The Structural Coherence of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

This essay opens with an overview of the extant criticism of Soyinka's play. From the early paraphrases, through Marxist, mythic, and performance analyses, to authorial reflections on the play, Professor McLuckie leads into a new reading of the play centred on the idea of beginnings. McLuckie argues that the play's peritexts are central to our understanding of intertextuality as a structuring device, that structural coherence is dependent on the hybridization of beginnings, and that, as Breytenbach observes, beginnings/origins rejuvenate text and performance for the reader/spectator.