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    Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe
    Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe
    Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe
    Audiobook20 hours

    Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe

    Written by Andrew Dickson

    Narrated by Andrew Dickson

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 10, 2016
    ISBN9781515975168
    Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe
    Author

    Andrew Dickson

    Andrew Dickson has been an arts editor at the Guardian and is now a freelance writer and critic, who has also written for the New Statesman and Sight and Sound among other publications. He has contributed to The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2010) and is currently an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a regular on BBC radio as a presenter and reviewer, and is author of the forthcoming Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe, a book about Shakespeare's global influence.

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    Reviews for Worlds Elsewhere

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    • 5/5
      This is a splendid book.It is part travelogue and part contemplation of Shakespeare's plays and how they are interpreted and have been interpreted outside of Britain over the last 400 years. Andrew Dickson starts with Germany and itinerant bands of 17th Century actors, moves to the western frontiers of the United States of the 19th Century, then to India and South Africa of the 20th Century and finishes in urban China of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Along the way Dickson wrestles with the familiar problems of text, editing, translation, staging and gender and some perhaps less obvious issues of literary criticism, political science, economics and the mass marketing of British culture.While not every chapter is a success (the chapters on South Africa often felt aimless), this is a fascinating examination of the birth, growth and current state of the phenomenon that is Global Shakespeare. Recommended for those with a deep interest in Shakespeare and how his work is and has been performed.
    • 5/5
      First, I'll just say that I love Early Reviewers! Something about knowing that I may not get the book I request frees me to ask for books that I might not otherwise pick up. I thought, "World's Elsewhere looks interesting." It was! It was! Thank you, ER!Now. Andrew Dickson sets out to explore how Shakespeare has been appropriated, commandeered, stretched, accommodated, and staged across the years and across the globe. He visits Germany, the USA, India, South Africa, and China in his two-year quest and finds fascinating facts to fill every one of the 454 pages.I am fascinated to find that near contemporaries of Shakespeare were acting his plays on the continent. In fact, Germany has so appropriated "unser Shakespeare" that they felt, especially in the Nazi era, that Shakespeare was German except for the accident of his birth in England. Dickson sees Hamlet as Germany's play; Richard the Third as America's; The Merchant of Venice as China's. I was pleased to learn something of the challenge of trying to translate Shakespeare's poetry into any Chinese language, and to find that in the 1950s, the goal of Chinese performance was to be as Western as possible - hence the actors wore huge noses.Is Shakespeare universal? I would have said so, but certain African elders in South Africa reject the reality of Hamlet's father's ghost (a figment from the curse of a witch) and castigate Hamlet for being ungrateful to his uncle who takes on his support.My conservative little heart quails at the descriptions of some productions but thrills at the flexibility and integrity of the plays that stand up to such treatment. In short, I loved this book, and I'm happy to let it lead me back to the Bard.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting and enjoyable book. I had the honor to be a guest lecturer on Elizabethan drama to the graduate English class at Kangwon National University in South Korea in 1983. I became very aware of different interpretations of Shakespeare from different cultural, language and ethnic backgrounds. Andrew Dickson has expanded on the cultural clash and admiration for Shakespeare worldwide, by examining it from the perspectives of different countries, different political situations and different time periods.Shakespeare was popular, surprisingly so, in the USA during the 19th century, where printed copies were read out loud to illiterate mountain men and stage productions were a favorite recreation in the gold rush days of California.In Germany, Shakespeare was popular almost from the time of the original plays, through the German romantic period, and into a major problem for the Nazis.In India, Shakespeare came along with English colonization, and has been more popular in the native translations and adaptations than most Europeans had ever known. Some of the earliest films, and many of the more successful theatre productions in India have been based on Shakespeare's plays, dialogue and characters.I had not known that one of the earlier black South African journalists, linguist and political activists, Solomon Plaatje, had translated Shakespeare into his native language, Setswana, and perhaps this is the first translation into any African language at all. Dickson also pursues the story behind the "Robben Island Bible", a copy of Shakespeare's plays that had belonged to Sonny Venkatrathathnam, and had the signatures of many of the political prisoners held at the infamous Robben Island, including Nelson Mandela. An interesting account is how Shakespeare was used to undermine apartheid as well.The author then travels to China, where he examines the history of Shakespeare in translation and adaption to Chinese theater traditions. The book is easy to read and the information is presented