Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet. Edward Wilson-Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ 31, 1608. I invited Captain Hawkins to a fyshe dinner, and had HAMLET acted aboord me, which I permit, to keepe my people from idleness and unlawful games, or sleep.3

      The first two performances, in September 1607, would have taken place while the Dragon was riding at anchor off Sierra Leone (and trying to lay in fresh fruit to counteract a bout of scurvy), and may in fact represent the very first recorded performance of Hamlet.* Even more remarkably, this would mean that the earliest recorded production of Hamlet was a command performance for a Portuguese-speaking native of the West African coast. By the time of the third performance, in March 1608, the Dragon had made it around the Cape, and was meandering between the various islands north-west of Madagascar. According to Keeling’s diary, then, Shakespeare was being acted off the Swahili coast even as Shakespeare was still alive and writing plays for the King’s Men in London.

      Fuller extracts from Keeling’s account of this period on the East African coast, published in the great compendium of Renaissance English travel accounts Purchas his pilgrimes in 1625, make for fascinating reading. The swing from the now-familiar (such as monsoon patterns and elephants) to the utterly fantastical can be somewhat disorienting for the modern reader, though it must be remembered that they were faced with constantly sorting between the astounding things they witnessed and fictional reports (many of which probably had more in common with their European traditions and experiences). A selection of Keeling’s observations from around the time that his men were supposedly performing Hamlet to help the digestion of Captain Hawkins’s Zanzibari ‘fyshe dinner’ gives a flavour of his writing:

      [20 March 1608] George Euans, one of the Hectors Company, was shrewdly bitten with an Alegarta. […]*

      The people are circumcised, as some affirmed to have seene.

      Here we found the beautifull beast. […]

      THE Moores of this place affirme, that in some yeeres, pieces of Amber-greece [sperm-whale gland] are found, Poiz twentie kintals, of such bulke, that many men may shelter themselves under the sides thereof, without beeing seene. This is upon the coasts of Mombasa, Magadoxo, Pata Braua, &c. being indeed all one long Coast.4

      While Burton and Stanley used Shakespeare as a talisman of Englishness during their expeditions, to set themselves apart from their exotic surroundings and perhaps keep themselves from ‘going native’, Shakespeare had nothing of this iconic status as transcendent genius and national poet in 1607–8. The performances on the Dragon would, then, be an even more intriguing episode of happenstance, whereby Shakespeare found his way to Africa as merely one of a jumble of shipboard occupations, nestled within a bewildering array of scarcely imaginable new experiences for the Englishmen coasting along East Africa.

      As suggested by the tentative manner in which this superb story has been told, however, a range of question marks lingers over its basis in truth.5 To begin with, the journal of Keeling’s from which the clearly pseudonymous ‘Ambrose Gunthio’ transcribed these passages in 1825–6 no longer survives, and the (admittedly chaotic) records of the East India Company suggest that it may already have been lost by the inventory of 1822. A number of experts have seen in this delightful episode the hand of the Shakespeare scholar and notorious forger John Payne Collier. Collier, who lived at the centre of Romantic intellectual and literary circles, and could name Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Charles and Mary Lamb among his friends, was later exposed as having fabricated a wide range of documents (purporting to be Tudor and Stuart originals) in support of his editorial scholarship and biographical writings. Other modern scholars have reinforced suspicions about the Keeling entries by questioning the likelihood that a group of shiphands would have been capable of performing not one but two long and complex Shakespeare plays on a crowded deck, or that they would even have wanted to during stifling days off the African coast.*

      While all of these doubts are reasonable, it is hard to understand why the supposed forger would allow his trick to remain unremarked upon by Shakespeare scholars for nearly half a century, when the story gained a wider currency. To this the sceptics can only respond that the delight of the forger is in having performed his chicanery in public, and not necessarily in it obtaining widespread approbation. If these stories were a forgery, however, the form they took began to make perfect sense in light of the exotic Shakespeare stories I was collecting during my travels: whether this episode only came to light in the nineteenth century, or was actually cooked up to suit nineteenth-century tastes, it fits comfortably into the compulsive desire of the English at that time to see Shakespeare rear his head in the Dark Continent, to sing (as the text of Bishop Tozer’s first Zanzibar sermon would have it) ‘the Lord’s song in a strange land’ (Psalm 137).6

      As I read through the memoirs of the early travellers and settlers, a pattern becomes increasingly clear. This was, in effect, a strange feedback loop in which fortune hunters, drawn to East Africa by literary fantasies cobbled together from accounts by Stanley and others like him, returned with yet more travellers’ tales which confirmed to the hungry audiences at home that the reality matched their fevered expectations. Evelyn Waugh joked, on his return from a tour of the region, about that time when travellers

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