Worlds Elsewhere

Anti-apartheid activist, Bollywood screenwriter, Nazi pin-up, hero of the Wild West: this is Shakespeare as you have never seen him before. From the sixteenth-century Baltic to the American Revolution, from colonial India to the skyscrapers of modern-day Shanghai, Shakespeare’s plays appear at the most fascinating of times and in the most unexpected of places. No other writer’s work has been performed, translated, adapted and altered in such a remarkable variety of cultures and languages. But what is it about William Shakespeare – a man from Warwickshire who never once set foot outside…