well. However, there is a great deal here that wanders from the main topic, and the hundred-page plus chapters needed a good editor to cut them down and to make them more concise. Also, while this had a great deal of information on the history of film, live theater and Shakespeare in these countries, the cultural adaptation and changes of interpretation get short-changed as well. I wish that more had been given of how African and Chinese interpretations had been written, rather than just toss-off lines about King Lear given a happy ending or Othello actually being about class warfare. Perhaps another book could be written about Shakespeare in these countries, but rather than interviewing film directors and actors, the author could interview teachers and film critics about how well adaptations are or aren't received. And also it would be wonderful if this had been expanded to cover Russian and Eastern European productions, especially during the Soviet era, and in South America and other colonial countries as well.The book has an excellent bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as film productions from these countries. There is also an excellent index as well. However, for a scholastic book, there are no footnotes, and for a non-scholastic book there is some specialized jargon and sometimes verbose language that can be off-putting, especially for readers where English is a second language..I recommend this book for serious students of Shakespeare; for high school, community college and university libraries where there is a good dramatic arts program, especially with multi-national students; and of course for advanced English studies departments everywhere. This book is also a "must read" book for any English or drama professor or actor or director who will work or teach in another country, even if only temporarily.
    • 4/5
      This is a wonderful book. It is a big thick book, and it's very enjoyable. Part travelogue, part Shakespeare study, and part study of Shakespeare's impact on the world, Dickson's book is a pleasure to read. Dickson has clearly spent a lot of time thinking and writing about Shakespeare and it really shows here. There has been a lot of ink spilled on Shakespeare, but Dickson has found a new and really important angle on him.
    • 4/5
      In what is going to be a year full of Shakespeare books, exhibitions, and celebrations, Andrew Dickson's Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe seems likely to prove a standout. Drawing inspiration from the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival in London, Dickson determined to try and explore why and how Shakespeare came to be "the world's most performed playwright, its most translated secular author" (xxiii). The resulting book makes for fascinating reading, and I suspect that even the most well-versed Shakespearean will learn much from it.The five main sections of the book take Dickson to Germany, the United States, India, South Africa, and China, but within each he visits multiple locations and themes, from translation to book collecting to various types of adaptations. He interviews a wide range of scholars, curators, actors, translators, and others, managing to weave their very different perspectives (and his own experiences during this travels) into a very satisfying narrative.Recommended for anyone with even a passing interest.
    • 3/5
      I love Shakespeare, and I love that his works are being embraced all over the world (and possibly among Klingons). So the idea of this book is a wonderful one. After a few accounts, though, I got a bit bored. Perhaps it could have been trimmed down a bit?
    • 2/5
      Summary: Shakespeare is of course well-beloved in his native England, but his work is read and loved around the globe. In this book, Dickson looks at how Shakespeare's plays and his influence have spread in the four centuries since his death, and how each country and each era that encounters his works adapts them to fit its own cultural ends. This book is organized into five geographical sections: Europe (focusing mostly on Poland and Germany), America, India, South Africa, and China. Review: I really wanted to love this book. I love Shakespeare, and I love travelogue-style journalistic non-fiction, so the premise of an author traveling around the world to look at how Shakespeare has been seen and adapted and used by different cultures was a fantastically compelling promise. However, this book was a huge struggle for me, and I ultimately didn't finish it -- I made it through the Germany section, and read a little bit of the America section before finally admitting defeat after many months of this sitting mostly untouched on my nightstand. While the premise is really good, I had a hard time with Dickson's writing. It's incredibly dense (not helped by the tiny typeface), with long wordy sentences that often contained so many asides and parentheticals that it was easy to lose track of what the sentence was actually about. The sections themselves were similarly long and dense, and not particularly well-organized, lacking chapter breaks or any other kinds of signposts about where we were in history or in the story. My favorite kinds of non-fiction are typically narrative non-fiction, and this didn't have enough of a narrative thread to hold all of the (incredibly detailed and obviously well-researched) individual pieces together, leaving it to feel kind of dry. And ultimately, while there is clearly a lot of information packed into this book, it didn't do a particularly great job at conveying that information in a memorable way to a non-academic reader (at least not this reader), which is truly a shame. 2 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: As I said, the premise is fantastic, and there are certainly likely to be people out there who get along with Dickson's writing style better than I did, so if you're a fan of Shakespeare and the various incarnations of his work, it's probably worth a shot.
