Editorial: aboard the Red Dragon in 2017

Abstract

Shortly before volume 29 of Shakespeare in Southern Africa was published, I went to see a sixman Hamlet at Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre, directed by Fred Abrahamse and starring Marcel Meyer in the title role. The production took its design and concept cues from the muchcited performances of the play on the deck of merchant ship the Red Dragon as it lay at anchor off Africa’s west coast (present day Sierra Leone) in 1607 and off the east coast of the continent (near the island of Socotra) in 1608. There has, over the years, been some dispute as to whether these maritime performances actually took place or were simply the fabrication of nineteenthcentury historians. It may be impossible to establish full scholarly consensus over the authenticity of entries in Captain William Keeling’s journal referring to Hamlet – and, for what it’s worth, Richard II – as a means of keeping his crew “from idleness and unlawful games, or sleepe”. The episode has nonetheless been a gift to the global Shakespeare industry, seeming to confirm that Shakespeare’s work began to spread across the world while he was still alive, almost as if his elevation to the status of international icon were an inevitable process stemming from his preordained universality. Some have even gone so far as to use the Red Dragon narrative to argue for Shakespeare’s unproblematic (nay, even ‘natural’ or ‘indigenous’) presence in Africa. Yet it is significant that these performances took place not on African soil but at sea – and, more specifically, on board a ship in the service of the East India Company. Keeling’s Hamlet is a part of the long story of Shakespeare’s co-option into British imperialism; invoking it does not absolve Shakespearean scholars or theatre-makers of our complicity in the race, gender and class dynamics that are writ large in the history and current manifestations of ‘Shakespeare in (southern) Africa’. Abrahamse and his team took the liberty of shifting the second recorded Red Dragon performance of Hamlet southward, so that their production could pitch itself as “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, as performed by the crew aboard the Red Dragon, off the East Coast of South Africa, 31 March 1608”. This device brought various advantages. The meta-theatrical aspects of Hamlet – most notably Hamlet’s advice to the players – could be foregrounded at the outset, and with the addition of some borrowed lines from the Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the cast presented themselves as a crew of six thespian sailors. The opening seemed to establish a contract according to which the audience would have to accept cuts to the text, like the absence of Fortinbras and the wartime setting, as necessities turned to virtues. It also facilitated the doubling that followed, in particular the portrayal of Gertrude and Ophelia by male actors (a strategy often employed by Abrahamse & Meyer Productions, somewhere between an ‘original staging conditions’ approach and a ‘queer Shakespeare’ aesthetic). Above all, the Red Dragon premise underscored the watery imagery in Shakespeare’s play: from the location of Elsinore – where Hamlet, following the Ghost along the castle’s parapets, might be tempted “toward the flood” or “to the dreadful summit of the cliff/ That beetles o’er his base into the sea” (1.4.73-75) – to the metaphysical “sea of troubles” (3.1.60); from Hamlet’s nautical-piratical exploits to the drowning of “mermaid-like” Ophelia (4.7.173). Applying the verbal to the physical, Abrahamse’s stage design was a square