by which Caribbean

artists, actors, and audiences can celebrate their dual social and linguistic histories. Walcott

accomplishes his purpose by re-reading, re-situating and re-structuring Antony and Cleopatra.8

Shakespeare’s well-known play does not require a summary; however, a brief summary

of A Branch of the Blue Nile is necessary. Walcott’s play dramatizes the conflict that arises when

an acting troupe in Trinidad attempts to stage a production of Antony and Cleopatra based on the

vision of their director, Harvey St. Just, a professional from England who uses Method Acting to

help his actors play roles with which they may not otherwise easily identify. Method Acting

encourages actors to rely on “emotion-memory” (Constantin Stanislavski coined the term

“emotion-memory” in order to refer to the actor’s past emotions as creative material that can be

used to sympathize, or identify with, a dramatic character)9 to relate to a particular role; it is a

naturalistic technique of acting developed by Stanislavski and adapted by American directors and

actors.10 Disputes that arise during rehearsals primarily concern an antagonistic relationship

between Chris and Gavin and the love affair of Sheila Harris—a black Trinidadian typist cast as

Cleopatra—and Chris, a black Trinidadian writer who is married to a woman from England. The

climax occurs when Sheila deserts the theater. Aside from a stunning performance of Cleopatra

by Marilyn, Cleopatra’s understudy, the opening night ends in a comical disaster that leads a

reviewer to write a scathing review titled “BARD GOES BANANAS.” The play’s conflict is

resolved when Chris seeks out Sheila and persuades her to return to the theater which has been

abandoned by the other actors in the troupe.

Walcott’s dramatic re-structuring eliminates several roles and scenes and subordinates the

love affair between Antony and Cleopatra to the conflict that arises from their efforts to maintain

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dual cultural affinities while performing Antony and Cleopatra. The play that Walcott’s troupe

stages retains Shakespeare’s fidelity to Cleopatra’s status as a queen and to Antony’s historical

identity as the ruler of one third of the Roman world.11 Walcott uses the framing narrative to

resituate the lovers within a Caribbean, post-colonial framework. Sheila is cast as a black

Trinidadian woman who attempts to “play” the role of Cleopatra as a parallel to her real-life love

affair with a black, married Trinidadian male whose wife is English. The climax of

Shakespeare’s vast play, which includes five acts and forty two scenes, occurs in act three when

Cleopatra fearfully flees from the battle and Antony ignominiously follows her; Walcott’s play

features two acts and twelve scenes, and the climax ensues when Sheila—cast as Cleopatra—

fearfully abandons the theater at the end of act one. Whereas Shakespeare’s play features a cast

of thirty two named characters plus a soothsayer, servants, soldiers, sentries, and guardsmen,

Walcott’s play presents a cast of nine named characters, and the portion of the framing narrative

that adapts the romantic interlude between Antony and Cleopatra is limited to encounters

between Chris and Sheila and rehearsals of Cleopatra’s suicide speech from act five, scene two

of Shakespeare’s play. A difficult play to stage, the action of Antony and Cleopatra moves back

and forth across the Mediterranean and flouts the unities of time and place to an extreme degree.

Generically, the trajectory of the play’s action follows the rubric of Aristotelian tragedy, yet it

also integrates a comic texture that accounts for the play’s generic hybridity. In contrast, the

setting of Walcott’s play is a bare stage in Trinidad (A Branch of the Blue Nile 212). Generically,

however, Walcott’s play is also a hybrid product, featuring both comic and serious dimensions.

In addition to re-structuring Shakespeare’s play, Walcott explicitly re-reads Cleopatra as

a woman from a dominated culture, making the implicit, yet more recently debated colonial and

imperial themes in Shakespeare’s play explicit. In Shakespeare’s play, Cleopatra is the ruler of

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Egypt, although in act three, scene six, Antony also makes her Absolute Queen of Egypt, Syria,

Cyprus, and Libya (Shakespeare 3.6.8-11), essentially establishing her as the ruler over much of

the Middle East as well as giving her authority to exercise power in his place. The dramatis

personae of A Branch of the Blue Nile indicates that Sheila is a black actress from Trinidad in her

early thirties (212). However, the play includes only three references to her race. The first occurs

in act one, scene one, after Sheila offers a stunning performance as Cleopatra during a rehearsal,

when Harvey, the play’s white director, sardonically tells Sheila, “Don’t come near me, you

stupid black bitch” (A Branch of the Blue Nile 220).12 Sheila herself refers to her skin color in act

one, scene three, when she tells Chris that she is a “broke, black, West Indian actress over thirty”

(238), and in act two, scene three, when she states that she stepped down from the stage to the

congregation because “that’s where an ambitious black woman belongs, either grinning and

dancing and screaming how she has soul, or clapping and preaching and going gaga for Jesus”

(284-5). Significantly, Walcott emphasizes that Sheila not only signifies a black Trinidadian

actress but that she also represents Cleopatra in the rehearsals of Shakespeare’s play as well as in

the framing narrative. In act one, scene three, after Chris and Sheila argue about Chris’s English

wife, Sheila calls him “Antony” (238), and she begins to identify with Cleopatra so closely that

in act two, scene three, Harvey declares, “Sheila, you are her [Cleopatra] now. She’s talking

through you” (285). Tompkins and Gilbert also affirm that the relationship between Sheila and

Chris develops in ways which rework the story of Shakespeare’s famous lovers (22).

Walcott also casts Marilyn, a mulatto woman with light brown skin who serves as

Sheila’s understudy and assumes the role of Cleopatra when Sheila deserts the theater, as a

female from a dominated culture, further illustrating the contentious debate regarding

Cleopatra’s ethnicity. Certainly, the rhetoric of comparison commonly used in colonial discourse

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has influenced this historical and literary debate, and Walcott’s casting of Sheila as Cleopatra in

rehearsals and the framing narrative and Marilyn as Cleopatra in the staging of Antony and

Cleopatra further underscore this rhetoric. This rhetoric of comparison also informs the

actresses’ personal and professional perceptions of themselves. For example, the references to

Sheila’s skin color discussed above do not suggest that she or others view her blackness as an

asset. Additionally, Sheila does not believe that Cleopatra was black: “Let Marilyn play it [the

role of Cleopatra]. She’s passable, but she’ll pass . . . Besides, there’s something else you never

told me. She [Cleopatra] wasn’t black, she was like Marilyn, Mediterranean” (284). Sheila’s

discomfort derives from her resistance to allowing her body to signify a black, Caribbean

Cleopatra because she thinks that the audience will perceive an English script and diction as

inappropriate for her black body. At the same time, the comparison of her skin color with

Marilyn’s lighter skin emphasizes the critical debate regarding Cleopatra’s ethnicity, an issue to

be discussed later in this chapter. Sheila also envies Marilyn’s lighter skin, using a rhetoric of

comparison to point out that Marilyn’s skin can help her acquire acting work abroad (256).

