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Island of Inversion: Carnival, Parody and Subversion in the Carriacou Shakespeare Mas, by
Ral J. Vzquez Vlez
The Grenadine island of Carriacou is home to one of the most syncretic carnival
traditions in the Caribbean. Though nowhere near as famous or flashy as its counterparts in
Trinidad and New Orleans, the Carriacou Carnival is host to endemic performance acts that have
long since disappeared from the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean, chief among them being the
Shakespeare Mas held each February. On that day, hundreds of players and spectators gather
from all over Carriacou at Hillsborough, the largest and only city in the island; once there, the
day unfolds through an unregimented schedule of singing, dancing, drinking and merrymaking
marked by cultural performances.
When the time comes to begin the Shakespeare Mas, all-male participants dressed in
elaborate costumes resembling a kingly clown clad in little mirrors gather in groups; two of them
challenge one another to recite previously memorized excerpts from William Shakespeares
Julius Caesar. The performer who better and more accurately recites the most passages is
crowned as king of his town or village, and those who flub their lines or fail to perform to the
crowds liking are struck by whips made out of wiring and phone cords, which all participants
wield for that purpose. Afterwards, the group takes the victorious recitalist to the next among the
Carriacouan villages to meet further challenges along the way, a journey that consumes most if
not all of carnival day.
The Shakespeare Mas is rife with African and European influences. According to Joan
Fayer and Joan McMurray in The Carriacou Mas as Syncretic Artifact, the masque combines
European pre-Lenten celebrations, British mummers Christmas performances and West
African masquerading traditions to create a Caribbean creole artifact where English literary
text, verbal combat, costumes, and dance-like movements bring people together for a day of fun

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and canonized social subversion (Fayer and McMurray 59). As Antonio Bentez-Rojo argues in
his Introduction to The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective,
cultural manifestations such as carnival at Carriacou and elsewhere in the Caribbean are
syncretic artifacts: they are not syntheses, but signifiers made of differences (Bentez-Rojo
21). Bentez-Rojo describes this process of Caribbeanization as follows:
What happens is that, in the melting pot of societies that the world provides,
syncretic processes realize themselves through an economy in whose modality of
exchange the signifier of there---of the Other---is consumed (read) according to
local codes that are already in existence; that is, codes from here (Bentez-Rojo 21).
Caribbean peoples, including those from Carriacou, are not mere passive receptors of cultural
influences and historical abuse. These people are aware (each to a different degree) of the
subversive subtexts through which they interpret their activities at carnival along with their ways
of seeing, thinking and judging the world, each other and themselves.
Knowing this adds another dimension to the Carriacou Shakespeare Mas. The texts
proclaimed throughout the day are selections from Julius Caesar originally pulled from The
Royal Reader, a textbook used in the British West Indies for schooling purposes from the 1880s
to the 1950s. As Craig Dionne mentions in Commonplace Literacy and the Colonial Scene:
The Case of Carriacous Shakespeare Mas, the Reader is comprised of examples of fine
oratory, condensed versions of literary masterpieces [such as Julius Caesar] and sections of
recitations from the biographies of Napoleon, Queen Victoria, or William the Conqueror
(Dionne 37). These texts are cut and pasted with no attention for narrative sequence or
respect to original context; furthermore, these selections deal with subject matter foreign to
Caribbean culture and history, let alone Carriacous (Dionne 37). They were intended to be
memorized and recited in front of an audience, namely a colonial classroom presided by a

