ABSTRACT
James Grant Benton’s uproarious Twelf Nite O Wateva! hit the stage in Honolulu on December 26, 1974. 1 Preserving Shakespeare’s plot while reworking his setting and characters, Benton’s play translated Twelfth Night, or What You Will into Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE), a language called “Pidgin” by those who speak it (Sakoda and Siegel 2003: 3). Benton’s script is largely what Thomas Cartelli calls a “proprietary” appropriation that undertakes “an avowedly ‘friendly’ or reverential reading of” Shakespeare, but Benton also engages in “transpositional appropriation” that “identifies and isolates a specific theme,” bringing “it into [the] … interpretive field” of his own culture and “confrontational appropriation” that “directly contests the ascribed meaning or prevailing function of a” passage from Shakespeare “in the interests of an … alternative social … agenda” (Cartelli 1999: 17, 18). Benton’s use of Shakespeare is most remarkable, however, in that it contributes to a transvaluation of Hawai‘i Creole English language and culture. Modeling what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has defined as “globalectics” – an artistic and interpretive discourse born of dialectical exchange between the local and the global (2012: 8) – Twelf Nite advances a philosophy of linguistic and cultural rapprochement. It pulls together Pidgin, Hawaiian, Early Modern English, and twentieth-century English; topical allusions to the Honolulu of the 1970s; and a pointed, class-based critique of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Together, these elements form what Ngũgĩ calls “a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue” (2012: 8).
