The Robben Island Shakespeare, with David Schalkwyk (Rebroadcast)

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2022

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While Nelson Mandela was incarcerated on South Africa's Robben Island, one of the other political prisoners, Sonny Venkatrathnam, managed to retain a copy of Shakespeare's complete works. Venkatrathnam secretly circulated the book to many of his fellow prisoners—including Mandela—asking them to sign their names next to their favorite passages. As South African Shakespeare scholar David Schalkwyk explains to interviewer Rebecca Sheir, there is something special about "a book that had passed through the hands of the people who had saved my country." Schalkwyk shares some personal history and reveals what Shakespeare might have meant to the men who signed the Robben Island Shakespeare. David Schalkwyk is a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He previously served as director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. He is the author of Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Plays, Literature and the Touch of the Real; and Shakespeare, Love and Service. His book about the Robben Island Shakespeare is titled Hamlet’s Dreams. It was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2013. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Originally published in 2013, and rebroadcast July 19, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, "Cowards Die Many Times before Their Deaths; The Valiant Never Taste of Death but Once," was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott, and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions, LLC, which created it for the Folger. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sometimes Shakespeare shows up where you wouldn't expect to find him.
0:04.8	Like, as the spark for a revolution.
0:12.8	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:19.3	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger Director. In many English-speaking
0:23.6	countries, Shakespeare is a legacy of British colonialism, and it's often startling to see how Shakespeare's works reverberate in these cultures that are so far removed from his own.
0:34.6	Sometimes, Shakespeare appears in places you would absolutely not expect. That's the story
0:40.9	we're going to hear in this podcast. It's an interview we originally released in 2013 with
0:46.9	David Skulkvick, a Shakespeare scholar whom I first met when he was editing Shakespeare quarterly
0:52.5	and working as director of research at the
0:55.0	Folger. David grew up in South Africa. The story he tells here is one of those unusual appearances
1:02.1	of Shakespeare, one involving a man whose birthday is this month, Nelson Mandela. We call this
1:09.0	podcast, Cowards Die Many Times Before Their Deaths, the Valiant
1:13.7	Never Taste of Death but Once. David Skulkwick is interviewed by Rebecca Shear. So David,
1:20.4	we should probably start by telling people that this book came about because of a complete
1:25.1	coincidence that involved a confluence of the two things you
1:28.3	were most interested in in the whole wide world. Can you tell us what those two things are and then
1:33.2	tell the story? Yes, certainly. I worked as an English professor in South Africa for a long time,
1:40.1	and I was interested in South African prison writing, and there's quite a large tradition of that,
1:45.5	with many, many people writing their memoirs about their time in prison during apartheid.
1:51.2	But I was actually mainly a Shakespearean, but I kept the two completely apart.
1:56.8	And then I went to Stratford upon Avon to a conference in 2006.
2:02.3	I was walking past Nash House, and it promised Shakespeare the complete works.
	...

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