Conversely, Marilyn claims that she is so jealous of Sheila’s talent that she suffers from

insomnia until two or three in the morning (254). Moreover, Marilyn maintains that “God has

favorites,” and that he wouldn’t “pick” her—that he “picked” Sheila instead (255). Yet,

Marilyn’s performance as Cleopatra accounts for the only positive aspect of the play’s review:

For here is an actress who has suddenly found herself, and who, in the role of Egypt’s

dimming, dying, and yet radiant queen, has said to herself, I shine, I shine for the future

of our theatre, I shine for all women, black, white, and shine she does, she illuminates our

tawdry stage like the moon herself, despite that bunch of Best Village bananas at her

back.” (271)

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Notably, even the reviewer’s description of Marilyn relies on a rhetoric of comparison. Sheila’s

and Marilyn’s roles, therefore, not only relate to the debate about Cleopatra’s ethnicity, but also

amplify the function that the theater plays in constructing these roles and personas. Thus the

play’s metatheatrical dimensions destabilize essentialist ideology, emphasizing the socially

constructed nature of human identity.

Six years after A Branch of the Blue Nile premiered in Barbados, Jyotsna Singh also

remarked on the role of metatheatre in Antony and Cleopatra. According to Singh, while Roman

actions and speech promote a hierarchical view of political order and an essentialist concept of

human identity, Cleopatra’s “histrionic mode of being” disrupts these notions of fixity (108),

revealing the Roman discourse and rhetoric of the play as well as Plutarch’s moralizing history

as male-centered and logocentric (111). This focus also correlates Cleopatra’s playfulness and

subversion of Roman claims with a strategy of improvising on Roman fictions and revealing

them as constructed and arbitrary (113). I agree with Singh’s analysis and I think that Walcott

kept these concepts of literary and social construction in mind when he wrote A Branch of the

Blue Nile. Shakespeare’s characterization of Cleopatra differs from Walcott’s depiction,

however, because Walcott approaches the play from the perspective of the dominated culture

and, therefore, offers Cleopatra’s perspective. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra may unsettle notions of

fixed identity; however, we never see her struggle to be Cleopatra—to play the role of an astute

Queen who learned the language of her people and who sought to prevent Egypt from facing

complete assimilation into the Roman Empire.

The characters Sheila and Marilyn also foreground post-colonial interpretations of

Cleopatra’s persona. Matsuda contends that one cannot determine Cleopatra’s skin color or

ethnic features (26), but post-colonial critics have underscored Shakespeare’s interpretation of

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Cleopatra as a black woman, or at least as possessing darker skin than members of his audience.

Despite the play’s explicit identification of Cleopatra with Egypt, previous critics did not

question Cleopatra’s race because of her Greek heritage (she descended from Alexander the

Great, and since the royal family did not intermarry, it is doubtful that Cleopatra would have

possessed Egyptian blood). The centrality of race and colonialism to the play finds support in

two textual references: Philo’s allusion to Cleopatra’s “tawny front” (Shakespeare 1.1.6)13—

mulattos were often referred to as “tawny moors”—(Clark 126)—and Cleopatra’s own

admission, “Think on me, / That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black / And wrinkled days

in time” (1.5.29-30). Additionally, Antony’s allusion to Dido, Queen of Carthage,14 another

famous African queen, evokes a black Cleopatra. In the first critical foray into the significance of

race in the play, Janet Adelman remarks that when Cleopatra tells us she is black with Phoebus’s

amorous pinches, she transforms sunburn into an amorous cosmic adventure: “She [Cleopatra] is

black (and blue) because Phoebus pinches her (186), and it is suggestive that Cleopatra attributes

her color to sunburn because she uses current theory to explain her color” (186-7). Thus,

according to Adelman, Cleopatra’s explanation associates her with Africa. Despite the

significance of these findings, I agree with Adelman’s assertion that Shakespeare’s audiences

were probably not concerned with whether Cleopatra’s origins were African; rather, they would

have viewed her as darker than them (188), thereby constructing her as an “Other.” Cleopatra’s

darkness would have also added to the threat attached to her persona throughout history,

literature, and drama: as MacDonald maintains, as an African, a woman, and a queen, Cleopatra

embodies three potent sources of threat to the white masculine Roman Empire (“Sex, Race, and

Empire in Antony and Cleopatra” 62). Notably, all three ways in which Cleopatra presents a

menace to Empire rely on a rhetoric of comparison.

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 Additional criticism concerning the ethnicity of Cleopatra abounds;15 and this dissertation

interprets Cleopatra as a woman of color, though, notably, scholars have rigorously debated the

issue of Cleopatra’s race. This emphasis on ethnicity evokes an important wider context: the

repeated construction of Cleopatra as an “other”—whether as a “black” woman (Shakespeare

1.5.29), a “serpent of old Nile” (1.5.251), “tawny” (1.1.16), a “serpent of Egypt” (2.7.26), an

“Egyptian dish” (2.6.126), Antony’s “crocodile” (2.7.27), a “triple-turned whore” (4.13.13), a

“right gypsy” (4.13.18), a “witch” (4.12.48), or a “vile lady” (4.15.22)—speaks volumes about

how dominating cultures have constructed a persona for Cleopatra while suppressing other

aspects of her biography. Prior to Walcott’s play, the West had almost always encountered

Cleopatra through the perspectives of writers and artists of dominant cultures. Moreover, these

roles cannot be acted in performance at will, particularly in cultures such as the Caribbean in

which split—or dual—social histories form the core of some of the most salient post-colonial

predicaments.

Walcott offers additional illustrations of this dilemma by re-reading the dueling cultural

affinities of Antony by representing Chris—who plays Antony in the framing narrative and in

rehearsals of Antony and Cleopatra—as straddling cultures that are influenced but also wary of

hegemonic ideals. Considering Antony’s historical position as a military commander in the

Roman Empire, Walcott’s re-reading of Antony’s character is sympathetic. Walcott re-reads this

split in Antony’s/Chris’s psyche by re-presenting his affection for Cleopatra/Sheila and his

refusal to choose one culture over another.16 In act one, scene three, Chris and Sheila argue about

his English wife (234). The couple splits up after Sheila scornfully tells him to go pick up his

wife, expressively insisting that no one needs a broke, black, West Indian actress over thirty

(238). Yet, despite the fact that Chris does not leave his wife, Chris clearly possesses deep

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affinities for Sheila and the Caribbean culture. For example, Chris persuades Harvey to stage his

“dialect piece”17 in addition to Antony and Cleopatra (223). It can also be inferred that Chris’s

attitudes toward Caribbean theater influence Harvey to stage the dialect version of act five, scene

two of Antony and Cleopatra that Marilyn and the troupe perform in act two, scene one of

Walcott’s play. The Clown speaks the dialect portions of this scene, since, as Harvey later

argues, in Shakespeare’s day the clowns spoke dialect, and since their dialect is so Jacobean, he

felt quite justified (268). For example, when Marilyn/Cleopatra asks the clown if the worm will

eat her, he responds, “‘Don’t feel I so dotish that I ain’t know the devil self don’t eat no woman;

I know that a woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil don’t make the dressing. But them whore-

mongering devils does screw the gods up with their women, ‘cause for every ten women God

make, the devil does mash up five’” (264). Additionally, Chris bases his A Branch of the Blue

Nile on his tape recordings of the troupe during and between their rehearsals of Antony and

Cleopatra, thereby documenting the personal, social, and professional struggles that inform his

own conflict as well.

