Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson review – journeys around Shakespeare’s globe

An entertaining exploration of the bard’s appeal, from Robben Island to Bollywood

A visit to an Afghan performance of The Comedy of Errors at the Globe’s 2012 festival of Global Shakespeare opens Andrew Dickson’s book. Set in contemporary Kabul, the production startled him with its revelation of the play’s rarely noted emphasis on exile and separation. It set Dickson thinking. “Unser Shakespeare”, our Shakespeare, as the Germans began calling him in the 19th century, has been claimed as a fellow citizen across the world in a way no other writer has. “Global Shakespeare” is now a favourite topic for academic discussions, but they tend to focus on the “what” and the “how” of particular performances or postcolonial generalisations. Dickson came away with a different question: “Why was Shakespeare, a writer who barely travelled, so popular globally? And why had he been not only adapted, but adopted, in so many countries worldwide?”

Worlds Elsewhere is his attempt to find an answer. Whatever else such an answer might encompass, Shakespeare’s mastery of language is not part of it. He is now far less widely known in English than in translations and adaptations, both linguistic and cultural – as when a Parsi Gertrude drinks poison in a glass of milk to avoid the prohibition on alcohol, an Indian Sebastian and Viola are separated when a railway bridge collapses into a river, and in South Africa a cold June is substituted for a freezing winter. Dickson’s quest takes him to four different corners of the globe. Gdansk, once the German Danzig, is his first stop, where a troupe of English players constructed a theatre in the early years of the 17th century, and where a modern theatre is being built to replace it. Weimar follows, for Goethe’s and Schiller’s invention of the romantic Hamlet and for the activities of the German Shakespeare Society, the first of many now established across the world. A trip across the United States, from Virginia to California, introduces him to Shakespeare’s huge American popularity, in the form of everything from Henry Folger’s obsessive collecting of first folios and other Shakespeareana, to 19th-century performances in remote mining towns, and with a nod to some of the country’s reputed 250 Shakespeare festivals. India acquaints him with the infinitely varying adaptations that crop up within Bollywood films, often unsignalled and barely recognisable behind the singing and dancing. In South Africa, Othello was taken up as a play against apartheid. An employee of Penguin’s China branch suggests that the interest in Shakespeare there is one way to link to a western lifestyle.

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