Worlds Elsewhere

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.