Yet, as in Shakespeare’s play, Chris’s/Antony’s dual affinities are not without their

consequences: in act one, scene one, after Harvey agrees to stage Chris’s dialect play, Chris

declares that they “have found some truth,” and that the truth “go split us up” (223). The truth

does split the troupe up, revealing the challenges inherent in performing Caribbean theater. In act

one, scene four, after the troupe does not take the rehearsal of Chris’s play seriously, Chris

becomes angry and proclaims that he stopped reading because the books he encountered were

not relevant to his life: “That goes for plays, too; I ain’t care who the arse it is, Shakespeare,

Racine, Chekhov, nutten in there had to do with my life all of them black people out in the hot

sun on Frederick street at twelve o’clock trying to hustle a living” (246). Chris’s anger escalates,

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and he contends that Harvey should not stage Antony and Cleopatra so people will feel white

(247), as if they are in a theater designed to cater to white, European audiences, because Trinidad

is not England or New York (the type of places that would typically stage a play like Antony and

Cleopatra).18 Chris also insists that there is no point in presenting a “major writer for a minority”

(247). An explosive argument ensues, leading to the climax of the play: Gavin angrily recounts

that he did not return from a failed acting career in the States to act “provincial shit” (249), Chris

calls Gavin a “schizophrenic nigger” (250), Harvey falls ill (250-1), and Sheila declares that they

have become “monsters” (253) and suddenly falls into a religious frenzy and passes “Cleopatra”

to Marilyn through her palm (260-1) prior to leaving the theater:

SHEILA. [They stare at each other.] It’s yours now, Marilyn. Press

My right palm. [She takes MARILYN’S palm, presses her own

against it.]

MARILYN. What?

SHEILA. The gift. The river in my palm. (261)

Previously, Sheila had recounted the palm reading she received from an African woman who

relayed that she saw a river with seven branches that was connected to Sheila, who could not

avoid the river any more than she could remove the “open tributaries” in her open palm (240).

This reading of Sheila’s palm connects Sheila with both Cleopatra and the Nile River. Thus

Chris’s prediction comes true: the “truth” splits up the troupe, which creates an overtly

antagonistic relationship between Chris and Gavin and leads to a crisis in Sheila’s ability to

“play” Cleopatra on stage.

Antony’s dual affinities have also been examined in post-colonial criticism of the early

twenty-first century. For example, Coppélia Kahn argues that through his relationship with

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Cleopatra, Antony is establishing a counter-empire (116). According to Kahn, Roman virtue and

“Romanness” are associated—if not almost synonymous—with masculinity (2, 14). She

contends that Shakespeare’s play is not “only about a struggle between two superheroes for sole

dominance over the Roman Empire . . . The play is doubly determined by homosocial rivalry; it

dramatizes the homosocial bonding that is Rome’s hallmark” (112). This homosocial bonding

relies on emulation, an urge to match the rival and competitor (113). Such a perspective also

correlates to Chris’s homosocial rivalry with Gavin, who more readily embraces Harvey’s

approach to matching the competition of international theater by performing Shakespearean

plays. In contrast, Chris resists presenting a major writer such as Shakespeare for what he calls

“a minority” (247).

Arthur Little also attempts to recuperate Antony’s psychic conflict by linking it with

Caesar’s view of Antony as falling short of Roman, masculinized ideals. Little describes Antony

as a “kind of White African” (104),19 positing that Antony’s English, ostensibly white body

betrays his “having gone primitive, Egyptian, and, in effect, African” (104). Little’s use of the

word “framing” proves key to his re-reading of Antony: Little employs the word to connote both

the imaging of Antony (his relationship to Roman masculinity) and his framing by Caesar to

portray Antony as falling short of Rome’s idealized image of its corporeal self” (23).

Similarly, in A Branch of the Blue Nile, Gavin depicts Chris as not fulfilling the role of an

idealized modern Caribbean artist. While Chris’s character, who more than likely represents

Walcott, embodies the “writing” aspect of theatrical production, Gavin underscores the

performative function, writing back to the idea of Shakespearean performance as quintessential.

Two key scenes prove pivotal in revealing Gavin’s philosophy: In act two, scene two, after

Sheila experiences an epiphany through which she identifies with Cleopatra, Gavin warns her,

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“from now on, girl, you’ll start having fantasies. Deal with the fantasy. Don’t dream like me

about the universality of the theater. It’s economics, and economics means race” (224). Sheila

responds by commenting on how bitter Gavin was when he returned from America, persistently

inquiring about what he “saw” while there. The perspective Gavin relays correlates to Fanon’s

revision of the Lacanian mirror stage in Black Skin, White Masks concerning how a black male

can see himself as unacceptable and undesirable in the eyes of the “other”:

GAVIN. At first off, I didn’t see myself in the mirror.

I just plain refused what they wanted me to see,

Which was a black man looking back in my face

and muttering: “How you going han’le this, nigger?

How you going leap out of the invisible crowd

and be your charming, dazzling self? I saw me;

then the mirror changed on me, the way you hate

your passport picture. I saw a number under it

like a prison picture, a mug shot in a post office,

and I began to believe what I saw in the mirror

because that’s how they wanted me to look.

I reduced that reflection to acceptance, babe,

Against my mother-fucking will. (226)

Gavin also insists that he traveled to the states to be an actor only to discover that he was viewed

through a stereotypic gaze (249); he thus advises Sheila to turn into Marilyn, who is both black

and white, to satisfy audiences of modern theater.

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 In addition to re-reading these aspects of the play—attributes regarding race, gender, and

colonialism with which Walcott closely identifies—Walcott also re-situates Antony and

Cleopatra. I view “re-situating” as a strategy of adapting Shakespeare, and I am therefore

distinguishing between appropriation and adaptation as much as I am departing from the scant

criticism of A Branch of the Blue Nile that primarily focuses on Walcott’s play as an

appropriation. To begin, Walcott subordinates the love affair that is central to Antony and

Cleopatra to the conflict between the dominated and dominating cultures, thus highlighting a

colonial reading of the play that was not emphasized by critics until the last few decades of the

twentieth century. Certainly, even the title of Shakespeare’s play underscores the romantic

relationship between the two infamous lovers. Additionally, twenty-six of the forty-two scenes in

Antony and Cleopatra dramatize or refer to the torrid affair between them; the other sixteen

scenes primarily focus on homosocial relationships and the personal and political dissension of

Antony and Caesar. Moreover, the play commences and concludes by amplifying the importance

of Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship. For example, in the opening act, Philo avers that

Cleopatra has transformed Antony into a fool and effeminized him: “Take but good note, / and

you shall see him / The triple pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool. Behold and

see” (Shakespeare 1.1.10-13). Conversely, the last act elevates the two lovers throughout,

including the final scene in which Caesar exalts both Antony and Cleopatra, insisting that

Cleopatra be buried by Antony and that “No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so

famous” (5.2.359-60).20 These aspects of Shakespeare’s play do not merely recapitulate a

romantic tale: they also provide a parallel to the conflict between Caesar and Antony and

illustrate that more than Empires—Egyptian or Roman—are at stake. Shakespeare’s

dramatization of Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship also destabilizes the otherwise fixed

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categories of race and gender, and this disruption proves particularly evident during the

occasions when Shakespeare’s Cleopatra apparently dresses Antony in her clothes: “I laughed

him out of patience; and that night / I laughed him into patience. And next morn, / Ere the ninth

hour, I drunk him to bed, / Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst / I wore his sword

Philippan (2.5.18-22).21

In A Branch of the Blue Nile, only three of the twelve scenes dramatize the relationship

between Chris and Sheila. In act one, scene one, Harvey uses Method Acting to encourage Sheila

to feel more at ease in the role of Cleopatra. Harvey asks Sheila, “What’s all this sexual

hesitation, Sheila? You know how sensual his [Antony’s] corpse is to her? (A Branch of the Blue

Nile 213). Sheila’s response, that “She’s not her [Cleopatra]” (213), leads Harvey to encourage

her to play what she feels about Chris, not “Antony” (313). Chris’s and Sheila’s private affair

thus becomes a topic of discussion in this scene to introduce Sheila as Cleopatra and Chris as

Antony and, more importantly, to illustrate how reflecting on their real-life relationship might

assist Sheila in playing Cleopatra on stage.

