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Shakespeare & Beyond

Richard Burton, Shakespeare, and the search for the source of the Nile

Shakespeare in Swahililand
Shakespeare in Swahililand

Shakespeare in SwahililandOn their travels into the interior of the African continent, European explorers like Richard Burton brought Shakespeare with them.

This excerpt from Shakespeare in Swahililand, by Edward Wilson-Lee, relates the story of the search for the source of the Nile, during which the expedition leaders, Burton and John Hanning Speke, “read Shakespeare intensively and repeatedly”.


“The expedition which finally succeeded in locating the source of the Nile left the coast of modern-day Tanzania in 1857 and was led by Captain Richard Francis Burton. Burton was not yet forty, but he was already the Victorian traveller par excellence; most notably, he had undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca – the Hajj – with a shaven head and in disguise, and his account of the feat had made him celebrated for both his daring and his phenomenal linguistic skills. In later life Burton would lead further expeditions throughout Africa and the Americas, while also finding time to translate the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra as well as writing learned treatises on Etruscan history, medieval literature and fencing. Even a bibliophile like Burton, however, could not afford to take much reading with him when heading into the African interior. The tsetse fly reliably killed off horses and pack-mules before they were a hundred miles inland, and the brigades of native porters also dwindled with terrifying speed as the journeys progressed. Some of them deserted early on while the coast was still in reach, undeterred by the loss of pay and the threat of execution by the expedition leader as he (often hysterical with fever and fear) struggled desperately to hold on to the remainder of his men. The rest of the native contingent was decimated by disease, starvation and punitive raids from the tribes whose land they were crossing. Available porterage was reserved, then, for ammunition, medicine and materials for trade with the locals, primarily American calico (called merikani) and copper wire, which was sold en route to tribes who wore it decoratively.

Burton did, however, find a little space for one or two volumes:

The few books – Shakespeare, Euclid – which composed my scanty library, we read together again and again …

The volume of Shakespeare Burton took with him is lost, most likely destroyed in a warehouse fire which burned many of his possessions in 1861. (His edition of the Sonnets, which does survive in the Huntington Library in California, amusingly contains pencil corrections to Shakespeare’s lines where Burton felt he could do better.) But the extensive quotation from the works in the expeditionary account he published on his return suggests how intimately he knew them and how constantly he read them on that expedition. The Lake Regions of Central Africa was, like most of these narratives, written at great speed on the steamer voyage home in order to avoid being beaten to the punch by competing accounts from fellow expedition members, and Burton seems to have followed his (also lost) expedition diary closely in writing it, taking the Shakespeare-heavy description of the interior direct from the diary pages where he reflected on each day’s events and reading.