As William Shakespeare wrote, “all the world’s a stage,” and how his works were read and used in colonial New Zealand is the subject of new research underway at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
While Shakespeare died over 200 years before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Te Herenga Waka Shakespeare specialist Professor Sarah Ross and PhD student Austin Haynes are researching how colonial settler families and Māori in the 19th and early 20th centuries viewed and applied his plays.
“We are stepping off scholarship and public debate in recent decades that consider Shakespeare as a talisman of colonial authority—along with the Bible,” Professor Ross says.
“These perspectives are crucial to recognising the role of Shakespeare as a colonising force and a tool of cultural oppression.”
“But at the same time, there are archives that tell particular and nuanced stories about Māori and Pākehā uses of Shakespeare in this period,” says Professor Ross, who is Head of the School of Arts and Media.
The source material includes book collections and archives of personal and institutional materials that haven’t been brought into public view or previously considered repositories.
“We are looking at specific cases of who reads Shakespeare and how, who transcribes or translates the plays and poetry, who collects these texts, and the choices readers make when they are creating texts of their own from the materials of Shakespeare.”
Professor Ross is researching one Pākehā settler Auckland family’s cache of books brought with them from England, which document how three generations of women from the mid-1800s onward were reading and using Shakespeare’s works.
PhD student Austin (Pākehā) is a fluent te reo speaker and translator. He is attempting to piece together the 19th century English syllabi which Māori students encountered at Native Schools as well as grammar schools for Māori such as Te Aute College in Hawke’s Bay and St Stephen’s Māori Boys School in Bombay, Auckland, to determine what Shakespeare-related texts were taught. It’s no mean feat, with many such schools having experienced fires that destroyed archival records.
“I’ve been trying to reconstruct the English syllabi from those schools by using exam results submitted to government departments, testimony from students at the time, and correspondence from teachers, which I am tracking down in archives across the country.”
Austin’s findings reveal that Shakespeare’s history plays as well as the tragedy Julius Caesar were popular texts taught to rangatahi tāne (young men) especially. A number of Māori men drew upon the play with Austin identifying examples of the play quoted in whaikōrero (formal orations), in Māori language newspapers and in private manuscripts from the period.
“I suspect that they saw Shakespeare’s tragedy as an appropriate text by which to express points about their own lives and concerns, which were often closely connected to tribal and national politics.”
“A major aim of my work is to shine a light on the fierce ingenuity and creativity of these tūpuna (ancestors) who encountered Shakespeare’s words and chose to repurpose or reuse them in their own (often highly inventive) ways to express their own concerns and mana motuhake (autonomy) . These are tūpuna whose descendants still dearly treasure their legacies of leadership and intellectualism, and it is a real privilege to be able to focus in on this part of their stories.”
One example from the 1920s involves Ngāti Mutunga intellectual Sir Peter Buck (aka Te Rangihīroa), who drew upon a translated quote from Julius Caesar to critique the Anglican Church’s suppression of Māori autonomy:
“e meingatia ana te Maori e te pakeha hei arawhata pikitanga mona ki nga turanga teitei”
A rendering of a famous extract from Shakespeare’s tragedy:
“But ’tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face”
Or, as Austin translates Te Rangihīroa’s words: “The Māori is being used as a ladder by the Pākehā to climb to loftier positions.”
The dual research project, which received funding of $30,000 from Te Herenga Waka’s Faculty Strategic Research Grant, also seeks to connect with comparable work being undertaken on Shakespeare in educational contexts in early America and India in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Their research findings will be shared at the Australasian Shakespeare Association Conference hosted by Te Herenga Waka in February next year, which will feature international Shakespeare scholar Professor Nandini Das from Oxford University.
They will also take their work to the Society of Renaissance Studies conference in London. Their insights will feature in a book to be published after the conferences, Professor Ross says.
“Our work is assiduously local, bringing the granular stories of Shakespeare’s use here out of the archive and to global audiences. We are hosting international scholars here and putting our archival work into conversation with global comparators, from India, America, Australia and beyond.”
“Through our work, we hope to arrive at findings that help us to think in complex ways about the place of Shakespeare in Aotearoa’s cultural past and present.”