The couple also appears in act one, scene three, discussing their difficulties with staging

Harvey’s version of Antony and Cleopatra (228-9):

CHRIS. You still here?

SHEILA. Yeah. We got rhythm.

CHRIS. Can’t talk Shakespeare, though.

SHEILA. Lips too big.

CHRIS. No. No brains.

SHEILA. Got rhythm, though. (229)

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In this scene, Chris also admits that his wife knows about his affair with Sheila (234), and Sheila

expresses frustration over Chris’s refusal to leave his wife (234). However, the scene concludes

with Sheila relaying her fear of a prophecy given to her by an African gardeuse (240), thereby

de-emphasizing her personal conflict with Chris/Antony. Although this scene masterfully

resituates the historical and Shakespearean couple, it also foreshadows Sheila’s flight from the

theater:

SHEILA. I don’t want to have it! I’m afraid.

CHRIS. Have what?

SHEILA. Her prophecy. I want to give it back. (240)

Sheila’s recollection of the prophecy adds immeasurably to this scene, subordinating her

relationship with Chris to her connection with Cleopatra. As I previously discussed, according to

Sheila, the African gardeuse told Sheila that she saw in Sheila’s palm a river with seven

branches, which Sheila could not avoid (240). In my view, the river the African gardeuse refers

to is the Nile River, which connects Sheila to Egypt and Cleopatra. As I will discuss later in this

chapter, the reading of the veins in Sheila’s palm and the title of Chris’s and Walcott’s play, A

Branch of the Blue Nile, also associate Sheila with Cleopatra by signifying the blue Nile River

and alluding to Cleopatra’s reference to her “bluest veins” (Shakespeare 2.5.29). Renu Juneja

maintains that the river in Walcott’s play is neither black nor white; it is between; it is blue

(245). Thus this scene represents the couple’s romantic relationship, but it also foregrounds the

significance of Sheila’s “role” as Cleopatra.

Act two, scene four, the final scene that features Sheila and Chris together, also

subordinates their relationship to the cultural conflict resulting from Sheila’s attempts to “play”

Harvey’s Cleopatra. In this scene, Sheila and Chris only briefly discuss Chris’s wife (A Branch

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of the Blue Nile 290); the rest of their conversation concerns Sheila’s departure from the theater

and Chris’s efforts to persuade her to return. The most compelling evidence Chris presents for

Sheila’s potential to perform European plays in the Caribbean regards a conversation he had with

a tourist on the Caroni bird sanctuary. According to Chris, the tourist averred that Trinidad has a

bird called the ibis that also lived by the Nile in Egypt, and that the Egyptians considered the bird

sacred (291). Significantly, Chris insinuates that the bird “loses her colour in captivity” (292),

rhetorically asking Sheila if “she don’t feel black, hiding in church” (292). Chris thus persuades

Sheila to see an implicit connection between Trinidad and Egypt as well as the Caribbean and

Cleopatra. Additionally, similar to the other two scenes that feature the twentieth century

Antony-Cleopatra duo, Sheila takes center stage, subordinating the historically tumultuous affair

that has dominated and, in many eyes, tarnished Cleopatra’s reputation for centuries to the

theatrical endeavor of establishing a counter empire.

A Branch of the Blue Nile also re-situates the climax of Shakespeare’s play to underscore

that fear, rather than betrayal, led to Sheila’s flight from the conflict-ridden stage in Trinidad to a

church in Barataria. This modification also enables Walcott to set the stage for Chris to sacrifice

his script to save Cleopatra from a life that, in his view, she has “emptied” (290). In

Shakespeare’s play, the climax occurs in act three, scene ten, when on a field near Actium,

Scarus reports that Cleopatra and her ships have abandoned the war at sea between Antony and

Caesar: “You ribaudred nag of Egypt — / whom leprosy o’ertake! – i’ the midst o’ the fight, /

when vantage like a pair of twins appeared / Both as the same, or rather ours the elder, / The

breeze upon her, like a cow in June / Hoists her sails and flies” (Shakespeare 3.10.10-15).

Canidius, Enobarbus, and another soldier had all emphatically urged Antony not to accept

Caesar’s challenge to fight at sea (3.7.32-5, 36-41, 42-9, 62-7), but Antony had determined to

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accept Caesar’s challenge even before Cleopatra offered him sixty ships. Although Shakespeare

depicts a weeping, contrite Cleopatra who begs three times for Antony’s forgiveness (3.11.54-55,

59, 67), Shakespeare affords the Queen only one line to explain her reason for fleeing the war:

“Forgive my fearful sails!” (3.11.54). Additionally, Shakespeare’s scene concentrates almost

exclusively on the blame Antony shifts from himself (“I have fled myself,” 3.11.9) to Cleopatra

(“Egypt thou knew’st too well / My heart was to thy rudder tired by th’ strings, / And thou

shouldst tow me after,” 3.11.55-6), eclipsing Cleopatra’s perspective.

In Walcott’s play, the climax occurs when Sheila flees a conflict-ridden stage, and

Walcott uses dialogue to explain why she left the theater. In act two, scene two, at the church in

Barataria, Sheila shares her testimony, declaring that she saw William Blake in the light-

illuminated fields, and now that the light is inside of her, she feels like a bright field (265).22 She

then asks the audience, “Who calls us? Why are we given our gifts?” referring to herself in the

prayer that follows as a servant of the Lord (266). Although the speech that Brother John gives

after Sheila’s benediction undercuts her testimony—he encourages the congregation to pinch

their pennies, band their jaw, and give to the Church and Caesar with “love” rather than as

Cleopatra that “lecherous serpent” of “Egypt” rendered (266)—Walcott depicts Sheila as more

comfortable using her gifts in the Church than in the theater. Walcott’s reworking of the climax

of Shakespeare’s play thus re-situates Cleopatra’s “fearful sails” (Shakespeare 3.11.54),23

emphasizing the motivation for Sheila’s departure rather than the abandonment of Chris or the

troupe.24 As Reed Way Dasenbrock observes: Sheila quits the theater to flee its dangerous

mimetic space (109), and Sheila represents her conversion in terms of a shift of rivers:

then from somewhere, next door,

I heard this evangelical meeting—the voice

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 wasn’t shouting, but lulling, like a river,

as if the Nile herself had changed her voice.

It wasn’t the Nile anymore but the river Jordan. (A Branch of the Blue Nile 281-82)

Sheila’s conversion also demonstrates Walcott’s integration of powerful Christian typology, the

opposition between Egypt and Israel, which has been important in Protestant thinking,

particularly the Protestantism of the African Diaspora (109). Significantly, Juneja asserts that

Chris’s art may not be mainstream but it is still a “tributary” of the Western tradition which

“begins” in Greece but draws on Egypt and Africa (245).

