https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=1107 Index de Appropriation fr 0 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=1105 This article analyzes South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Exploring the social and political critiques contained in MacBeki and The Merry Wives of Zuma, this article argues both plays should be read as postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare – works that alter the original plays’ language and themes for new, local purposes. Uys’s works target the legacy of colonization in South Africa by deriding neocolonial abuses and the characters who continue to revere colonial systems of power and control. In doing so, his deployment of Shakespeare eschews reaffirming the kind of European cultural hierarchy that the British playwright is often associated with in decolonizing states. In this fashion, Shakespeare’s plays are decolonized by mocking their historic elevation, while at the same time being redeployed to critique national crises such as corruption and continuing economic disparity. However, while these two plays illustrate Shakespeare’s usefulness in critiquing national crises, they also reveal the precariousness of using satire for such purposes in the quickly-shifting political landscape of contemporary South Africa. This article concludes by questioning whether Uys’s two satires were outdone by the events he was attempting to critique. jeu., 23 nov. 2017 17:01:29 +0100 mer., 20 déc. 2017 21:01:43 +0100 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=1105