A Book Behind Bars: The Robben Island Shakespeare

A Book Behind Bars: The Robben Island Shakespeare, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger, opened on May 25, 2015 and closed on October 2, 2013. The exhibition highlights a 1970 edition of The Alexander Text of the Complete Works of Shakespeare that circulated throughout the Robben Island prison in South Africa from 1975 to 1978.

List of Shakespeare's works with signatures

The Robben Island Shakespeare is a 1970 edition of The Alexander Text of the Complete Works of Shakespeare—probably the most widely sold and read scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s texts in the twentieth century. It belongs to former political prisoner Sonny Venkatrathnam, who chose it as the one book he was permitted when first imprisoned.

Covering the volume in colorful, religious Diwali cards, celebrating the Hindu festival of lights, Venkatrathnam convinced a gullible warder that it was his bible, and when he was transferred to the small single-cell section where Nelson Mandela, among others, was kept, he took it with him. He then circulated the book to his fellow prisoners in the single cells, asking them to mark their favorite passages from Shakespeare with their signature and the date. Between 1975 and 1978 thirty-three of Venkatrathnam’s fellow prisoners signed the book.

It is impossible to know from the signed passages in the Robben Island Shakespeare why those lines from Shakespeare might have made an impression, or might have spoken to a prisoner in a particular moment. Indeed, some passages seem to shout their relevance to the hardships of imprisonment, or of political unrest, or of injustice. Other signed passages do not, and instead may have been familiar, learned in school, or read for the first time. Some readers may have been struck by fantasy, in the way that any good book removes you from your present circumstance.

The images of signatures that follow, and their accompanying descriptions, offer some speculation about what passages may have meant. These are drawn from David Schalkwyk’s book, Hamlet’s Dreams, in which he writes that making sense of the signatures in the Robben Island Shakespeare "is an impossible task. But it is also irresistibly compelling."

Front Matter and The Tempest

This article includes information on Sonny Venkatrathnam and Kadir Hassim who signed in the front matter of the Robben Island Shakespeare, and on Billy Nair who signed his name in The Tempest.

A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice

This article includes information on Elias Motsoaledi and Kwedi Mkalipi who signed in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and on Walter Sisulu who signed his name in The Merchant of Venice.

As You Like It

This article includes information on Sandi Sijake, Mobbs Gqirana, and J.B. Vusani who all signed their names in portions of As You Like It.

Tweflth Night

This article includes information on Govan Mbeki and Wilton Mkwayi who signed their names in Twelfth Night.

Richard II

This article includes information on Mac Maharaj and Joe Gqabi who both signed their names in Richard II.

Henry V

This article includes information on Sibusiso Bengu and Ahmed Kathrada who signed their names in pages of Henry V.

Julius Caesar

This article includes information on Nelson Mandela, Andrew Masondo, and Liloo Chiba who all signed their names in pages of Julius Caesar.

Macbeth

This article includes information on Andrew Mlengeni and Eddie Daniels who signed their names in the margins of Macbeth

Hamlet

Michael Dingake, page 1034

The first of three signatures in Hamlet is that of Michael Dingake, another political activist who spent 15 years on Robben Island for his involvement with the ANC.

Dingake selected Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes:

POLONIUS: The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character....
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel...
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment...
Neither a borrower nor a lender be...
This above all—to thine own self be true...
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee.
(Hamlet, 1.3.56–81)

Like many other passages, this selection as an aphorism, or taken out of context, is but practical advice given from father to son, and contains some of the more familiar and repeated lines of Shakespeare. Dingake, a strikingly informed and intelligent commentator on his situation, was unlikely to have missed the nuance of Shakespeare’s placing this sage advice from father to son within the context of entrapment and mistrust. This passage, instead, was likely to have been a familiar or a favorite, or cherry-picked for the folk wisdom contained in this isolated bit of text.

Saths Cooper, page 1035

In his explanation of his choice from Hamlet, Saths Cooper reflected on the “Falling off” of the values of the struggle against Apartheid in the “new” South Africa.

In the speech, Hamlet reflects on the nature of custom and the drinking habits of his uncle:

HAMLET: This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduc’d and tax’d of other nations;
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and, indeed, it takes
From our achievements, though perform’d at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So, oft it chances in particular men
That, for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin;
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason;
Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners—that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,
His virtues else be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of eale
Doth all the nobel substance of a doubt
To his own scandal.
(Hamlet, 1.3.17–38)

Cooper notes that he was attracted to this speech in part because so many of the famous speeches had already been chosen by his fellow prisoners, and in part because he wanted to avoid the obvious choice. Most of all, however, it appealed to him because it seemed to him that on Robben Island, in the midst of struggle, "the hardships, the frailties, the sheer dehumanization that you had to confront … brought out often the worst in us than the best."†


† From interview with playwright Matthew Hahn, February 5, 2008.