Yet, it occurs to me that we ought not to isolate sections of Walcott’s play as

representative of the whole; I thus submit that Walcott’s reconfiguration of Cleopatra’s departure

from the sea to Sheila’s desertion of the theater foregrounds the playwright’s reworking of the

dénouement of Shakespeare’s play. In my view, whereas Shakespeare depicts Cleopatra’s

suicide as a self-conscious choice that rejects life on the colonizer’s terms, Walcott omits certain

lines and stage directions from Shakespeare’s script to represent Cleopatra’s suicide as

performed by Sheila’s understudy Marilyn as comic, while also dramatizing Sheila’s figurative

death from the theater and rebirth within the Church. First, Plutarch’s account of Cleopatra’s

death differs significantly from the Shakespearean version that Walcott revises. In “The Life of

Marcus Antonius,” Plutarch recounts an eloquent and passionate monologue that Cleopatra

allegedly gave prior to her death—a speech which Shakespeare curiously omits. Specifically, he

suggests that Cleopatra longed to be buried with Antony, whom, according to Plutarch, Caesar

had allowed Cleopatra to bury in Egypt:

O my deare Lord Antonius, not long sithence [since] I buried thee here, a free woman:

and now I offer unto thee the funerall springklinges and oblations, being a captive and

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 prisoner . . . For as thou being a Romane, hast bene buried in Egypt: even so wretched

creature I, an Egyptian, shall be buried in Italie, which shall be all the good that I have

received by thy countrie. If therefore the gods where thou art now have any power and

authoritie, sith [since] our gods here have forsaken us: suffer not thy true friend and lover

to be carried away alive, that in me, they triumphe of thee: but receive me with thee, and

let me be buried in one selfe tomb with thee. (86)

Shakespeare excises the speech of Cleopatra that Plutarch recounts, however, reworking

Plutarch’s account to dramatize her death by suicide, retaining the role that Plutarch avers

Cleopatra played in finding the serpent of the Nile that kills with the least pain,25 and presenting

a glorified version of her death in which her last words, “Come, / thou mortal wretch, / With my

sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate / Of life once untie / Poor venomous fool, / Be angry and

dispatch. O couldst thou speak, / that I might hear thee call great Caesar ass / Unpolicied”

(Shakespeare 5.2.302-6), deride Caesar, her conqueror.

During Marilyn’s staging of Cleopatra’s suicide, these lines from Shakespeare’s play are

cut, and Walcott makes “husband, I come: Now to that name my courage prove my title!” her

last lines (264), de-emphasizing Cleopatra’s contempt for the colonizer. Walcott also weaves a

comic dimension into his presentation of this scene: only seconds after Marilyn/Cleopatra refers

to her “immortal longings” and prepares to kill herself, Wilfred, a stagehand dressed in a black

sweatshirt and jeans, enters, and by mistake rolls on a cutout of bananas or fig trees and places it

behind Marilyn/Cleopatra during her speech (A Branch of the Blue Nile 264). Walcott’s stage

directions indicate that Marilyn becomes enraged, and the dialogue reveals that Harvey develops

irritation as well: “[Harvey’s Voice] “Wilfred! Wilfred! Move the figs!” (264-265). Yet, in a

comic conclusion, Wilfred decides not to move the figs, opting instead to bow, “as if he were

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part of the action,” and exit (265). Additionally, although Iras enters with Marilyn/Cleopatra’s

robe and crown, Walcott excises Shakespeare’s stage direction, [“The women dress her”]

(Bevington 1381); thus Walcott’s Marilyn/Cleopatra is poised to die with a cutout of bananas,

rather than gold, behind her, resulting in a type of hybridized performance that, significantly,

leads the audience to laugh and applaud (A Branch of the Blue Nile 265). Walcott’s subtraction

of the stage directions that indicate Cleopatra is dressed in royal garments and the monologue in

which Cleopatra curses Caesar are intentional, highlighting significant counter-discursive aspects

of his masterful adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.

While Walcott’s play disrupts the Westernized iconic representation of Cleopatra,

Walcott also supplements this figurative death with the metaphorical death of Sheila/Cleopatra,

who is reborn through the arduous task of accepting her God-given talents in a culture where the

role of a black woman on stage is still precarious. Act two, scene two, in which Marilyn and the

Clown re-stage act five, scene two of Shakespeare’s play, is followed by Sheila offering her

testimony in a Church, asserting that her eyes have seen the salvation which God has prepared

for everyone (266). Walcott makes it evident that Sheila left the theater because of the conflict

she had experienced when she attempted to play the role of Cleopatra: “I killed her [Cleopatra].

She was killing me. My body was invaded by that queen . . . I heard my blood whispering like

the Nile, its branches, instead of traffic . . . Egypt was my death. Now I’ve found a faith where

I’m not important . . . I’ve simply changed religions” (296). Moreover, A Branch of the Blue Nile

suggests that Sheila’s flight does not resolve her conflict, emphasizing that one cannot simply

change clothes—or religions—to intrinsically change identities. Thus in act two, scene four,

Brother John chides Sheila, maintaining that her humility cannot “perform” for God, and that the

congregation is not an audience any more than the devout are actors (287). This dialogue

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undercuts Sheila’s assertion of having changed religions (296). Unlike Shakespeare’s Cleopatra,

Sheila’s longings are not solely “immortal” (Shakespeare 5.2.281); she desires the visceral

experience of performing for live audiences. Yet, Sheila’s experience as a black woman in

Trinidad thwarts her ease with performance, particularly her comfort with playing the role of

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.

Sheila represents aspects of Walcott’s biography as well as his perception of the moral

climate of Trinidad; thus it can be deduced that Walcott does not identify with what some critics,

primarily 19th and early 20th century commentators, see as the decadent representations of either

Egypt or Cleopatra and, therefore, present counterpoints to these putative theatrical

representations. King insists that “Trinidad was different from Walcott” because “it believed in

the hedonist fête” (Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life 345), whereas Walcott did not like to join in

the crowds, the wild dancing, the surrender, and the abandonment in a country where one-third

of the national income resulted from Carnival (345). According to Tejumola Olaniyan, Walcott

opposed the performance traditions of the black majority in the Caribbean, such as Carnival, to

advocate an “omnibus encompassing heirs to Prospero and Caliban, Crusoe and Friday, free to

borrow in any direction” (488). Juneja also affirms that Walcott’s play conforms to counter-

cultural principals: whereas the black, colonial actors found himself “needing to ‘out-perform’ in

any sphere of his white counterpart, the counter-culture performer reinterprets colonial culture”

(57).

Walcott also identifies with an Antony whose Cleopatra was like a muse, but who

presented a significant challenge to the task of maintaining his cultural and political affiliations.

The character Chris/Antony thus shares affinities with Walcott that prove particularly significant

when viewed in light of the sacrifice Plutarch’s and Shakespeare’s Antony makes for Cleopatra,

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similar to the one that Chris offers to Sheila and the troupe. As previously discussed, Plutarch’s

Antony does not confront Cleopatra after she abandons the war with Caesar. Instead, he follows

her, boards her ship, and grievously laments his circumstances for three days (69-70).

Shakespeare excises this account of Antony’s reaction, however, dramatizing a fictitious

argument between the couple in which Antony blames Cleopatra for abandoning his fleet

(Shakespeare 3.10) and threatens to kill her (4.12). Walcott omits these scenes, replacing them

with a scene in which Chris follows Sheila, finds her, and offers A Branch of the Blue Nile to her

as his act of “contrition” (A Branch of the Blue Nile 291). Chris urges Sheila to read, or at least

type, the script and return to the theater, since fooling the congregation would be worse than

deceiving herself (294). In act two, scene eight, Sheila subsequently returns to the theater and

discovers the script that Chris had left there before his return to Barbados.

