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ABSTRACT
Wole Soyinka's sonnet "Hamlet" is first situated in the historical and biographical circumstances under which it was generated. A close reading of the text follows with interpretations carried out on two levels: transtextually with Shakespeare's play Hamlet and subtextually with Soyinka's disguised "messages" written during solitary confinement in a Nigerian prison. Prose writings by Soyinka are referred to in support of my subtextual de-coding of the poem. A theoretical framework for the reading is also postulated based on a schema of intersecting vertical and horizontal compositional trajectories. With the close reading played out, consideration is given to the appropriateness of Shakespeare's tragedy as archetypal template for Soyinka's sonnet. It is concluded that while there is neither generic compatibility nor any psychological correspondence between Shakespeare's protagonist and Soyinka's speaker, scrutiny of the political state of Denmark in the play, and of the condition of the Nigerian body politic at the time the prison poem was written, does point to similar political conjunctures.
Hamlet" is the second of Wole Soyinka's "Four Archetypes" in his collection of prison poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972). The others are "Joseph (To Mrs Potiphar)," "Gulliver," and "Ulysses (Notes from here to my Joyce class)." All four poems refer allusively to canonical works, both ecclesiastical-to the Old Testament Book of Genesis-and secular-to Shakespeare's play, Swift's satire, and Joyce's novel, respectively.
Following the theme of the conference for which this paper was originally written, "Strategies of Betrayal,"1 it must be obvious from the outset that Shakespeare's Hamlet would lend itself to, at least, a thematic reading along these lines in whatever sense one were to take the term "betrayal": either as treachery, deception, pretence, or as illusion, or of all of these meanings taken together. The focus here, however, will not be with the thematic configurations of Shakespeare's tragedy, but rather with strategies of deception at a linguistic level as practiced by Wole Soyinka in his poem "Hamlet." This will not rule out cross-referentiality with Shakespeare's Hamlet, but will prioritize Soyinka's poem as target text, rather than giving emphasis to the source text-Shakespeare's play.
Soyinka's poem needs to be contextualized so that our interpretations may square with the sociopolitical circumstances that gave rise to it. If we fail to do...