What Is Global Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is arguably the most successful writers not only of his time but to date. His plays and poets have made their way across the globe and countless languages. However, the idea of the works of Shakespeare in a global sense is more than just the words of a man being read and heard around the word. It is how every culture takes his words, his plays and creating something that relates to them and yet is still, at its core, undeniably Shakespeare. It transcends language and stage, becoming an all-inclusive experience that generations of people can adopt as uniquely their own.

Perhaps the easiest way to define global Shakespeare would be to first get and understand of what should be categorized a local or authentic Shakespeare. …show more content…
The most notable of these differences is the language. From the Americas to Africa to Asia, the words of Shakespeare have been translated into various different languages, letting millions of people experience his words in their own native tongue. However, this should not be the only determinate for how we define global Shakespeare. We often perceive productions performed in a language other than English as lacking an “essential element of Shakespeare in the process of linguistic and cultural transfer”. While that is true, these performances also gain something that traditional Shakespeare performances do not have when looking at it from a modern perspective. The Elizabethan style of the English language in which Shakespeare used to captivate his audience is not one that is commonly spoken anymore. The little things like his diction, his subtle references that people of his time would have been able to catch and pick up on easily, are almost completely lost on those of us who have not studied the era. Foreign-language performance have the unique opportunity where with each new translation you can provide a more “colloquial” language that “becomes tied to the interpretation…of the particular performance.” This allows the translators to use words, references and phrases …show more content…
Shakespeare is more than just his words in a specific time and place. Shakespeare is all about how the his works of fiction bring us closer to our reality, taking a moment to see the world around us by looking into a fictional one. So global Shakespeare does not become defined by what is on the page or the stage but what is actually all around us. Any and all renditions of Shakespeare that have you stop and reflect, even for a moment, has had the desired effect of taking you out of the theatre and in front of a mirror of the world you live in is to be considered global