Soyinka and the Dead Dramatist

When Soyinka wrote his essay and for some two decades after, this criticism was dominated by a political turn that saw postcolonial cultural influence in terms of the stark alternatives of oppression and resistance and that focused on critical, even hostile, responses to issues of race and colonialism in plays like Othello and The Tempest; but in the last decade or so it has developed a more nuanced view of Shakespeare's relationship to global and local cultures.1 Soyinka's essay anticipates this development, poking fun at some kinds of appropriation while slyly practicing others. Though critics from Chinweizu to Kwame Anthony Appiah have faulted Soyinka for an insufficiently political stance on issues of colonialism and race, his combination of irony and imitation pointedly replies that he is not rejecting politics, but embracing a kind of politics capable both of writing appreciatively about Shakespeare and of serving African needs: a pluralist politics in which local balances global, and in which the lived experiences of individuals ("the humanity of actors of a particular history") matter as much as ideology.23 The individual and the political, the global and the local, speak constructively to each other on the ground of Shakespeare.