| Few Ugandans are able to finish their education, and students at all levels find little modern relevance in many curricula. Regarding literary education, few students get an opportunity to be exposed to Shakespeare's works. Those that do study Shakespeare find that the teaching of these plays still tends to be confined to literary issues, ignoring their relevance to the economic, social, cultural, and political concerns of Uganda.;In this dissertation, I attempt to analyze some aspects of Shakespeare's plays Richard II, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus from a Ugandan context. I do so by employing historical materialism, a method of criticism which assumes that a text is an integral part of the material conditions and the ideological issues embedded in those conditions at the time of the text's production. Historical materialism implies that an analysis of the text's historicity captures not only the text's specific historical and cultural conditions but also its relevance to successive historically and culturally based perspectives.;The three plays under study form a triptych bound together by two main themes, both of which resonate in the England of sixteenth-seventeenth century and the mid-twentieth century history of Uganda, particularly from 1952 to 1986. One of these themes is the danger of neglecting the common people; the other is the futility of political coups. The plays and the history of Uganda show how political opportunists take advantage of the backwardness of the masses to attain positions of power and how political coups are not the best solutions to political problems. A coup may succeed in getting rid of a bad leader, but the injustice done by individual leaders such as Richard, Caesar, Coriolanus, Mutesa, Obote and Amin is not the fundamental problem. Rather, the problem is with the people, who, due to the lack of political awareness, provide a support system by which dictators thrive. Hence, the people must change. The key to meaningful change is providing a relevant system of education to all people. |
