Wole Soyinka
circumstance which might be adjudged the instigating factor for the pat-
tern that each play presents to us. Since these plays all belong in the
same corpus, in the same career of a playwright responding to a volatile
bloc of historical time, what follows is a comparative “symptomatic”
reading of the five plays discussed in the chapter. Each of these plays, I
shall argue, contains a dramatization, in form and content, of the “ritual
problematic” as a homologous structure, a “symptom” of pervasive and
deep existential, social and epistemological alienations and crises in post-
colonial Africa in particular, and more generally, in the modern world.
The dramaturgic distinctiveness of each play is thus a mark of what in
Soyinka’s career I have called the imperative of appropriate response.
Thus, if we are searching for the most productive area of Soyinka’s writ-
ings in which to explore the intersection of his political radicalism with
his aesthetic avant-gardism, it is to this group of plays that we must turn.
The press release of the Swedish Academy which announced the
award of the Nobel prize for literature forto Soyinka specifically
choseA Dance of the Forestsas one of the few works of the poet and play-
wright to highlight in the brief, two-page statement. It gave the follow-
ing summation of the external features of the play: “A kind of African
Midsummer Night’s Dreamwith spirits, ghosts and gods. There is a distinct
link here to indigenous ritual drama and to the Elizabethan drama.”
This is an apt summary ofonlythe external formal features of the play; in
terms of the deep structures of plot and characterization, the resonance
and allusions in this play are far less toA Midsummer Night’s Dreamthan to
The Tempest. Indeed, given the extensive borrowing in plot and charac-
terization from the latter play, it is surprising that no critical commentary
onA Danceand its “complexity” has looked to that Shakespeare play on
fantasy and moral accountability, on guilt, remorse and expiation, for
interpretive clues.
Like Prospero and Ariel inThe Tempest, Forest Head and Aroni (a name
that has phonetic echoes of Ariel) inA Dancelure some remorseless per-
petrators of monstrous acts of criminality and venality to a reckoning in
the heart of the forest. And, just as inThe Tempest, the slow pace of the
movement toward the settling of accounts results from the introduction
of subplots and “distractions” which considerably complicate the main
plot structure. InThe Tempest, these complications arise from the con-
spiratorial “plots” of, on the one hand, the plebeian plotters, Caliban,
Trinculo and Stephano, and, on the other hand, the aristocratic would-be
regicides, Antonio and Sebastian. In Soyinka’s play, the delayed-action
structure of the plot results from the exertions of, again, two groups of