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teacher. The latter perhaps would be ready to catch any mistakes or omissions the reciting pupil
might make and chastise them accordingly with a given number of whiplashes, reserved as well
for whenever he deemed it necessary to punish the boys on account of laziness, incivility or
insubordination. For their part, the speakers co-disciples would be stiffly quiet and attentive,
ready to laugh at the misfortune of their fellow wretch while being weary lest the same or worse
should befall them.
In addition, these children would learn to read and write by memorization for its own
sake, mostly to avoid being beaten at school and receiving far worse punishment upon returning
home; physical and psychological abuse aside, most if not all their contact with Shakespeares
works would be through fragmented selections tailored to fit the needs of the classroom and the
demands of colonial curricula. These ways of approaching Julius Caesar and other so-called
master texts taught teachers and students alike to approach his [Shakespeares] narratives as an
endless reserve of multiple and polysemous orientations and perspectives that are extracted
from the text in the form of allegorical readings mirroring an unchanging and univocal
experience (Dionne 38). In other words, colonial teachers and colonized pupils were made to
look upon Shakespeare as a godlike figure who wrote quasi-divine works rife with universal
truths which codify and canonize all human experiences. However, embracing this type of
reading meant divorcing Shakespeare as man and author from his particular epoch and historical
contexts; as consequence, his works were perceived less as individual pieces more or less rooted
in continuity and concerns prevalent at the time of the author and more as documents nearly as
eternal and binding as the Bible itself. It would have been pointless, not to say suicidal, for
anyone to refute these ways of thinking and reading: most teachers and people at large would
have been wise to keep their mouths shut, assuming they ever thought about the matter at all.

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Less still could be expected from the students themselves: the majority would be chiefly
concerned with not being whipped or paddled at school and not getting earfuls and welts at
home, so they only needed to do as they were told, hope for the best and carry on.
Even so, the Shakespeare Mas is more than a mere remembrance of Carriacous colonial
past, or a mockery of pitifully flawed methods of pedagogy and instilling discipline; Dionne
contends that the masque borrows from past and present performances throughout the Caribbean,
such as the defunct Pierrot Grenade from Trinidad. As Andrew T. Carr attests in Pierott
Grenade, this performance featured a jester-character who happened to be a deeply learned
scholar that would be challenged by a student-character to spell long (and perhaps rarely used
pedantic) words; this know-it-all jester also had to recite longer lectures on esoteric
knowledge, anything from Shakespearian excerpts to agricultural garden methods and spicy
satire on political, social, and economic matters (Carr 284; quot. in Dionne 40). The greater
purpose behind these comic spectacles was to mock colonial schoolteachers pretensions of
knowledge and authority while also unmasking the disciplinarian tactics and dictatorial
bearing of colonial power and education, all part of the metropolis intentions of Anglicizing
its wayward children (Dionne 40).
Like the Pierrot Grenade and other masques before it, the Shakespeare Mas is a comic
reversal of colonial practices enforced by physical punishment and other no less violent types of
coercion. As Dionne elaborates, this type of subversive performance gives birth to a sort of
doubling imbedded in its very nature; such doubling consists of an appreciation for the
liberating empowerment of the colonizing position, coupled with a deeper comic inversion
that forcefully unveils the oppression and abuse upon which colonizers build their rule upon the
colonized (Dionne 40). The duality that makes Caribbean carnival celebrations possible explains

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how participants of the Shakespeare Mas treat it both as a genuine expression of their love for
his [Shakespeares] language and something of a crude parody of oratorical pedagogy
(Dionne 40). This relationship of simultaneous love and hate accounts for a certain pride of
knowing this particular work of Shakespeare, coupled with a regretful loathing of the ways
through which most generations were introduced to the Bard. To the people of Carriacou,
Shakespeare was and still is an island of inversion: he stands to this date as a cruel reminder of
an oppressive past, yet also as a means to achieve recognition and validation in society long after
the teachers rod has fallen into disuse and new editions of the book left most Royal Readers to
gather glorious dust.
Saturday, November 15th, 2014

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Works Cited
Bentez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective.
Introduction: The Repeating Island. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. 1-29.
Print.
Dionne, Craig. Commonplace Literacy and the Colonial Scene: The Case of Carriacous
Shakespeare Mas. Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Craig
Dionne and Parmita Kapadia (eds.). Ashgate Publishing, 2008. 37-57. Print.
Fayer, Joan M. and McMurray, Joan F. The Carriacou Mas as Syncretic Artifact. The
Journal of American Folklore 112.443 (Winter 1999): 58-73. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.