Hamlet’s travels to postcolonial stages : Femi Osofisan’s Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet! or the Resurrection of Hamlet and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2016 Hamlet

Abstract

Ever since the putative performance of Hamlet aboard a ship of the British East India company off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607, the African itineraries of Shakespeare’s play have largely been shaped by colonial, decolonial and postcolonial concerns. In the twenty-first century, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet has become saturated and problematized by its expansive travel histories. Authors, filmmakers and theatremakers can draw on a rich formal repertoire when reimagining Hamlet in today’s globalized, postcolonial contexts. Adopting a new formalist approach that analyses the political affordances of processes of transcultural adaptation, this chapter compares two recent examples that reset Hamlet in Africa: Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan’s rewriting Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet! or the Resurrection of Hamlet (2003–2017) and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2016 Hamlet production. It offers a case study of how the Shakespearean template has been transformed by its fusion with African ritualistic, theatrical and artistic elements. The productions share some notable similarities in their formal principles of adaptation but differ in their reflections on the political significance of Hamlet as a travelling tragedy in the postcolonial contexts of their production and reception.