His search led him to the American playwright and academic Matthew Hahn, who, after reading a biography of Nelson Mandela by Anthony Sampson, travelled to South Africa to interview eight of fifteen surviving Robben Island prisoners mentioned in the volume. ![]() In 2012, The British Museum contacted journalist John Battersby to locate the actual S hakespeare volume for inclusion in its travelling “Shakespeare Staging the World” exhibition. The evolution of this work is itself a study in vision and artistic perseverance. The turbulent lives that emerge energize every scene. This play, based on that experience, is composed of actual verbatim dialogue spoken by two generations of prisoners who, choosing their favorite passages from the Bard, discuss textual meanings in terms that range from hilarious to profound. The volume, which became known as the Hindu Bible, was circulated enthusiastically among the prisoners-including Nelson Mandela-as a source of animated discussion. One of the Indian prisoners, Sonny Ventratkathnam, managed to smuggle in The Collected Works of Shakespeare by putting Deepavali stickers on the cover. Reading material was limited to religious texts. ![]() How Shakespeare infiltrated the Robben Island prison is a fascinating chapter in this extraordinary volume. It is a play incorporating parts of many other plays, selections, in fact, from the entire Shakespeare canon, words and lines that spoke directly to these prisoners in their unique circumstances. This is a play based on the words of Robben Island prisoners incarcerated during the apartheid period in South Africa.
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