Shakespeare in Singapore

Performance, Education, and Culture

Philip Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429772115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare in Singapore provides the first detailed and sustained study of the role of Shakespeare in Singaporean theatre, education, and culture.

This book tracks the role and development of Shakespeare in education from the founding of modern Singapore to the present day, drawing on sources such as government and school records, the entire span of Singapore's newspaper archives, playbills, interviews with educators and theatre professionals, and existing academic sources. By uniting the critical interest in Singaporean theatre with the substantial body of scholarship that concerns global Shakespeare, the author overs a broad, yet in-depth, exploration of the ways in which Singaporean approaches to Shakespeare have been shaped by, and respond to, cultural work going on elsewhere in Asia.

A vital read for all students and scholars of Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Singapore offers a unique examination of the cultural impact of Shakespeare, beyond its usual footing in the Western world.

Part 1

A taste of home – 1819 to 1900

1.1 The East Indies

Shakespeare’s works, most likely, did not reach Singapore until the nineteenth century — Shakespeare wrote in a time of exploration and growing trade routes into the ‘East Indies’, a place which Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined as rich in resources and peopled by savages — Shakespeare’s image of the East Indies would go on to inform the rhetoric of Empire

It is unlikely that any Shakespeare – either in print or performance – reached the site of modern Singapore prior to the nineteenth century. Those living in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, likewise, had little to no concrete awareness of the lives of contemporary Malayans. The people and landscape of the East Indies, however, was alive in the imagination of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and, as we shall see later, their works went on to inform the mentality of the later colonial mission and the attitudes which surrounded the dissemination of Shakespeare.

The history of the small island at the southernmost tip of the Malayan Peninsula stretches back much further than the period of British rule. During the fourteenth century the settlement Temasek or Singapura (‘lion city’), a large urban settlement and trading centre, flourished for several decades. From the fall of Temasek until the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, the indigenous Malayan communities that remained were mainly involved in fishing, foraging in the jungles, and some piracy. By the time of Shakespeare’s birth, the Portuguese were in possession of Malacca and were in perpetual conflict with the Johor Malays. Portugal was one of the earliest countries to translate Shakespeare and so it is possible, although unlikely, therefore, that Shakespeare – in any form – reached the site of Temasek before the nineteenth century.

And what was Singapura to Shakespeare himself? During Shakespeare’s lifetime, European awareness of Malaya was little better than the sixteenth and seventeenth century Malayan awareness of Shakespeare. Sir Francis Drake had circumnavigated the earth and a map of his journey, which shows the shape of the Malaysian Peninsula but not the Straits Island, was displayed in London during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Shakespeare’s England also saw a large influx of goods from abroad and a rapidly-developing awareness of lands beyond Europe and Africa. Dutch ships were returning to Europe laden with items from elsewhere. Luxury goods such as pepper and cloves reached England from Southeast Asia by way of the Mediterranean, thanks to the Levant Company. In 1599 more than one hundred of London’s merchants formed what would become the East India Company, one of the foundational elements of the British Empire, in order to finance a trip to the ‘East Indies.’

Shakespeare’s depiction of Asia is representative of his time – a (largely imagined) place of unspecific exoticism and otherness. He makes reference to the ‘Indies’ in Comedy of Errors, Henry VIII, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night, in each case as a place filled with spices and jewels ready for the taking. Shakespeare imagines the Indies to be peopled by curious and primitive beings such as the ‘men of Ind,’ to which Trinculo suggests that Caliban may belong, in The Tempest.¹ ‘Indians’ are described as sun-worshipers in All’s Well That Ends Well and Othello compares the jealous man to a ‘base Indian’ who in his ignorance ‘threw away a pearl.’² Shakespeare likely read Sir Walter Raleigh, whose 1596 account of his search for El Dorado was widely disseminated and discussed. Raleigh asserted that a race of headless people lived on the Caura River, presumably inspiring the ‘Anthropophagi’ people known to Othello and Falstaff, and the ‘men whose heads stood on their breasts’ mentioned in The Tempest.³ The Indian boy discussed, and sometimes cast, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the closest we come to an Asian character in Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare’s image of the East Indies, in other words, bore little relation to the contemporary lives of the indigenous Malayans living where Temasek once stood.

Of course, this has not stopped colonial agents and artists from finding Malaya in Shakespeare’s works. While, in practice, a gulf existed between the world Shakespeare imagined and the actual lives of those who inhabited the Straits region, the ways in which Shakespeare imagined the East Indies and its people would come to have a significant impact upon the colonial mentality during the twentieth century. Agents of the Empire, as we will see in later sections, would come to see Shakespeare as a civilising agent – an individual of such intellectual greatness that he speaks directly to the lives of the colonial subject without even having met them. The potential for Shakespeare to give voice to the Other would have far-reaching consequences in English thought as the mission of the British Empire evolved, not only in the British presentation of Shakespeare in Singapore, but in the legacy of the English educational system into the twenty-first century.