    • 4/5
      Dickson's work is full of interesting information and is clearly well researched. Unfortunately, the narrative was difficult for me to follow probably because I am clearly not as well versed in Shakespeare as Mr, Dickson. For the Shakespeare scholar this book would be a truly great resource.
    • 4/5
      Inspired by an international Shakespeare festival held in London in the lead-up to the 2012 Olympics, journalist Dickson decides to explore just what has made Shakespeare and his plays such an international sensation. Over the next few years he travels to Germany, the USA, India, South Africa, and China to explore the history and various iterations of Shakespeare and his works in these widely varying locales. Dickson explores questions like how much the plays remain Shakespeare's when translated into other (contemporary) languages and contexts, whether the wide dissemination of the plays is just a result of colonialism rather than global appeal, and the different political uses for the Bard and his plays, among others. Part travelogue, part history, and part critical exploration Shakespeare's plays in multiple cultural contexts, the book is a fascinating exploration of just why so many people continue to read and perform plays in times and places far-flung from the Bard's origins rendered in beautifully evocative prose. Recommended for Shakespeare fans who enjoy a dose of armchair travel.
    • 4/5
      I received this book through the Early Reviewer program. Basically, the author became interested in how Shakespeare became assimilated into other cultures than his native British one and traveled around the world to look at this. I learned a lot about German Shakespeare theater early on, Shakespeare in frontier days in the US, and his influence on Bollywood in India, the prisoners on Robben Island in South Africa, and in the Chinese centers of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. None of this is necessary reading, and the writing is fairly pedestrian, but it is interesting in its own way.
    • 5/5
      This is a fascinating survey of the way Shakespeare's works have been interpreted and performed and borrowed around the world. It functions as a bit of a travelogue, as Dickson spends several years traveling to Germany, the U.S., India, and South Africa to see performances, talk to academics, and track down performers, directors, translators, and academics, looking to understand how and why Shakespeare got to be so important in so many places. Colonialism is part of the answer; the "universality" of his plots is another, but the real answer is more complicated and less easily summed up. One gets the feeling that Dickson's researches left him unexpectedly at sea with regard to this question, as if perhaps his thesis didn't get a chance to finish cooking, but I don't think that's quite it - I think it actually is that the answer is complicated and elusive and is different for different groups and even different people who've been involved in bringing Shakespeare alive in different - and sometimes politically charged - contexts. Even without a clear conclusion, which it seems to me would be impossible, Dickson's travels and encounters are a fascinating, absorbing, incredibly dense read, and his writing offers a window into Shakespeare and his importance that one doesn't get from even an in-depth college-level course. This is well worth your time if you're familiar with and interested in the man, the mythos, and the way the plays have propagated and mutated over the last four hundred or so years. One wishes for even more detail, and I think Dickson does too; a glance at the references and bibliography leaves one wishing for time and space (and dollars, my goodness) to dive right in.
