ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s relationship with Africa is as old as the plays themselves. This is not because the plays made their way to Africa during the playwright’s own lifetime: despite frequent allusions to the first recorded staging of Hamlet aboard the Red Dragon in 1607, anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone, recent scholarship by Bernice W. Kliman (2011) has cast doubt on the authenticity of this tale. The tenacity of the myth of the Red Dragon Hamlet points to the ongoing fascination of the Shakespearean world, and its population of scholars and theatre-practitioners, with the idea of Africa.
