Worlds Elsewhere
Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Anti-apartheid activist, Bollywood screenwriter, Nazi pin-up, hero of the Wild West: this is Shakespeare as you have never seen him before.
‘Extraordinarily exhilarating … like no other Shakespeare criticism you have ever read’ (Margaret Drabble) ~ ‘A tour de force by any standards’ (David Crystal) ~ ‘Revelatory’ (James Shapiro) ~ ‘Brilliantly original’ (Michael Pye)
From the sixteenth-century Baltic to the American Revolution, from colonial India to the skyscrapers of modern-day Shanghai, Shakespeare’s plays appear at the most fascinating of times and in the most unexpected of places. But what is it about William Shakespeare – a man who never once set foot outside England – that has made him at home in so many places around the globe?
Travelling across four continents, six countries and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere is an attempt to understand how Shakespeare has become the international phenomenon he is – and why.
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.