    • 4/5
      In this highly readable literary travelogue, The Guardian’s former theatre editor, Andrew Dickson, explores (and I mean that literally) why the world loves Shakespeare.Revered by Nazi Germany as well as the Soviet Union, unabashedly entertaining to both 19th century Gold Rush miners and contemporary Bollywood, and speaking to the politics of oppression in South Africa and China, Shakespeare appears to speak the world’s language. Traveling to five continents, viewing innumerable performances, both filmed and live, and interviewing scores of people, the indefatigable Dickson entertainingly tries to come to grips with the Bard’s appeal across countries, cultures and times. Lovers of all things Shakespeare will enjoy the trip.
    • 4/5
      As I sat down to read this quite wonderful book, Hamlet was being performed in English to the war and travel weary Syrian refugees in a camp on the edge of France. Hardly anyone in attendance could understand much of what was being said and some commentators thought this was an odd almost offensive choice of entertainment for these men and women adrift and alone in a foreign land. But they loved it. They were rapt and attentive and something moved them deeply - whether it was Shakespeare or simply the effort made by their hosts to give them an evening of distracted pleasure I do not know. The camp has now been dismantled amid much controversy but perhaps the moment will linger in the minds of the refugees as they struggle on elsewhere. The book under review is about that and much much more. Well-written and expansive, Worlds Elsewhere travels, probes and sings the tales of Shakespeare with such a thoughtful and unique perspective that it deserves a wide readership and Andrew Dickson a sustained applause. Bravo
    • 5/5
      I had read and studied King Lear in classes, but the first time I actually saw a performance of that famous play was an eye-opener. As we took our seats, the stage was inky dark. We sat and sat and gradually, slowly, we noticed something on the stage, but it was impossible to make out what. Very dimly, the lights picked out the object - it was the figure of a man, sitting on a chair. The lights, almost imperceptibly, grew brighter. The man was naked! I wondered if I had mistaken the night my reservation was for and was attending the performance of some other play. I checked my ticket and no, it was the right night, the right play, but I was very confused. The lights were now bright enough to see all of the stage - it was just the man and his chair. Then a couple of other characters came out and, silently, they carefully dressed the nude man, dressed him in finery, finishing with a royal ermine furred cape, a crown and a sceptre. Ah - it was Lear! But what was the point of him being naked?Of course, when the end of the play arrived and King Lear had his famous mad scene in which he tears off pieces of clothing (a detail I hadn't really thought much about when I read the script for a class), the staging at the beginning became more meaningful. I realized the arc the play's director was taking - the transformation of Lear from a common, vulnerable man to a regal powerful king back to a common man - the error-prone human he had been throughout, even when he had been bedecked with regal trappings and carelessly wielding his power, caught up in the role he was taking rather than being the true person that he was.With a burst of awe I realized for the first time that the director of a play could layer on additional, powerful meaning without changing a line of dialogue. He had added a bit of acting that wasn't prescribed in the script and thereby drastically shaped the play's context. True, Shakespeare's scripts gave very sparse directions on how actors should actually comport themselves, but that was also something that I hadn't paid much attention to in my studies. (It should be obvious that I was not a seasoned theater-goer!) The notion of interpreting a play beyond its scripted dialog was a real insight to me.What does this have to do with Worlds Elsewhere? Andrew Dickson, the author and a very seasoned theater-goer and erudite Shakespearean scholar, found himself also experiencing flashes of insight - his on the notion of the interpretability and adaptability of Shakespeare in the world's many cultures. Themes and ideas that usually went by unnoticed or thought of minor importance took on real meaning and major significance for him when Dickson attended the World Shakespeare Festival, watching Shakespearean plays performed in translation to their native languages by troops from Afghanistan, Brazil, South Africa, Zimbabwe - nearly fifty different countries. The heady mixture of new meanings and directions prompted in Dickson a desire to explore this international interest in Shakespeare in more depth.The notion of the universality of Shakespeare has been bandied about so much it is cliché. The question in Dickson's mind was not if he was universally appreciated, but why? What was the context for such popularity? How had the barely travelled Shakespeare ended up in such far-reaching places and not only appreciated, but adopted as an