Worlds Elsewhere

January 18, 2016
In this exhausting literary tour guide, Dickson (The Rough Guide to Shakespeare) writes with breathless astonishment about the different cultures to which the Bard’s plays have travelled. He himself travels to India, South Africa, Japan, and Hong Kong, among other places, while also uncovering facts from the history of Shakespeare in translation. In the 19th century, for example, between 75 and 100 Shakespeare translations were produced in Parsi theater, beginning with Cymbeline. In South Africa, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, a renowned activist for racial equality, drew on King Lear and its themes of displacement and loss in his most well-known book, Native Life in South Africa. Meanwhile, an 1844 poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath begins by proclaiming that “Germany is Hamlet,” in that the country, like the melancholy Dane, couldn’t make up its mind about its future. Shakespeare’s plays have influenced many of the scripts produced in Bollywood and other Indian film industries, and the Chinese and British governments recently negotiated a deal to have Shakespeare’s complete works translated into Mandarin. Regrettably, Dickson comes to no startling conclusions—the book even lacks a concluding chapter, and his amazement at Shakespeare’s popularity throughout the world seems overstated. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

January 1, 2016
Shakespeare, performed in the most unlikely places. In a melding of literary history and travelogue, journalist and BBC Radio presenter Dickson (The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, 2009, etc.) enthusiastically recounts his worldwide excursions in search of Shakespearean productions. As a playwright, Shakespeare "wrote bestride the world," more often setting his works in far-flung places rather than his native Britain. When he turned to England, he reached back into history. Part of his motivation may have been to avoid censorship; "playwrights of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras worked in continual fear of losing their livelihoods" if they offended those in power. But Dickson is more interested in how Shakespeare has been interpreted globally; to find out, he hopped around the world, watching performances and interviewing everyone who might enlighten him. Shakespeare has long been popular in Germany, he discovered, especially "at moments of political crisis or change," such as the rise of Nazism. In South Africa, the author viewed performances inflected with the nation's racial troubles. In Germany, he accompanied a woman who works on postwar political theater to a "self-consciously baffling" production of Coriolanus, "acted by five female performers wearing wigs to a soundtrack of corny eighties pop music." Although he asserts that "in translation...the plays had a habit of wriggling free" to suggest new meanings, Dickson is confounded by the difficulties of translating them into Chinese. "The challenges...were almost innumerable," a Chinese translator tells him, even with an apparently simple line such as, "To be or not to be." The author is amused by the notion that for decades, Chinese scholars put forth Marxist interpretations: "Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money," Marx noted with satisfaction. Despite a tendency to digress--he reports on every thought, step, and sometimes irrelevant observation--Dickson proves himself a genial guide to Shakespeare's huge influence and legacy. A frequently illuminating investigation of Shakespeare around the world.

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February 15, 2016

In this engaging and informative book, Dickson (honorary fellow, Birkbeck Ctr. for Contemporary Theatre, Univ. of London, UK; The Rough Guide to Shakespeare) explores the ways in which the works of William Shakespeare are performed and interpreted around the world. He focuses on five countries: Germany, the United States, South Africa, India, and China, each of which he visited and where he talked with scholars, actors, and translators. The result is an absorbing investigation into the varying encounters of the Bard worldwide. In each section Dickson blends a history of Shakespeare in a specific country with a look at current performance trends. His research and conversations returned riveting stories about Shakespeare in California during the Gold Rush, the enduring appeal of Hamlet in Germany, and the playwright's influence on Bollywood. In some places the author visits, the seemingly innocent act of translating his works into native languages is a complicated and politically charged process. The plays themselves bring different meanings to different cultures, from the tense performance of Othello in apartheid-era South Africa to the study of The Taming of the Shrew in contemporary China to explore modern ideas about gender roles. VERDICT Highly recommended for all Shakespeare lovers and also for readers interested in the role of arts and culture in this age of globalization. [See Prepub Alert, 10/26/15.]--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2016
Shakespeare has always been a travelerfirst and foremost, figuratively. Nearly all his tragedies and comedies are set somewhere other than England. Moreover, as Shakespeare-obsessive BBC and Guardian contributor Dickson argues near the end of this Shakespearean Baedeker, Shakespeare's characters and language are rife with traveling. Moved by a production of The Comedy of Errors by refugee Afghans who well understood the play's subtexts of separation and wandering, Dickson set out on two years of sojournings in modern nations particularly attached to the Bard. His big book's big chapters report his findings, in history and field, in Germany, the U.S., India, South Africa, and China. In all, Shakespeare first arrived in adaptations full of extraneous dances, songs, and tomfoolery and such surprises as Lear and Cordelia surviving and resuming their thrones. Each country hears Shakespeare speaking to and of them, and each has used Shakespeare politically: Germany to consolidate nationalism and the U.S. to endorse, though incidentally, the individual entrepreneurial spirit of, especially notably, California-gold-rush prospectors. South Africa and China employ the Bard to educate, while in India, Shakespeare has become inextricable from popular culture through movies and TV that constantly plunder his characters, plots, incidents, and apothegms. Dickson's journey of discovery is surely the book of the year for Shakespeareans and many others.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)