The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare

"In some ways, this is a bit of a cheat. It’s when you’re on Desert Island Discs, and you choose ‘the complete works.’ I was really struggling to think of a book that both registers the enormous energy and creativity of non-English language Shakespeare and Shakespeare reception and is also attentive to some of the potential problems about that spread. Oxfam is a global organization, but so is McDonald’s. It is Shakespeare or is it McShakespeare that what we’re getting by spreading this product around? Was it originally a colonial and now a neo-colonial engagement? How do societies and cultures make Shakespeare into their own property? Do they? Or does it always carry the slight otherness of having been originally in the English language and sometimes imposed on different cultures? This is a book that I wouldn’t expect anybody to read from cover to cover. But if you wanted to look at this whole international, trans-historical issue of how Shakespeare went from being a glover’s son in a one-horse town, Stratford-upon-Avon, to being probably the most globally recognized author of all time, it traces some of those tracks. It’s looking at the history, although it’s not organized chronologically; it’s also looking at the geography. For example, ‘What are the traditions in Japan and Japanese? What parts of Japanese theatre does Japanese Shakespeare pick up?’ The Kurosawa film, in a way, is a blending of the Shakespearean story and aspects of Samurai and other cultural narratives that are more specific to Japan. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Where and when did these texts go? What was the role of translation? We learn that quite a lot of translations into non-European languages go via French or German, not directly from English. There are lots of interesting things about that. In some ways, the spread of Shakespeare could be your history of globalization itself: the routes, the media, the individuals, the financing, the consequences. It’s almost as if you had one of those dyes that are used to see an X-ray. Shakespeare would be like that dye, and you would see how England, Britain and America extended their influence around the world. One thing about translations is that they seem to date more quickly than the original which—not just in Shakespeare—often seems to have a timeless quality. Translations keep being redone, not because they’re not good, but because they have to be of their time. You can’t get away from that. I did once watch the beginning of Kurosawa’s Macbeth film with a group of Japanese students. I was talking about Shakespeare to them, but I thought it’d be interesting to include something they’d be able to tell me about. So, there’s a prologue to the film and there’s a translation in the subtitles. I asked what it meant, and they said it was such a weird form of Japanese they couldn’t understand it. They preferred the English. I found that interesting. As quite a monoglot person, I like to learn more about how these things work."