honorary citizen by many of those populations?So, suffused with new insights and aglow with the energy of a quest, Dickson spends the next five years traveling all over the world, from California to Cape Town, from Gdańsk to Kolkata, San Diego to Shanghai, watching plays and movies, reading and interviewing. Worlds Elsewhere is a journalistic account of his experiences and his attempt to untangle the many themes that have influenced Shakespeare's assimilation into the various countries and cultures.Interviews with actors, theater impresarios, politicians, audience members and authors and critics are detailed, historical context is delineated, ranging from Chinese opium wars and the role of the British East India Trading company to the California gold rush to the politics that affected traveling players in 17th century Poland. Shakespeare in the South African Robben Island prison while Nelson Mandela was held captive is explored and the interest held by the Nazi party is discussed.The account of Dickson's travels, itself, is absorbing - the transportation, food, hotels - the difficulties faced and how these, too, became fodder for many insights on travel and the clash of cultures as detailed in Shakespeare's plays. But does this huge amount of data gleaned from interviews with fascinating people, the details of Bollywood movies and their predecessors, the history behind Abigail Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's (and Washington's and John Adams', et al) interest in Shakespeare, how the plays were adapted for gold-rush era tent cities, that Ulysses S. Grant rehearsed the role of Desdemona while a lieutenant in Texas - does all of this fascinating data actually answer Dickson's question of why Shakespeare is so globally popular (and, where he isn't, why not)?I think the value of this account of Dickson's research is not in his conclusion, which, after all, must be entirely subjective, but may be captured best in another tired cliché: the journey's the thing (attributed, possibly spuriously, to Homer). The account of his travels and the process of his research hold more interest than the question of why Shakespeare is so popular. Dickson has travelled all over the world, talked with fascinating people, watched exotic productions of familiar plays, read and absorbed so much history and politics, and he has described those experiences in an articulate, occasionally poetic, fashion. The volume contains a comprehensive index and an extensive bibliography, but, surprisingly, no footnotes. It fits - this was not about the crusty and oft-times arcane discussion of Shakespeare's meaning and intention when he said xxx in his play YYY at line nn in the first folio version. This account was a live, animated view of the experience of Shakespeare in live cultures, with all their history and politics and ethos tossed in the pot and given a good stir. Dickson's conclusions may be supported by the data he derives from his exploration (though the amount of data from five years of focused research is huge and his results rather nebulous), but the account of his exploration is, by far, the most intriguing aspect of Worlds Elsewhere. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      There are sure to be a plethora of books, plays, festivals, exhibits, and tributes this year, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1616 on April 23rd One book surely long in the making is this one, in which the author, not only a scholar but a regular television presence in Britain, decided to take a journey to discover how Shakespeare had infiltrated culture in other countries. Why was he, the author asks, so popular globally?Dickson decides to go to five different countries where Shakespeare was quite popular: Germany, where Shakespeare was regarded as an honorary citizen; the United States, where the Founding Fathers were among the first to promote Shakespeare; India, “where there were now reckoned to be more cinematic adaptations of the plays than anywhere else in the world”; South Africa, where Nelson Mandela, while in prison, read Shakespeare; and China, where Shakespeare was reportedly so popular that there were more schoolchildren learning the plans in Mandarin than there were in Britain and America learning them in English.Much of the book reads like a travelogue, with insights about Shakespeare interspersed among observations about the history and culture of his destinations. In that respect, this book reminds me of the history/travelogues by Simon Winder.In each of the places the author travels, Dickson discovers that different countries are partial to different plays. In addition, the plays take on changes in interpretation both subtle and large, especially in response to cultural mores. Audiences everywhere can generally find something to which to relate given Shakespeare’s universal themes. Dickson also reports on trends going the other way; that is, how much art and language and culture in the different countries had been affected or transformed by Shakespeare.An extensive bibliography is appended.Evaluation: This book will delight Shakespeare aficionados. It may be a little bit TMI for others.