ended in the enslavement and torture of Caliban is, of course, entirely lost on Ngugi’s deluded visionary.
Interestingly, however, Shakespeare’s Tempest provides not one but two prophecies of colonization, and if Prospero’s overlordship takes the form of tragedy, the second version is unmistakably in the key of farce. This subplot features the clowns Stefano and Trinculo, who are shipwrecked in the storm that opens the play and who imagine themselves the sole survivors to have been washed up on the island. In a series of burlesque episodes that run parallel to the main action of the play, Stefano (fuelled by the vat of wine on which he drifted ashore) conceives a plan to murder Prospero and rule over the island with the aid of Caliban, who (in his inebriation) believes Stefano to be a god. In the first great colonial narrative in English, at that time largely a matter of speculative fiction, Shakespeare had not only predicted with uncanny accuracy the course of Britain’s future colonial empire, but also the many comically botched and bungled amateur attempts at colonization which preceded it.
A few days after Eid I pick my way down to the dock, back past the Beit al-Ajaib and the shorefront restaurant celebrating Queen’s frontman and local boy, Freddie Mercury, in search of a passage to the mainland. Ferry travel here, as in so many parts of the Third World, creates a class system with stark boundaries: a relatively comfortable passage for me and other travellers who can afford it, and dangerously overcrowded hulks for those who can’t. The number of sunken vessels is astonishing, though for one reason and another they hardly register a blip on the Western media radar. The week after I make the short hop over warm waters to the mainland a cheap-passage ferry, with an official capacity of 645, capsizes with 3586 people on board; 2976 of them – roughly the number of excess passengers – are drowned.2
Though it is not the hovercraft on which I came to the island as a child, my ferry is sufficiently commodious for me to continue to read during the crossing, and to think about the first performances of Shakespeare in East Africa. Striking as John Baptist’s photographs of shipboard actors are, they cannot claim to record the first English stage plays acted on (or off) the coast of Swahililand. In fact, one of the most incredible stories in all of Shakespeareana recounts how Shakespeare’s work was acted off the East African coast during the poet’s own lifetime. The performances in question are said to have taken place on the Dragon, which led the Hector and the Constant on the third voyage of the East India Company between 1607 and 1610, years during which Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published and when he was himself writing about sea travel in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. While the Constant made a swift passage around the Cape of Good Hope to its destination of the Molucca Islands (the fountainhead of the early modern spice trade, now in modern Indonesia), the Dragon and the Hector were beset by a litany of disasters and spent much of the next year and a half coasting slowly around Africa. In extracts supposedly taken from the diary of Captain William Keeling of the Dragon, first published as a postscript to an article on Hamlet in The European Magazine of 1825–6, we hear that the ship’s crew were distracted from more dangerous temptations by being allowed to stage two of Shakespeare’s plays on board:
Sept. 5, 1607. I sent the Portuguese interpreter, according to his desire, aboard the Hector, where he broke fast, and after came aboord me, where we had the TRAGEDY OF HAMLET; and in the afternoone we went altogether ashore, to see if we could shoot an elephant.
Sept. 29, 1607. Captain Hawkins [of the Hector] dined with me, when my company acted KINGE RICHARDE THE SECOND.
March 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