By Eze, Norbert Oyibo
This study attempts to investigate Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi as playwrights, comparing five plays selected from each playwright’s corpus, using trangeneratinal perspectives and intertextuality as basis for analysis and interpretation. The objective of the study is to explore the ways in which the plays of our chosen playwrights can be amenable to transgrenerational and intertextual interpretation, pointing out their explicit and subtle similarities and differences. The study draws upon primary and secondary sources, adopting Marxist, feminist, mythic and intertextual approaches to literary criticism as methodology, in order to enable us to have a feel of the complex and diverse worlds the texts were built on. Transgenerational perspectives and intertextuality used as yardsticks for the study amalgamated multiple issues in criticism and this seems to help us in reading the plays in their fuller and varied contexts – tribal, national, international as well as the differing artistic visions that frame them. In order words, the study involved evaluation and definition of the nature, sources, influences and kinships as well as the limits of the intercourse between the playwrights’ dramatic visions. Apart from illuminating the plays’ areas of common bond and differentiation, the study seems to reveal the weaknesses of squeezing playwrights and their plays into one generation or the other.