The staging of his only play, set in 15th-century Constantinople, allows a fresh conversation about decolonising English literature There is no more quintessentially stale, pale and dusty Englishman than Dr Samuel Johnson, committed Tory and devout Anglican. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him “the most distinguished man of letters in English history” for his essays, criticism and fiction. His Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its 40,000 entries, set the standard for all subsequent dictionaries. But who reads him any more? Even university students struggle with Johnson’s essays, which are mostly about other dead white men, such as Shakespeare. Traditionalists might decry Dr Johnson as another victim of decolonising the curriculum in favour of BAME writers, but many have probably not even read him. They are even less likely to have read his translation of the 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (1735). Equally neglected is his one and only stage play, Irene (1749), on the doomed relationship between an Ottoman sultan and Greek prisoner set in Istanbul, inspired by his interest in translating Lobo’s account of the religion and politics of the Habesha people of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both reveal an interest in and sympathy with people and places a world away from the elite gentlemen’s clubs and political debates of Georgian England. Continue reading...
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