Significantly, Walcott thought of his talents as God-given (Derek Walcott: A Caribbean

Life 40) and possessed a Messianic image of himself, and I insist on a reading of his play that

proposes he integrated these aspects of his experiences into the character Chris/Antony, who

presents Sheila with a vision of the present in which both her mortal (theatrical) and immortal

(religious) longings can co-exist. Such a perspective correlates to my assertion that Chris—the

play’s “Antony”—functions as a type of Christ figure in Walcott’s play. Walcott reworks the

account of Antony’s sacrifice of himself for Cleopatra, depicting Chris’s script, which he leaves

for Sheila and the troupe, as a type of sacrificial offering. The narrative that undergirds the

Christian religion proposes that Christ sacrificed his life for all of humanity without knowing

whether humanity would accept this gift or not. Similarly, Chris leaves his script at the theater in

Trinidad with a letter that urges the troupe to help him with the end of the play (311), even

though he does not know what the outcome of his gesture will be (311). Additionally, the

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rhetoric surrounding Christ’s death is encoded with the tropes of reconciliation, redemption, and

renewal, and Chris’s script symbolizes his reconciliation with the troupe and the renewal of

Sheila’s life; Sheila finds the script Chris had attempted to give her at the church in Baratari

when she returns to the theater and agrees to begin rehearsing and perform the play.

From a feminist perspective, Chris’s visit with Sheila at the church in Baratari

undermines her agency by suggesting that she would not have gone back to the theater without

the intervention of Chris. However, by calling his script an act of “contrition” and leaving it at

the theater, Chris also shows his humility and willingness to part with a work of art while

maintaining only a nascent form of hope that the troupe and Sheila will accept it, finish it, and

perform it. He is not certain about what the outcome of his attempt to alter the gendered

structures that undergird the theater in the Caribbean will be, but he nonetheless attempts to

change those structures.

Arthur Little and Lisa Starks have also approached Shakespeare’s Antony as a sacrificial

figure, though Little emphasizes Antony’s inversion of gendered and racialized myths. Little

postulates that Antony’s death reverses gender roles and inverts a foundational myth of the

Western World in which “the white man sacrifices himself at the feet of a black woman” rather

than vice versa (116). Thus Little views Antony’s role in Antony and Cleopatra as feminine.

Starks appreciates Little’s emphasis on the erotic dimensions of the play and Antony’s body, but

argues that Antony “plays a male (albeit alternative) rather than female” role (255). Starks argues

that Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra culminates in a poetic fusion of death and sexuality

characteristic of the Liebstod, or a sensual story of love and death, as developed through the

narrative of male masochism (243). Significantly, Starks asserts that Antony inhabits a Christian

masochist’s universe of martyrdom and identification with the crucified Christ—but with a

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difference, since his role as a masochist refigures an erotic economy that destabilizes binaries

that undergird Western constructions of sexuality, heroism, and masculinity (254). I concur with

Starks’s view of Shakespeare’s Antony as an eroticized sacrificial figure. Additionally, I

appreciate Little’s perspective of Antony’s feminized body, since the history of the

representation of Christ’s body includes art and medieval devotional texts that depicted Christ as

feminine (Bynum 205). However, it is perhaps most significant that Walcott reconfigures Chris

as a black sacrificial Christ figure, further destabilizing racial binaries that undergird Western

constructions of Christ’s identity. Rejoinders to these constructions are not infrequently a subject

in other post-colonial plays and texts.26

Significantly, in Plutarch’s source, Cleopatra is portrayed as the savior of Antony: if she

had not sent her secretary Diomedes to bring him to her, he would have died in his home,

writhing in agony from the pain of a self-inflicted wound that not even his own servants would

assuage or end (79). In my view, Antony’s sacrifice is depicted most poignantly by his

astonishing yet unabashed decision to follow Cleopatra after her departure from the war-ridden

sea, and Walcott also re-situates this act to ruminate on the role of Caribbean theater in

decolonization. In “Egypt, Tobago,” Walcott contends that Antony exchanged an empire for her

beads of sweat” (28), and the critic Matsuda has focused on this line to depict Walcott’s view of

Cleopatra in this poem as that of a male chauvinist (24-5) in comparison to the more positive

portrayal of women she observes in A Branch of the Blue Nile. And yet Walcott concludes

“Egypt, Tobago” by maintaining that “everything else is vanity, / but this tenderness / for a

woman not his mistress / but his sleeping child” (lines 82-5), suggesting that Walcott may have

recognized Antony’s deep affection for Cleopatra—an affinity that makes his sacrifice

endearing—prior to the composition and production of A Branch of the Blue Nile.

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 In A Branch of the Blue Nile, Walcott masterfully reworks Shakespeare’s play, excising

the tragic dimensions of the history and literary accounts so that sacrifice takes the place of and

prevents, rather than precedes, self-destruction. Walcott’s split social history was both a blessing

and a curse: while his aspirations to prolong the line of great authors such as Marlowe and other

English writers fueled his literary visions, his efforts to relate the “English” language and

literature to Caribbean people and contexts inform the conflict of A Branch of the Blue Nile.

Since Walcott aspired to create theater that rivaled the drama of other countries yet targeted

local, Caribbean themes, actors, and audiences, Walcott’s use of Shakespeare in A Branch of the

Blue Nile should be viewed as a venture whose success must be measured on both the stage and

the page. That is, although A Branch of the Blue Nile was only produced three times, it may be

judged an unsuccessful theatrical endeavor; but its impact must also be analyzed in light of the

play’s noteworthy effects on post-colonial criticism of both Walcott’s and Shakespeare’s plays.

Notes

1. As far as I am aware, apart from M. K. Joseph’s campus novel, A Pound of Saffron, Derek
Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile offers the only post-colonial adaptation/appropriation of
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra written in either the genre of fiction or drama. Walcott had
also treated Shakespeare’s play in his poem “Egypt, Tobago.” Since A Branch of the Blue Nile
also employs counter-discursive post-colonial metatheatre, as both Not Now, Sweet Desdemona
and A Tempest do, A Branch of the Blue Nile is the most appropriate subject for this chapter.
2. See the Introduction for my extended discussion on Kenneth Burke and the significant
relevance of his concept of the rhetoric of identification to both the “identification” Rob Nixon
discusses in “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest” and my extension of Burke
and Nixon to post-colonial appropriations of Othello.
3. A third production, An Amsterdam production in 1991, in Dutch translation, toured the
Netherlands (Döring qtd. in Massai 17).
4. William Shakespeare relied on his chief source, “The Life of Marcus Antonius,” in the first-
century biographer Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans to characterize both
Antony and Cleopatra and to dramatize events of their lives (Shakespeare used an English
version by Sir Thomas North, 1579, which I have quoted from in this chapter).
5. Antonio Benitez-Rojo conjectures that the key to Africanization in the Caribbean colonies lays
in the degree of mobility that the African possessed when he or she came to the Caribbean (70).
Regardless of the African population of an island, Plantation conditions forced Africans to live in
circumstances of incarcerating forced labor, thereby limiting their ability to exert a cultural

