How many foreign leaders on state visits to the UK choose to divert their flight via Birmingham, to pay homage to William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, before proceeding to London for a mere summit on passing global matters?
Such was the choice in 2011 of the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, a self-professed “Bardolater”, like the 200,000 of his fellow countrymen who visit Shakespeare’s country each year, not to mention the 3 million Germans and 4 million French. The same might be said of the author of this book (and indeed your reviewer): their devotion to Shakespeare lures them on the most unlikely adventures.
Seeing an Afghan troupe performing The Comedy of Errors at London’s Globe theatre in 2012, as part of the World Shakespeare festival in the Olympic year, reignited Andrew Dickson’s fascination with the Bard’s appeal to other cultures, other worlds. So he embarked upon a two-year journey all over the globe, to discover that the English poet who never left these shores now belongs quite as much, if not more, to other countries as to his own.
Poland, where Dickson’s travels begin, built its own Globe-style theatre in Gdansk long before London finally managed to do the same (and then thanks only to a stubbornly persistent American, Sam Wanamaker). Germany was the first country in the world to form a Shakespeare society, insisting that his was an essentially German sensibility. Dickson shows how German writers from Goethe to Marx drew inspiration from Shakespeare. Had Germany won the first world war, its treaty terms would even have demanded the “formal surrender of Shakespeare to Germany”.
In the western United States, Dickson discovers that Shakespeare was the most popular playwright among the “49er” gold-rush frontiersmen, with the supreme risk-taker Richard III their favourite character. North America boasts more towns named after Shakespeare characters, and more First Folios in Washington’s Folger library than anywhere else in the world.
In Israel as in Nazi Germany, The Merchant of Venice has often been the unlikely play of choice. In China “special venom” was reserved for the works of “Shashibiya” during Mao’s cultural revolution, not least because his wife, Jiang Qing, was a former actor who had never been cast in a Shakespeare role – though, as Dickson observes, she would surely have made a formidable Lady Macbeth.
Shakespeare has since become “an honoured Chinese author”, to the point where more of the world’s high-school students will soon be reading him in Mandarin Chinese than in the original early-modern English. In India he has been all but single-handedly responsible for the birth of billion-dollar Bollywood, which has made more than 150 movies based on his plays. Amid other reverberations of empire was his enlistment in South Africa in the ANC’s long struggle for freedom, not least via a volume entitled Shakespeare Against Apartheid.
All these countries lay a claim to Shakespeare often deeper and more justified than that of England itself, where he remains a bizarre mix of tourist attraction and adventure playground for over-inventive theatre directors. Dickson’s tireless investigations demonstrate more powerfully than the sharpest literary criticism the universal appeal of Shakespeare, or what he prefers to call his “rhizomatic” effect – as in an underground root that sends shoots upwards in all directions.
Dickson’s travels often bemuse himself as much as his bedazzled readers; he has endearing moments of self-doubt, and vividly abandons journalistic convention to describe the chasing-down of interviewees at a quirky variety of venues. But this book is much more than just a hugely entertaining travelogue. In its strikingly original, engagingly idiosyncratic way, Dickson’s action-packed global quest amounts to a substantial new contribution to Shakespeare scholarship.
Worlds Elsewhere is published by The Bodley Head (£20). Click here to order it for £16
