Nathaniel Merriman's lecture: "On the study of Shakspeare".
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008-09-23
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7034 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007368
- Description: Nathaniel Merriman’s lectures on Shakespeare were published in 1857 and 1858. The first, “On the Study of Shakspeare,” was delivered in the Court House, Grahamstown on the 2nd September 1857 to an audience of more than four hundred and fifty people. The second, “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History,” was given in the same venue two months later, on Friday, 6 November 1857, and was also well attended. The lectures were published under the auspices of the Committee of “The General Institute,” which sponsored the lectures, and printed at the Anglo-African Office in the High Street. The two lectures and their context are little known in Shakespeare studies because the original pamphlets are rare. The first lecture appears in Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography (1910), while the second is picked up only in the 1979 revision of that work. Copies of “On the Study of Shakspeare” are held by the Mendelssohn Library in the Library of Parliament, Cape Town; by The South African Library, Cape Town; and in the Oppenheimer Collection, Johannesburg. Copies of “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History” are held by the Mendelssohn Library; by the University of the Witwatersrand Library, Johannesburg; and by the Kimberley Public Library. The purpose of preparing annotated editions of these lectures is to make them more accessible to scholars and draw them further into the mainstream of international discussion on colonial Shakespeare.
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Guy Butler: 21 January 1918 - 26 April 2001
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7053 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007413
- Description: [From Introduction]: For much of the last twenty-five years of his life, Butler’s thought and work were not perceived to be ‘current’ at all. His poetry was hardly read (what’s new there? – neither is anyone else’s); some of it lay in manuscript or obscure little publications until the Collected Poems appeared in 1999. The autobiographies attracted a loyal following amongst a small, educated reading public. His early dramas, though they met with initial success, were stifled by the poetic idiom to which they aspired, and by the racial claustrophobia against which they fought. (Demea, Butler’s South African reworking of the Medea, made it to the boards only in 1990 – the multi-racial cast, let alone the themes, kept it in hibernation until then.) The deluge of journalism and polemic suffered the usual fate of ephemera. Until resurrected by Stephen Watson in 1990, the essays and lectures remained buried in periodicals where they could not be assessed as a totality. His inspiring teaching was a gift to his students, hardly accessible to the wider society; and above all, much of his time was spent as homo commiticus, serving on the boards and sub-committees of numerous university institutions and other organizations, some of which he founded. In his autobiography, he observed wryly of his changed status following accession to the Chair of English at Rhodes in 1951: ‘Professors are not entirely themselves. Their interest as persons decreases because they are now public personages. Much of their time is spent on committees whose function is to pick the brains of individuals without giving them credit.’ Guy Butler gave generously of his brains in such circumstances.
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- Date Issued: 2001
Guy Butler (obituary)
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 1999
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7052 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007411
- Description: An obituary focusing on Guy Butler's Shakespearean preoccupations. The 1999/2000 volume of Shakespeare in Southern Africa only appeared in 2001. The Butler obituary was included as a 'stop-press' item as the volume went to print, which accounts for the apparent anomaly between the date of publication and the date of Guy Butler's death.
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- Date Issued: 1999
Can formal language planning link to grassroots cultural initiatives?: an informal investigation
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2002
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7041 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007381
- Description: Formal language planning is inevitably a top-down, highly technical process. Success for such planning would seem to depend on engaging productively with existing or readily developed social motivation within the society. This article reports on an informal investigation into how ordinary language practitioners and cultural workers in South Africa view the possibilities of contributing to the country’s emerging language dispensation, what they regard as their most useful possible contributions, and what they expect from the language planners and ‘government’ in support of South Africa’s Language Policy and Plan.
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- Date Issued: 2002
Book review: Derek Barker: English Academic Literary Discourse in South Africa 1958-2004: A Review of 11 Academic Journals
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7044 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007386
- Description: Barker’s book concerns the evolution and publishing trajectories of South African journals devoted to English literary studies between the years 1958 (when the first such journal, English Studies in Africa, came into being) and 2004, the end-date of the survey. In other words, his work coincides with the period in South African history when apartheid’s protagonists were pushing for total political and social ascendancy through to the nation’s emergence into the arena of democratic possibility.
