The Dramaturgical Function of Songs and Chants in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman: A Performance-Psychoanalytic Reading
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68050/JAMS.2026.474Keywords:
Wole Soyinka; Death and the King’s Horseman; Song, chant; dramaturgy; Yoruba cosmology; ritual performance; cultural resistance; postcolonial theatreAbstract
This study examines the dramaturgical function of chants in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, investigating how these oral performance elements contribute to plot advancement, character development, and cultural resistance. While previous scholarship has emphasised the play’s ritual content and cultural symbolism, few have examined the specific narrative and psychological work performed by chant as a dramatic device. Grounded in Richard Schechner’s Performance Theory and psychoanalytic criticism, the study conducts a close textual analysis of selected chants by Elesin Oba, the Praise-Singer, and the market women. These chants are analysed for their symbolic structure, emotional subtext, and cultural meaning. Findings reveal that chant in the play functions not only to externalise internal conflicts, such as Elesin’s fear and ambivalence toward death, but also to assert Yoruba cosmology in defiance of colonial disruption. Chants operate as vehicles of ritual memory, dramatising the tension between communal duty and personal desire, and between cultural continuity and historical rupture. The study concludes that Soyinka’s use of chant transforms performance into both psychological exposition and cultural resistance. Far from being ornamental, chant emerges as a central structuring device in the dramatic logic of the play, underscoring the tragic consequences of disrupted ritual and failed transcendence.
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