Adaptation and Translation: Shakespeare’s Othello and Femi Osofisan’s Wesoo, Hamlet!

The adaptation of Shakespeare's plays for African theatrical contexts represents one of the most productive sites of cross-cultural literary negotiation in postcolonial drama, and a comparison of Shakespeare's Othello and Femi Osofisan's Wesoo, Hamlet! illustrates how Nigerian dramatists have claimed the Shakespearean text as raw material for political and cultural commentary specific to the Nigerian experience. This study examined how Osofisan's radical theatrical practice engages with the Shakespeare canon as both an imperial inheritance and a resource for political subversion. A reception theory and postcolonial theatre methodology was applied. Othello's exploration of racial otherness in a European context is read alongside Osofisan's engagement with Hamlet's plot in a radically different cultural and political register: Osofisan's adaptation transplants Hamlet's revenge narrative into the context of post-independence Nigerian political violence and military repression. Both texts use theatrical performance to explore how individuals with moral authority navigate systems of power that demand either complicity or destruction. The analysis revealed that while Shakespeare's tragedies derive their power from the isolation of the individual in a world of political betrayal, Osofisan's adaptations consistently locate the solution to individual moral crisis in collective communal action. The study concludes that the comparison of Shakespeare's originals with Osofisan's adaptations is one of the most effective tools for teaching comparative drama at universities in the South West geopolitical zone of Nigeria.

Keywords: Shakespeare adaptation, Osofisan, postcolonial drama, theatrical adaptation, Nigerian theatre