Soyinka, Wole
Soyinka, Wole (b. 1934),Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and political activist. Soyinka's plays combine influences from his own Yoruba culture, Shakespeare, and the Greeks. Soyinka studied Shakespeare with G. Wilson Knight at Leeds (Knight's Golden Labyrinth acknowledges a Soyinka essay on Lear), and Soyinka's theatre of ceremony, festival, and ritual frequently echoes Shakespeare: Macbeth in A Dance of the Forests (1963); the chronicle plays in Kongi's Harvest (1967); Antony in Death and the King's Horseman (1975). A 1983 paper (Shakespeare Survey, 36) confirms this eclecticism.
Tom Matheson
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