Dimensions
159 x 241 x 45mm
Bollywood screenwriter, anti-Apartheid activist, German postmodernist, Gold Rush miner: this is Shakespeare as you have never seen him before. From the first recorded performance of Hamlet in Sierra Leone in 1607 to a one-man King Lear in China in 2001; from the famous 'Robben Island Bible', the edition of Shakespeare in which Mandela and his fellow prisoners inscribed their names, to the world's largest collection of First Folios in an underground vault on Capitol Hill; from the renaissance city-state of Gdansk to the revolutionary wars of the USA to the collapse of the Berlin Wall u Shakespeare and his plays have made a home for themselves at the most interesting of times and unexpected of places. No other writer's work has been performed, recited, adapted and translated in such a wondrous variety of cultures and languages. Travelling across four continents, six countries and 400 years, Andrew Dickson takes us on a personal journey of countless surprises in an attempt to understand how and why Shakespeare became the truly global phenomenon he is. 'Could hardly be bettered' Jonathan Bate on The Rough Guide to Shakespeare