AFRICA’S YOUTH

Hokitika Guardian, 30 December 1933, Page 6

AFRICA’S YOUTH

FONDNESS FOR SHAKESPEARE. A KEEN SENSE OF HUMOUR. The delight with which boys in a native seminary at Nyenga, Uganda, take part”in the acting of 'bhakesp'ettfean plays was recently described by the Rev. B. Doyle, English master at the seminary. The soys come straight from the African villages to the seminary at the age of twelve or "thirteen and stay until they are nineteen or twenty. None: ot, them know any English at ‘first, and a course in the language and literature is one of the main items of the currieulitm.

“I was myself astonished at the sup-,, cess of the experiment,” said Father j Doyle. “The boys take to Shakespeare's: works with enthusiasm. They at once; understand the. rhetoric, the ’vivid: action, and' the rich humour of the ; Elizabethan theatre. They love the oratory of Brutus and Mark Antony and the comedy of the gravediggers 1 in Hamlet. Tlieir memories are prodigious, and they can repeat whole plays without a prompter.

“They respond at Once to Shakespearean comedy and laugh uprcarously at the play scene in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ when they" read it in class. I once tried to read scenes of modern farce with them,, but '"they' were quite Unmoved. They speak Shakespeare well, especially the more declamatory passages. “The boys soon get a sense of the archaism of Shakespeare, and quote him with amusing effect. I was: once explaining to a class cf hoys of about fifteen that they would have To prepare the whole of ‘The Merchant ;of -Venice’ for t'heir next examination, and not merely the trial scene, when a small voice from the back of the class murmured Shylock’s lie ‘ls it so nominated in the bond; They have a quaint humour of their own. A biy once said to me after a Scripture lesson, ‘You know, Father, I should not like to have been Daniel.’ I told him I thought it would have. been a -fine thing to be Daniel. The boy replied, ‘But he’s dead!.”