Worlds Elsewhere
Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Shakespeare's Influence Across Four Centuries and Four Continents
Ranging ambitiously across four continents and four hundred years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global. Seizing inspiration from the playwright's own fascination with travel, foreignness, and distant worlds, Andrew Dickson takes us on an extraordinary journey: from Hamlet performed by English actors tramping through the Baltic states in the early 1600s to the skyscrapers of twenty-first-century Beijing and Shanghai, where "Shashibiya" survived Mao's Cultural Revolution to become a revered Chinese author.
Discover how Nazi Germany attempted to nationalize the Bard, and delve into the history of Bollywood, where Shakespearean stories helped give birth to Indian cinema. In Johannesburg, witness how Shakespeare was enlisted in the fight to end apartheid. In nineteenth-century California, encounter shoestring performances of Richard III and Othello in the dusty mining camps and saloon bars of the Gold Rush.
Both a cultural history and a literary travelogue, Worlds Elsewhere is an attempt to understand how Shakespeare has become an international phenomenon and why no other writer's work has been performed, translated, adapted, and altered in such a remarkable variety of cultures and languages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exhausting literary tour guide, Dickson (The Rough Guide to Shakespeare) writes with breathless astonishment about the different cultures to which the Bard's plays have travelled. He himself travels to India, South Africa, Japan, and Hong Kong, among other places, while also uncovering facts from the history of Shakespeare in translation. In the 19th century, for example, between 75 and 100 Shakespeare translations were produced in Parsi theater, beginning with Cymbeline. In South Africa, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, a renowned activist for racial equality, drew on King Lear and its themes of displacement and loss in his most well-known book, Native Life in South Africa. Meanwhile, an 1844 poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath begins by proclaiming that "Germany is Hamlet," in that the country, like the melancholy Dane, couldn't make up its mind about its future. Shakespeare's plays have influenced many of the scripts produced in Bollywood and other Indian film industries, and the Chinese and British governments recently negotiated a deal to have Shakespeare's complete works translated into Mandarin. Regrettably, Dickson comes to no startling conclusions the book even lacks a concluding chapter, and his amazement at Shakespeare's popularity throughout the world seems overstated.