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influence in the area (70). The sugar plantation arrived in Barbados by 1667 (69), whereas, in
contrast, Jamaica did not complete the transition to the Plantation until during the eighteenth
century (70).
6. In Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama, Bruce King asserts that due to various professional
reasons, Walcott resigned from the TTW on 15 November 1976 (259-60). In Derek Walcott: A
Caribbean Life, King dates the resignation on 3 May 1970, citing a quarrel between Slade and a
drunken Walcott over professional matters as precipitating Walcott’s resignation (256).
7. Stage One Theatre Productions was a non-profit company established in Barbados to primarily
perform Caribbean plays. See Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life 378.
8. Here, I invoke Joanne Tompkins in “Spectacular Resistance”: Metatheatric in Post-Colonial
Drama.” As I discuss in the introduction and other chapters of this dissertation, Tompkins
identifies re-reading, re-structuring, and re-situating as the key functions of post-colonial
counter-discursive metatheatre.
9. See An Actor Prepares 168.
10. As Daniel Dinkgräfe observes, Lee Strasberg made Stanislavsky’s system popular in
American as the “Method” (47). Strasberg developed the theories of motivation and substitution:
the actor should consider what would motivate him or her to act in the way that is similar to a
dramatic character, but the actor should use techniques such as emotion-memory to substitute for
an idea of the character that is potentially developed in the actor’s imagination (48). In
Strasberg’s words, “The actor is not limited to the way in which he would behave within
particular circumstances set for the characters; rather, he seeks to substitute reality different from
that set forth in the play that will help him behave according to the demands of the role.” See
Approaches to Acting: Past and Present 47 and A Dream of Passion: The Development of the
Method 60.
11. After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Antony—a Roman General and Politician—joined
with Caesar’s nephew, Octavius Caesar, and Lepidus to divide up and rule the Roman Empire.
12. This comment is, in my view, extremely sexist, but Sheila hugs Harvey after he makes this
statement to her, indicating that she possesses a degree of tolerance for this tone and language.
13. All references to Antony and Cleopatra derive from The Complete Works of Shakespeare
(6th ed.), edited by David Bevington.
14. See 4.4.53.
15. See especially “The Imperial Romance of Antony and Cleopatra” in Ania Loomba (2002)
112-144. In the 1980s, 1990s, and early decades of the twenty-first century, post-colonial critics
departed from tradition by interpreting Cleopatra as a black African Queen and by reading the
play as a study of racial, sexual, and ethnic alterity. Henrik Clarke (1984), Ania Loomba
(“Theatre and the Space of the Other,” 1989; Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism 2002), Mary
Nyquist (1994), Joyce Green MacDonald (1996), and Mary Floyd-Wilson (2001) all insist that
despite Cleopatra’s historical Greek heritage, Shakespeare’s play portrays her as black. Both
Kim Hall (1995) and Loomba (2002) discuss the significance of skin color and “foreignness” in
the play by relating it to the stories of Sheba and Solomon, and of the Shulamite in Song of
Songs, both of which are vigorously renewed during the Renaissance (124).
16. Walcott also represents these split affinities in his poem “Egypt, Tobago,” describing a
dismembered Antony as having his head / in Egypt, his feet / in Rome (lines 37-9).
17. Walcott’s play does not refer to the specific title of this play.

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18. Significantly, in his criticism of Antony and Cleopatra (1964), Burke addresses the
challenges Shakespeare must have faced in persuading his audience to identify with characters
(Antony and Cleopatra) of such grandeur. According to Burke, Shakespeare amplifies the theme
of love so that his audience will identify with Antony and Cleopatra; one of the ways he
accomplishes this is by adding imperial tinctures to the love affair between Antony and
Cleopatra (in Burke’s view, the Elizabeth empire “on the make” would have been in the
unconscious recesses of Shakespeare’s and the audience’s minds). See “Shakespearean
Persuasion: Antony and Cleopatra.”
19. Prior to Little, Kim Hall had described Antony as “going native” by falling into plentitude
and excess in Egypt. See Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern
England 158.
20. In Plutarch’s “Life of Marcus Antonius,” Plutarch reports that Caesar allowed Cleopatra to
bury Antony with her own hands and that Cleopatra’s death, which occurred several days later,
may have resulted from suicide.
21. Plutarch does not reference accounts of Cleopatra dressing Antony in her clothes;
Shakespeare’s addition of this aspect of the plot may function to comment on the topical issues
of social and theatrical cross-dressing during the Renaissance in England.
22. Walcott may be referring to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, particularly “The Chimney
Sweeper,” in which Blake refers to an Angel with a bright key who sets chimney sweepers free
from their coffins so that they run down a green plain leaping and laughing, washing in a river,
and shining in the sun (lines 13-16).
23. Plutarch does not relay a rationale for Cleopatra’s flight.
24. Significantly, Plutarch does not recount Antony confronting Cleopatra after her flight from
the sea. Walcott refers to Plutarch in A Branch of the Blue Nile; in fact, the reviewer accuses
Harvey of hiding behind Plutarch (268); thus, like Shakespeare, Walcott may have also read a
translation of Plutarch’s account of Mark Antony’s life.
25. According to Plutarch, Cleopatra ordered the venomous bites of snakes of Egypt to be tested
on prisoners to ascertain which serpent produced death most swiftly and with the least amount of
pain, and Plutarch maintains that she watched the application of the creature’s bites to prisoners
on a daily basis (75). Shakespeare integrates this aspect of Cleopatra’s history into Antony and
Cleopatra through Octavius Caesar’s speech about Cleopatra in which he notes that “She
[Cleopatra] hath pursued conclusions infinite / Of easy ways to die” (Shakespeare 5.2.355-356).
This speech implies that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra had sought the serpent that kills with the least
pain.
26. Here, I have Njorge in Ngũgĩ, Thiong’o Weep Not Child, Olunde in Wole Soyinka’s Death
and the King’s Horseman, Caliban in Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, and Nnu Ego in Buchi
Emicheta The Joys of Motherhood in mind.

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 CONCLUSION:

THE FUTURE OF POST-COLONIAL STUDIES OF

SHAKESPEARE

In the Epilogue of The Tempest, Prospero remains alone on the stage to renounce his

magic and to implore the audience to pardon him for his crimes and release him from

confinement on the island.1 This Epilogue underscores the contingency of Prospero’s power on

audience approval as well as the responsibility of the audience to produce the conclusion.

Literary criticism functions similar to a dramatic epilogue: it analyzes fictional events to lead the

audience to make conclusions about a text. The afterword or conclusion to any scholarly work of

notable length further highlights the similarities between critical and theatrical conventions: in a

conclusion, it is as if someone walks on stage to comment on the previous collection of chapters.

As such, I use this conclusion to assert that this dissertation significantly emphasizes the

intersections of theatrical and critical traditions, striving to persuade the audience to release these

post-colonial plays from their confinement in the realm of “third-world drama” or

“appropriations of Shakespeare.”

