Description:
This book explores how Shakespeare and Achebe appropriate supernatural devices like prophecies, dreams, beliefs, and divinations to create complex characters such as Macbeth, Othello, Okonkwo, and Ezeulu.
Review Quotes:
"Kenneth Usongo has broken the boundaries of national and territorial restrictions and regionalism to explore the underlying cultural dispensations that unite us as humans-- the search for certainty and truth and the interconnectedness between the spiritual and the mundane that define and give meaning to life. He has put into palpable terms the seeming contradictions in Othello's "I am not what I am," Macbeth's the disappearing bearded weird sisters, Hamlet's the ghost, the Igbo chi, the pythons, the yam, the western church, and the evil forest into the boiling cauldron of modern civilization. What comes out of Shakespeare/Achebe's cauldron is the humbling picture of humankind's indebtedness to the supernatural and warnings against excesses in pride, political power, ambition, greed, homicide, and vanity." Emmanuel N. Ngwang, Wiley College, Marshall, Texas, USA