All of this was to come, however. During the nineteenth century, the Imperial mission was primarily concerned with trade rather than culture, and there was little interest in capitalising upon Shakespeare’s apparent essentialism until the early twentieth century. English-language theatre in Singapore, and Shakespeare performances in particular, served primarily as cold comfort for homesick expatriates, with only one recorded attempt to give Shakespeare to a non-European audience. The faltering education system came to adopt Shakespeare only during the final two decades of the nineteenth century. It is this era which is the subject of the remainder of this chapter.

1.2 Performances until 1900

Shakespeare has been read in Singapore since at least 1842 and performed since 1844 — During the nineteenth century there was little perceived need to ‘give Shakespeare over,’ and, as such, Shakespeare was performed almost exclusively for and by white expatriates — Shakespeare served to reinforce, and facilitate the performance of, English cultural identity

On 30 January 1819 Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles signed an agreement with Temenggong Abdur Rahman, the local leader of the Straits communities, which allowed the East India Company to build a factory on the site of the Straits settlement. Rapid immigration followed; at the beginning of the nineteenth century Singapore had roughly 1,000 indigenous Malayan inhabitants. By 1826, after the founding of Singapore as a British colony, the population had increased tenfold, rising to over 30,000 in 1836 and 81,000 in 1860.⁴ These settlers came from all over Asia, but, by far, in the greatest number from China.

The founding of modern Singapore coincided with the rise of Shakespeare as a central figure in Victorian literary culture. By the late eighteenth century, thanks to the publication of several editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, as well as the considerable talent of actors such as David Garrick and Sarah Siddons, many British people felt they ‘had Shakespeare in their bones and blood.’⁵ The year before Singapore was founded The Sheffield Shakespeare Club (possibly the first such group) was established, and four years later The Stratford Shakespeare Society came into being. In 1840 Thomas Carlyle described Shakespeare as ‘the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of literature.’⁶

When Europeans came to Singapore, they brought their regard for Shakespeare with them. Sports such as tennis, cricket, and football were the pastime of choice, but amateur dramatics, too, emerged during the early years of the settlement. The first theatre was erected in 1833. Information as to what was performed and by whom from the first decade is scant and the question of the first performance has been lost to history, but it is likely that Shakespeare’s works were among those performed. The first mention of Shakespeare in the Singapore press occurred in a letters page of The Singapore Chronicle and Commercial Register (possibly reprinted from a British newspaper) on 31 March 1831 when, in reference to a legal case occurring at the time, the writer quoted the line ‘Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.’⁷ Five years later, The Singapore Chronicle and Commercial Register republished an article comparing Shakespeare with Scott.⁸ These early references suggest that, even before a stable theatre scene or educational institution existed to disseminate Shakespeare, his language was already present in the local European imagination.

Shakespeare’s poems and passages from his plays, in poetry anthologies and other collections, may have found their way to Singapore as private possessions during the 1820s and 1830s. Copies of Shakespeare were commercially available in Singapore from at least 1842, although purchasing the complete works may have been beyond the means of an average European clerk stationed overseas. In 1842, the stores of M. Dos Santos in Commercial Square advertised ‘Pictorial Shakespeare in his vols and parts, and each play separate’ to be sold at London prices.⁹ In 1886, W.J. Alan and Co. at 44 Raffles Place sold The Complete Works at an unspecified price, and in 1897 Kelly and Walsh Ltd. sold The Complete Works for $25 and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare for $0.40.¹⁰ Translating nineteenth-century prices into today’s equivalents is challenging because not all goods rise in price at the same rate – it was not until the late 1930s, for example, that, thanks to the Cold Storage Company, residents of Singapore could purchase luxuries such as ice cream. To place these prices in context, in 1910 a government telegraphist – an individual who operates a telegraph – had a starting salary of $26 per month (although this was considered ‘princely remuneration’).¹¹ A chicken at the time cost around $0.36 and an egg around $0.30.¹² A copy of The Complete Works from Kelly and Walsh Ltd. would have cost a telegraphist an entire month’s salary, but Lamb’s Tales would have been a minor purchase.

The first professional acto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.   A taste of home – 1819 to 1900
• 2.   ‘A great and perceptive love’ – 1900 to 1942
• 3.   Shakespeare in the final days of British rule – 1942 to 1963
• 4.   Playing Balthazar – 1963 to 1980
• 5.   ‘Not pukka’ – 1980 to 1990
• 6.   ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand’ – 1990 to 2000
• 7.   ‘To shake the head, relent, and sigh’ – 2001 to 2019
• …and exits
• Bibliography
• Index