In addressing select post-colonial dramas as criticism as well as adaptations of

Shakespeare’s plays, these chapters engage with some slippery labels while simultaneously

privileging explanatory versus descriptive modes of analysis. Scholars continue to debate about

whether to designate plays such as those examined in this dissertation as “appropriations” or

“adaptations.” Approaches to this question range from the skeptical perspective of Daniel

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Fischlin and Mark Fortier who, in the Introduction to their critical anthology Adaptations of

Shakespeare, maintain that there is no “right” name for the work represented in their

anthology—there are only labels with more or less currency and connection to history (2)—to

the more assertive conjectures regarding differences between “intercultural appropriation” and

“local adaptation” (qtd. in Massai 18, 21) posited by Tobias Döring. To complicate this issue,

this dissertation analyzes “writing back,” a strategy that scholars such as Jane Kidnie deem is

impossible when writers respond to Shakespeare, since, in her view, Shakespeare’s texts lack a

point of origin (1) because they are not “sealed off” in a specific past moment in time (69). I

have opted to use the terms appropriation and adaptation interchangeably in order to focus on the

rhetorical situation—or process—of these post-colonial plays. This terminology allows me to

argue that the process of “writing back” to Shakespeare begins with “identification,” as analyzed

by Kenneth Burke in A Rhetoric of Motives, and that this identification makes the post-colonial

writer and his or her constraints a part of the rhetorical situation. I have also illustrated how the

use of post-colonial counter-discursive metatheatre, as described by Joanne Tompkins, enables

these post-colonial writers to critique the intact Shakespearean play while simultaneously

adapting it.

Not Now, Sweet Desdemona; Une Tempête; and a Branch of the Blue Nile begin to

decolonize Shakespeare’s plays by making the discursive processes of race, gender, and

colonialism visible and by illustrating the connections between these processes, even when

geographical, cultural, and historical differences would appear to threaten such endeavors as

anachronistic. Here I refer to decolonization as a process that dismantles colonial and imperial

structures. These three post-colonial plays re-read the raced and gendered discourses of

colonialism within Shakespeare’s plays, illustrate the threat of interracial unions to sentiments of

147
British nationalism, and re-structure the original texts to alter, or at least challenge, colonial

structures. This view of decolonization differs from others, such as nativism, the recovery of

pristine pre-colonial cultures, or a rejection of the colonizer’s language, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

advocates in his “farewell” to the English language.2 Rather, these plays begin to decolonize

Shakespeare by dismantling the deep-seated, prejudicial ideologies of race, gender, and

colonialism that are evident in British drama such as Shakespeare’s, and which have shaped the

lives of millions of people who encountered Shakespeare through colonial education. On a

personal level, these post-colonial writers recognize and expose the role that English Literature

played in disseminating dichotomies such as center/margin, center/periphery,

canonical/uncanonical, and civilized/uncivilized. Politically, these post-colonial plays write back

to the institutionalized English Language and Literature that finds its roots in the dual

developments of the study of English and the growth of the British Empire.

While numerous descriptive articles compare and contrast these post-colonial plays, this

dissertation offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the rhetorical situation of “writing

back” to Shakespeare and the hegemonic ideals undergirding race, gender, and colonialism in his

plays. I maintain that identification is the starting point in the process of writing back, a process

that can be theorized in addition to described as “sympathetic” (Nixon 567). Murray Carlin

identifies with Othello, Aimé Césaire with Caliban, and Derek Walcott with both Antony and

Cleopatra, indicating the relevance of irony to these rhetorical situations. These authors

deconstruct their ironic identifications with literary figures in Shakespeare by using counter-

discursive metatheatre to re-read, or critique, the original play. Additionally, strategies of

adaptation enable these post-colonial writers to alter those aspects of the characters and plays

148
from which they disassociate, encoding the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized people

within the post-colonial plays.

The implications of this research underscore a previously overlooked aspect of

Shakespearean appropriation: these post-colonial readings of Shakespeare’s plays constitute a

form of literary criticism, which shares a kinship with post-colonial criticism. This discovery re-

situates the origins of post-colonial criticism of Shakespeare’s plays. Scholars currently locate

these origins in the last two decades of the twentieth century, pinpointing decolonization,

Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism, and the rise in popularity of cultural materialism as

the conditions that led to the emergence of post-colonial criticism. From this perspective,

however, decolonization and post-colonial predicaments are subjugated to literary criticism,

since this narrative frequently relies on the appropriation of post-colonial literatures for the

critical purposes of developing an understanding of Shakespeare, his plays, and their role in

colonialism. Conversely, Carlin, Césaire, and Walcott adapted Shakespeare’s plays to illustrate

how post-colonial societies adjust to the constraints that the influence of Shakespeare places on

language and culture. This perspective views the post-colonial writer as central to the rhetorical

situation, and pinpoints post-colonial criticism as emerging during the process of decolonization.

And yet this conjecture does not negate the kinship shared by these dramatic

interpretations and post-colonial criticism of Shakespeare’s plays. Although this dissertation

focuses on three branches of post-colonial responses to Shakespeare—interpretations from South

Africa, the French Caribbean, and the British West Indies—the development of these

perspectives shares parallels with the emergence of Anglo-American post-colonial criticism of

Shakespeare; all of these branches find their source in the cultural and historic memory of

seventeenth century British literature and in the development of English Language and Literature

149
as an object of study. Consequently, this dissertation seeks to encourage a new way to approach

Shakespearean studies. In addition to asking what new light these post-colonial plays can shed

on Shakespeare’s plays, we can explore how these adaptations illuminate ongoing post-colonial

predicaments that led to select occasions for “writing back.” The result, therefore, is an

epistemological shift that perceives the convergence of the theatrical and critical traditions. Some

scholars may argue that the project of reframing the origins of post-colonial criticism is trivial

due to its goal of identifying a particular timeframe for such origins. However, the issue of

origins is at the heart of many post-colonial predicaments, relating to the significant

philosophical difference between insisting that Europeans first settled the Americas and regions

of Africa and the Caribbean versus the claim that they conquered indigenous peoples, as Caliban

emphasizes in The Tempest: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st

from me” (1.2.334-5).

Consequently, much more is at stake in these particular predicaments than in a general

relationship of any writer to a tradition, which may explain why Harold Bloom intentionally

omitted Shakespeare from the manuscript for The Anxiety of Influence that he wrote in the

summer of 1967. In his preface to the second edition, Bloom reflects that he was not yet ready to

meditate on Shakespeare (xiii); he also contends that “Shakespeare invented us, and continues to

contain us” (xvi). In contrast, Carlin, Césaire and Walcott needed to meditate on Shakespeare

because they were aware that they had been constructed as an “other”—as the “other” we see

variations of in Shakespeare’s plays—and that this projected self-perception pervaded their day-

to-day lives.

Thus this dissertation asks scholars to treat these post-colonial dramatists with the same

gravitas awarded post-colonial critics. The likelihood that such an ideological change will occur

150
remains uncertain. At present, scholars still identify more with Shakespeare and his critics than

with Murray Carlin, Aimé Césaire, or Derek Walcott: a search of the MLA International

Bibliography reveals that 3,387 scholarly works with the word “Shakespeare” in the title were

published during the last ten years in contrast to 145 scholarly texts with the word “Walcott” or

148 with the name “Césaire” in their titles.

We should, therefore, continue to further develop this area of study by applying the

theoretical approach outlined in this dissertation to more post-colonial texts. This dissertation

provides a representative sample of works to which a theory of “writing back” applies,

demonstrating knowledge of the most seminal Shakespearean plays and criticism approached

from post-colonial perspectives, as well providing a thorough analysis of Césaire and Walcott,

two of the most noteworthy and prolific post-colonial authors of this era as well as one additional

post-colonial author, Carlin, who should not be overlooked. I hope that what emerges will result

in a new way of reading additional post-colonial plays that comment on Shakespeare’s plays.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The Tempest in David Bevington ed. The Complete Works of
Shakespeare, 6th. (London: Macmillan, 2008), Epilogue 1603.
2. See Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.

151
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