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- Date Issued: 2006
Intellectual challenge is as necessary as breathing: an interview with Laurence Wright
- Authors: Wright, Laurence , Pearce, B
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text , Article
- Identifier: vital:7059 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007422
- Description: Professor Laurence Wright is Director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. In 2009, he will have completed 25 years of research, teaching and scholarship at Rhodes University and this interview marks the occasion. A Rhodes Scholar and a Commonwealth Scholar, he studied at the universities of Rhodes, Warwick and Oxford. He is also Honorary Life President of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa. He has published widely in literary studies and is the Managing Editor of two academic journals as well as of the poetry magazine New Coin. He currently serves on the Council of the English Academy and is a co-opted member of the English National Language Body. He has taken a broad interest in the role of English in this country, ranging from language policy and teacher education matters, to archival research and the role of the humanities in public life. I thought that it would be worthwhile to interview him as his knowledge of literature is substantial, while his incisive and engaging thoughts on a range of topics are worth hearing. The interview was conducted intermittently by email between July and October, 2008.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Politics, latent and overt, in Hill of Fools
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7064 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007430
- Description: [From the text]: R. L. Peteni’s novel Hill of Fools (1976) is a work that benefits greatly when Collingwood’s maxim is observed. The author’s family history and the circumstances surrounding the book’s publication add a dimension of political and social meaning which its surface deliberately occludes. Perhaps more importantly, while the story can readily be enjoyed, the quality of sensibility behind the work is not readily accessed without understanding some of the socio-political background.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Confronting the African nightmare: Yael Farber’s SeZaR (theatre review)
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7046 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007388
- Description: Yael Farber’s adaptation of Julius Caesar marks something of a breakthrough in South African Shakespeare productions. The key achievement is that the play is no longer about Rome or Renaissance England, nor is it about processes of cultural translation or trendy theatrical Africanisation, largely cosmetic. This production is, in a generous way, squarely and pointedly about Africa.
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- Date Issued: 2001
Repositioning Renaissance studies in South Africa: strategic thinking or 'business-as-usual
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7054 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007415
- Description: Increasingly, in many leading South African tertiary departments of literature, early modern studies have a fairly slim hold on the core curriculum. More and more, departmental offerings concentrate on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, perhaps in the belief either that today’s students are so poorly prepared that they will never be able to cope with the mental shifts necessary to appreciate pre-industrial literature and its language, or, worse, that nothing before the C19 colonial incursion into South Africa can really matter very much to undergraduates. Whatever the reason, in such departments, it is no longer possible to get to grips with the contribution of the renaissance to the formation of the modern world. The significance of the broader nomenclature, early modern studies, doesn’t appear to strike home, especially the point that, if students want to understand the world we live in, they have to know this period particularly well. Indeed, they need to have some idea of the interaction between early modern Europe and the literature and ideas of the ancient civilizations of Rome and Greece. If we fail them in this regard, as I believe we are doing to an increasing extent, the result will be generations of intellectual sleepwalkers, denizens of mental landscapes they are responding to, or ‘reading’, in terms of an inner life unaware of important historical continuities and disjunctions; cut off, moreover, from understanding essential features of modernity.
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- Date Issued: 2006
Cultivating Grahamstown: Nathaniel Merriman, Shakespeare and Books
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7033 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007367
- Description: In 1857, Archdeacon Nathaniel Merriman delivered two public lectures on Shakespeare under the auspices of the “General Institute” of Grahamstown. The first, “On the Study of Shakspeare”, was given on 2 September and “Shakspeare, As Bearing on English History” two months later, on Friday 6 November. This article sets out to place the lectures in their local context, by providing a brief sketch of literary and cultural life in the town, in which the appreciation of Shakespeare played no small part.
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- Date Issued: 2008
Archdeacon Merriman, ‘Caliban’, and the Cattle-Killing of 1856–57
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7026 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007212 , http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020180802242574
- Description: [From the introduction]: Did Archdeacon Merriman accept that Mhlakaza was Wilhelm Goliath? The short answer is that we don’t know. However, historical problems sometimes yield, or at least buckle slightly, when approached from unusual, tangential perspectives.I believe it can be shown that in the terrible aftermath of the Cattle-Killing, Nathaniel Merriman was brooding on his former servant, Wilhelm Goliath, and that evidence of this preoccupation emerges indirectly in a very open and unexpected forum: a public lecture on Shakespeare.
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- Date Issued: 2008
"Something rotten in this age of hope": Wesley Deintje directs The HamletMachine (Rhodes University Theatre, 28 September 2007)
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7048 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007390
- Description: Heiner Müller’s most famous play (Die Hamletmaschine, 1977) has evolved into something of a familiar war-horse for student theatre. The United States in particular has taken to the work; indeed, it was meant in part for them: “Heil Coca-cola!” says the script. For today’s South African ears this has become, very aptly, “Hail the Rainbow Nation!” What young director can resist it? Only eight pages in extent, the sparse yet densely referential text offers unfettered scope for interpretation and contextualization. Sure, the original offered Muller’s despairing take on the collapse of western civilisation, typified in the East German predicament where intellectuals felt trapped between the total failure of ‘actually existing socialism’ – that ideological mirage – in the German Democratic Republic, and the horrors of emergent bandit capitalism presaging an uncomfortable future. But the spaces in the text are so capacious that almost any claim to climactic despair can be entertained: idiot consumerism, gender oppression and aggression, political treachery and malfeasance, fascism, existential angst, intellectual cowardice, the postmodern condition, the rejection of hope.
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- Date Issued: 2008