Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” plotters: the Old Man (Demoke’s father) and Agboreko as they work to
drive away the unwelcome dead and head off Demoke and his com-
panions from Forest Head’s design to have them be present as culprits
at the ritual trial; and the ferocious antagonism of Eshuoro and Ogun
which constantly thwarts and disrupts the proceedings at the “trial.” Even
the flashback scene to the court of Mata Kharibu recalls the inserted
masque of Juno and Ceres inThe Tempest: both enhance the magical,
oneiric quality of each play’s atmosphere as well as enlarge the spiritual
and metaphoric compass of the themes of each play. Finally, beside the
obvious and compelling parallelism of characters such as Forest Head,
Aroni and Agboreko respectively with Prospero, Ariel and Gonzalo in
The Tempest, Soyinka’s play is also indebted to the Shakespeare play for
the basic imaginative structure of the dramatic action, this being the use
of an elaborate and extravagant fantasy to stage the day of reckoning for
unrepentant perpetrators of serious crimes and misdemeanors.
For all its extensive borrowing from the plot of the Shakespeare play,
A Danceis most decidedly not an imitative, derivative play. Indeed, con-
sidering the fact that Soyinka was a young playwright literally at the
beginning of his career as a dramatist when he wrote and staged this
play, it is remarkable the extent to which he was able to assimilate and
creatively transform the powerful, daunting influence of a genius of the
order of Shakespeare, and in one of his greatest dramatic creations too.
Thus, the differences and departures from the dramatic structure and
imaginative universe ofThe Tempestin Soyinka’s play are just as startling
as the similarities we have indicated above.
Unquestionably, the most crucial departure of A Dance from
Shakespeare’s play is the fact that the trial of the guilty party is made
more central to the plot, and is given considerably more capacious “play-
ing time” in action and dialogue than inThe Tempest. And this, in turn,
derives from the fact that this trial scene is patterned on the model af-
forded by the most powerful judicial-administrative cults in traditional
African precolonial society, the type that Achebe brings to the narrative
ofThings Fall Apartin the tenth chapter of that novel.
Scholars of the institutional sources of spectacle in Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama and theatre have pointed to the tradition of the elab-
orately staged public trials and, sometimes, royal pardons, of real and
suspected plotters and adversaries by the monarchs of the period as a
very probable source of the scene of Prospero’s trial and pardon of his
enemies inThe Tempest.ForA Dance, the model of the trial scene or-
ganized around masked and unmasked but costumed adjudicators can