Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe

by Andrew Dickson Narrated by Andrew Dickson

Overview

There are 83 copies of the First Folio in a vault beneath Capitol Hill, the world's largest collection. Well over 150 Indian movies are based on Shakespeare's plays-more than in any other nation. If current trends continue, there will soon be more high school students reading The Merchant of Venice in Mandarin Chinese than in early-modern English. Why did this happen, and how? Ranging ambitiously across four continents and 400 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, Dickson takes us on an extraordinary journey-from Hamlet performed by English actors tramping through Poland in the early 1600s to twenty-first-century Shanghai, where Shashibiya survived Mao's Cultural Revolution to become an honored Chinese author.



Both a cultural history and a literary travelogue, the first of its kind, Worlds Elsewhere explores how Shakespeare became the world's writer, and how his works have changed beyond all recognition during the journey.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Simon Winchester

…learning and assimilated high culture…mark out Andrew Dickson's wonderfully imaginative Worlds Elsewhere…a true travel book, of the best kind.

Publishers Weekly

01/18/2016
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. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

"Dickson's journey of discovery is surely the book of the year for Shakespeareans and many others." ---Booklist Starred Review

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"Dickson's journey of discovery is surely the book of the year for Shakespeareans and many others." —Booklist Starred Review

Library Journal

02/15/2016
In this engaging and informative book, Dickson (honorary fellow, Birkbeck Ctr. for Contemporary Theatre, Univ. of London, UK; The Rough Guide to Shakespeare) explores the ways in which the works of William Shakespeare are performed and interpreted around the world. He focuses on five countries: Germany, the United States, South Africa, India, and China, each of which he visited and where he talked with scholars, actors, and translators. The result is an absorbing investigation into the varying encounters of the Bard worldwide. In each section Dickson blends a history of Shakespeare in a specific country with a look at current performance trends. His research and conversations returned riveting stories about Shakespeare in California during the Gold Rush, the enduring appeal of Hamlet in Germany, and the playwright's influence on Bollywood. In some places the author visits, the seemingly innocent act of translating his works into native languages is a complicated and politically charged process. The plays themselves bring different meanings to different cultures, from the tense performance of Othello in apartheid-era South Africa to the study of The Taming of the Shrew in contemporary China to explore modern ideas about gender roles. VERDICT Highly recommended for all Shakespeare lovers and also for readers interested in the role of arts and culture in this age of globalization. [See Prepub Alert, 10/26/15.]—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile

Dickson’s exploration of how Shakespeare’s works were received, used, and altered in five nations worldwide is part travelogue, part cultural history. Because he details the process of searching out his material, it’s appropriate that he narrate the account himself and fortunate that he does it well. In expressiveness, skill at pacing, and ability to convey meaning, he holds his own as compared to professional narrators. He does an admirable job of acting when quoting from Shakespeare. At times, he falls into repetitive intonation patterns, understandably, but it never becomes off-putting. Rather, his ability to convey surprise, wonder, intrigue, and the like with appropriate energy and vividness brings a fair amount of charm to this interesting and enlightening book. W.M. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2015-12-17
Shakespeare, performed in the most unlikely places. In a melding of literary history and travelogue, journalist and BBC Radio presenter Dickson (The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, 2009, etc.) enthusiastically recounts his worldwide excursions in search of Shakespearean productions. As a playwright, Shakespeare "wrote bestride the world," more often setting his works in far-flung places rather than his native Britain. When he turned to England, he reached back into history. Part of his motivation may have been to avoid censorship; "playwrights of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras worked in continual fear of losing their livelihoods" if they offended those in power. But Dickson is more interested in how Shakespeare has been interpreted globally; to find out, he hopped around the world, watching performances and interviewing everyone who might enlighten him. Shakespeare has long been popular in Germany, he discovered, especially "at moments of political crisis or change," such as the rise of Nazism. In South Africa, the author viewed performances inflected with the nation's racial troubles. In Germany, he accompanied a woman who works on postwar political theater to a "self-consciously baffling" production of Coriolanus, "acted by five female performers wearing wigs to a soundtrack of corny eighties pop music." Although he asserts that "in translation…the plays had a habit of wriggling free" to suggest new meanings, Dickson is confounded by the difficulties of translating them into Chinese. "The challenges…were almost innumerable," a Chinese translator tells him, even with an apparently simple line such as, "To be or not to be." The author is amused by the notion that for decades, Chinese scholars put forth Marxist interpretations: "Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money," Marx noted with satisfaction. Despite a tendency to digress—he reports on every thought, step, and sometimes irrelevant observation—Dickson proves himself a genial guide to Shakespeare's huge influence and legacy. A frequently illuminating investigation of Shakespeare around the world.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171296513
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/10/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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