Strini Moodley, page 104

Founding member of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, Strinivasa “Strini” Moodley was convicted of terrorism and imprisoned on Robben Island in 1976.

Moodley also selected a passage from Hamlet, although his choice is a more familiar passage than Cooper’s:

HAMLET: What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how
express and admirable! in action, how like an angel!
in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.
(Hamlet, 2.2.305–7)

In this passage, Hamlet is alienated from his home country, estranged from his own language, and the very concept of the human is brought into question. Robben Island, it seems fair to say, highlighted this sort of meditation on the essential nature of man.

King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra

King Lear

Frank Anthony, page 1074 & Justice Mpanza & M. Essop, page 1113

Frank Anthony is one of three prisoners who marked pages in King Lear. David Schalkwyck writes that “Of all Shakespeare’s works [Lear] combines a representation of particular political forms of dispossession and concomitant suffering within a concrete grasp of the metaphysics of human need that resonate especially well with the struggle against political oppression and the absolute reduction—like Lear and Poor Tom on the heath—of the body and mind to their barest forms of existence. In the play, as on Robben Island, the specificity of the political is intertwined with the irreducible needs of the human.” †

Anthony appears to have marked the entire opening passage.

Both Justice Mpanza and Mohamed Essop chose Edgar’s closing declaration:

"The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, now what we ought to say."
(Hamlet, 5.3.323–6)


†Hamlet’s Dreams, p. 61

Antony and Cleopatra

T. Dawetti, Antony and Cleopatra, page 1196

Antony and Cleopatra is the only Roman play, aside from the popular Julius Casear, to be marked by a prisoner. Thompson Dawetti’s signature comes at the very end of the play—it is unclear whether it marks, then, the entirety of the play, or just these final lines:

CAESAR: She shall be buried by her Antony;
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it a pair so famous.
High events as these
Strike those that them; and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented."
(Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.355–60)

The significance to Dawetti of the play, or of its final lines, is not known.

Shakespeare's sonnets

J. Nzuza, page 1312 & Don Davis, page 1313

Six Robben Island prisoners made their signatures in the back of the Collected Works, by Shakespeare’s sonnets. J. Nzuza and Don Davies selected sonnets 25 and 30, respectively, both of which are poems celebrating the constancy of friendship:

Sonnet #25

Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whome fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun’s eye;
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die,
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d.
Then happy I, that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed.

Sonnet #30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up rememberance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I soughts,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan th’ espense of many a vanish’d sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paide before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

Neville Alexander, page 1318–19

Neville Alexander spent 10 years on Robben Island, from 1964–74, following his conviction for conspiracy to commit sabotage. Highly educated, Alexander had been studying and teaching in Germany prior to his return to South Africa following the Sharpeville massacre.

In Venkatrathnam’s book, Dr. Alexander marked Sonnets 60 and 65, both poems that meditate on mortality and the relentless passing of time—a subject sure to be on the mind of any prisoner:

Sonnet #60

Like as the waves makes towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

Sonnet #65

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! Where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift food back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

T. Cholo, page 1329

Prisoner Theo Cholo also marked a sonnet—his selection was Sonnet 123, a commentary on memory and a defiance of time and its transformations in the context of close relationships. Themes of friendship, love, and time are overarching themes in many of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Sonnet #123

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change.
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wond’ring at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow, and this shall ever be:
I will be true, despite they scythe and thee.

R. Mhlaba, page 1332

The final prisoner to leave his mark among Shakespeare’s sonnets was Raymond Mhlaba, ANC member and Rivonia Trialist. He liked Sonnet 140, a “dark lady” sonnet that deals with love, and which would seem to have little to do with his time as a Robben Island prisoner.

Sonnet #140

Be wise as though art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain
Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
If I might teach thee wit, better it were,
Though not to love, yet, love, to tell me so;
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians know.
For, if I should despair, I should grow mad,
And in my madness might speak ill of thee.
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad
Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be.
That I may not be so, nor thou belied,
Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.

Supplemental materials

Audio

Rebecca Sheir, host of the Folger's Shakespeare Unlimited series, talks with David Schalkwyk, also a South African, about what Shakespeare might have meant to the men who signed the Robben Island Shakespeare.

In the News

Mandela's 'Robben Island Shakespeare' on Display in D.C., by Bobbi Booker, August 22, 2013 for The Philadelphia Tribune.

Shakespeare Inspired Robben Island Inmates, Including Mandala, by Suzanne Presto for Voice of America.

Shakespeare Writings Inspired South African Prisoners: Sketches by Nelson Mandela included in exhibit at Folger, by Margaret Summers, July 2, 2013 for The Washington Informer.

Related programs

Folger Theatre