The Robben Island Shakespeare

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.8 • 878 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2015

⏱️ 19 minutes

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Summary

While Nelson Mandela was incarcerated on South Africa's Robben Island, one of the other political prisoners managed to retain a copy of Shakespeare's complete works, which was secretly circulated through the group. At that prisoner's request, many of the others—including Mandela—signed their names next to their favorite passages. As Shakespeare scholar David Schalkwyk, also a South African, 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 Professor of English at the University of Cape Town and, beginning in 2009, has served as Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and editor of "Shakespeare Quarterly." He is also the author of "Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays," "Literature and the Touch of the Real," and "Shakespeare, Love and Service." His most recent book, "Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare," was published in February 2013. ---------------- From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. Produced for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Richard Paul; Garland Scott, associate producer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore,
0:06.5	the Folgers director. In many English-speaking countries around the world, Shakespeare is a legacy
0:12.5	of British colonialism. And it's often fascinating to see how Shakespeare's works reverberate in these
0:18.3	cultures so far and so different from his home.
0:22.1	Sometimes Shakespeare appears in places you would absolutely not expect.
0:26.5	That's the story we're going to hear in this podcast.
0:29.6	We call it cowards die many times before their deaths,
0:33.5	the valiant never taste of death but once.
0:36.7	It's an interview with David Skulkvick, a Shakespeare scholar who I first met when he was editing Shakespeare Quarterly
0:42.3	and working as director of research at the Folger.
0:46.3	David grew up in South Africa.
0:48.3	The story he tells here is one of those unusual appearances of Shakespeare.
0:53.3	He's interviewed by Rebecca Shear.
0:55.7	So, David, we should probably start by telling people that this book came about because of a
1:00.7	complete coincidence that involved a confluence of the two things you were most interested in
1:05.3	in the whole wide world. Can you tell us what those two things are and then tell the story?
1:10.6	Yes, certainly.
1:11.8	I worked as an English professor in South Africa for a long time,
1:16.0	and I was interested in South African prison writing.
1:18.8	There's quite a large tradition of that,
1:21.3	with many, many people writing their memoirs
1:24.4	about their time in prison during apartheid.
	...

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