Strong Precursors: Shakespeare in southern Africa and Shakespeare in Southern Africa, then and now

Abstract

In January this year, South African academics and practitioners in the fields of literary studies, linguistics and education mourned the death of Stanley Ridge (1942–2018). Over the course of his thirty-year career at the University of the Western Cape – and a productive decade as emeritus professor – Stan was not only an esteemed teacher and a respected scholar, but also a cherished mentor to young researchers, writers, educationists and activists. He worked tirelessly in and through key institutions, including the National English Literary Museum, the National Language Body and the English Academy. Stan was ideally placed to review ISEA, 1964–2014: A South African Research Institute Serving People (2016), a collection of essays about the development of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa edited by current director Monica Hendricks. The history of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (SSOSA) is closely connected to that of the ISEA, and I knew that readers of this journal would be interested in Laurence Wright’s chapter on the Society – along with other material in the book charting the development of “English studies” during the period in question. So I asked Stan if he would act as a reviewer; characteristically, he agreed to do it without delay. But a short time later he passed away. Re-reading Wright’s essay in this context, I became overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude and admiration – mixed with a substantial measure of humility and perhaps even a hint of shame – as I thought about the work of ‘those who came before’ (and, in some instances, ‘those who have gone before us’). There are a number of figures who, like Stanley Ridge, dedicated themselves to furthering cultural and educational causes such as the Shakespeare Society. As a young Shakespearean, it was I suppose necessary for me in some Freudian sense to distance myself from the work of academics and ‘amateurs’ alike through organisations like SSOSA – not to dismiss it, but perhaps to view it with a certain amount of scepticism, or at least to imagine myself as one who might have been sympatico with critics of the Society at the time of its founding in the torrid final years of apartheid. Such critics were acknowledged by Guy Butler in his editorial for the first volume of Shakespeare in Southern Africa, published the year after SOSSA was established: