Cosmos and History in Wole Soyinka’s <i>Death and the King’s Horseman</i>

In the Author’s Note to Death and the King’s Horseman, Wole Soyinka famously asserts, “The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely. The confrontation in the play is largely metaphysical.” This claim has generally divided the scholarship on the play into those who accept it and those who do not. What has been noted less frequently is that the alternative between metaphysical and cultural-historical readings is not only a question about the play but also one within it – not simply because support for either view can be found there, but because the question about which of these interpretative frames should be used to understand events is the play’s central structuring principle. Recognizing this fact makes it possible to identify the play’s formal unity and brings into view its differing conceptions of the historical and cosmological orders of experience. Ultimately, the tragedy that Horseman stages is the fall from cosmology to history.