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

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      … they take the flow o’th’ Nile

      By certain scales i’th’ pyramid. They know

      By th’ height, the lowness, or the mean if dearth

      Or foison follow. The higher Nilus swells,

      The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsman

      Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,

      And shortly comes to harvest.

      Antony and Cleopatra (II.vii.17–23)

      Although the world was beginning to open up during Shakespeare’s lifetime, with Jesuit missions to the Far East and growing settlements in the Americas, he lived in an age in which the Mediterranean still merited its name as ‘the middle sea’, the place in the centre of the world. Around this great inland sea all places of importance were arranged – notably excluding the backwater island which Shakespeare never left – and through it man’s greatest voyages had taken place. The classical geographer Pliny, still a respected authority in the Renaissance, declared that while men of the south were born burnt by the sun, and those of the north had frosty complexions, the blended climate of the middle lands made for fertile soils and minds. Only there, he contends, do the people have proper governments, while ‘the outermost people … have never obeyed the central people, for they are detached and solitary, in keeping with the savagery of Nature that oppresses them’.1 About half Shakespeare’s plays are set in his native Islands; the rest, with the important exception of that strange beast Hamlet, arrange themselves around the Med. Its waters were so thick with history and myth that Odysseus’ ten-year cruise from Asia Minor to the Greek Islands remained the archetypal sea voyage even long after Shakespeare’s contemporaries had circumnavigated the globe through far more treacherous waters. And into this central body of water flowed the most famous and strangest of rivers, the Nile.

      Every year, at the end of summer, the waters of the Nile rose above its banks and flooded the plains of northern Egypt, a potent symbol of the unexplained and irresistible force of nature. ‘My grief’, says Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at the sight of his raped and mutilated daughter Lavinia, ‘was at the height before thou cam’st / And now like Nilus it disdaineth bounds’ (III.i.70–71). The destructive power of the Nile, however, was matched by its near-magical fertility. As the annual flood subsided, the river left behind water and silt rich enough for agriculture to flourish in the middle of a desert land. The power of the Nile mud to make things grow was held in such high regard that naturalists from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe believed it capable of spontaneously generating animal life, though (as was fitting for a river whose source lay deep in an unknown continent) the ‘fire / That quickens Nilus’ slime’ (Antony and Cleopatra, I.iii.67–9) could only produce monstrous serpents and crocodiles.

      By the middle of the nineteenth century, much of the mythical aura had evaporated from the Nilotic delta. If the British biologist Thomas Huxley would soon suggest that all life did ultimately have its beginnings in the primordial slime, few believed any longer in life regularly emerging from the inanimate. Egypt had been invaded by Napoleon and had then fallen (as he had) under the growing British sphere of influence; its ancient artefacts were fast becoming familiar exotics in the museums of Europe. (By the end of the century, Sigmund Freud would plumb the middle-class European mind from a consulting room bursting with Egyptiana, including a mummy’s mask that he liked to stroke.) The Egyptian floodplains had been given over to the industrial-scale production of cotton and fledgling tourism was starting to be seen in Cairo and on the river. Much of the continent from which the Nile flowed, however, was still completely unexplored, and the undiscovered source of the great river remained a tantalizing symbol of the stubborn resistance of parts of the world to the increasingly bullish European powers. Sir Roderick Murchison, the President of the Royal Geographical Society, blended the languages of intellectual and financial speculation when he declared (in his presidential address of 1852) that there was ‘no exploration in Africa to which greater value would be attached’ than establishing the source of the Nile, and that the men who achieved it would be ‘justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age of geographical science’.СКАЧАТЬ