Shakespeare Bulletin

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The summer saw a series of major auctions, including one in New York that shattered the record price for a canvas. Fixated on the eye-popping bottom lines, publicity pieces hyping the sales barely registered that 2016 was also a major Basquiat anniversary, marking thirty-five years since he achieved gallery representation and merited the Artforumprofile that brought his work to the attention of connoisseurs with little access to the SAMO©—a portmanteau/epocope for “same old shit”—tagged graffiti with which the artist made his name. In contrast, anniversaries were very much in the news in Stratford-upon-Avon where, for the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death, more of the “SAMO” simply would not do. The most high-profile event was Shakespeare Live!, a starry evening with a title that could be read as a descriptor of the April 23 BBC broadcast, or a hortatory appeal for a resurrection at Holy Trinity Church. Among the scenes, songs, and dances was a cheeky sketch wherein a gloom of Hamlets debated the ictics of “To be or not to be.” Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant, Rory Kinnear, and Sir Ian McKellen represented experienced Danes; Dames Harriet Walter and Judi Dench teased what might have been; Tim Minchin provided comic relief; and HRH Prince Charles himself tottered on stage to offer royal resolution. The company of royals and Shakespeareans ostensibly assembled to tutor Paapa Esseidu, the first black RSC Hamlet, in a production that overtly referenced the year’s other anniversary artist and his assertion that “the black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings” (qtd. in McGuigan 32). Though the influence was less obvious, traces of Jean-Michel Basquiat also appeared in Maria Aberg’s breath-taking Faustusand Polly Findlay’s vigorous Alchemist, rendering all three plays and their protagonists a trio of unlikely Basquiat Cases.

Though born in New York to a Haitian father and mother of Puerto Rican background, Basquiat was adamant that his “roots come from Africa” (qtd. in Fretz 151), and summer 2016 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the artist’s dealer-arranged visit to that continent. RSC director Simon Godwin acknowledged his own star’s Ghanaian heritage by placing Elsinore in a West African Denmark, all hazy orange skies, overworked ceiling fans, and fervently chirping insects. Bernardo and “Francisca” exchanged the text’s “bitter cold” (1.1.6) for the djembe/dunun drums that signaled the Ghost, the large machine gun of the soldier delivering letters to Horatio lent fearsome plausibility to pirates lurking off Cape Verde rather than in the North Sea, and the wooden masks and syncretic...