Worlds Elsewhere Read online

  In fact, he seems actively to have avoided writing about the Britain of his own lifetime: the plays Shakespeare does locate in the British Isles are either distanced by time (the English histories) or by theme (the ancient Britain of King Lear, feudal Scotland in Macbeth, the Roman invasion-era Cymbeline). In arresting contrast to born-and-bred Londoners such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, whose plays place on stage the city in which they lived and breathed, Shakespeare sets only one full script, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in anything resembling the Elizabethan world he knew.

  On a microscopic level, too, the scripts are littered with tiny but telling references to what Coriolanus calls ‘a world elsewhere’. Macbeth’s Witches make fleeting mention of the disastrous far-Eastern voyage of the Tiger, one of whose shipmates went on to found the East India Company; Henry V’s prologue glances at the Earl of Essex’s campaign in Ireland; Love’s Labour’s Lost pokes sly fun at the inept diplomacy of Ivan the Terrible. Hamlet frets that his fortunes will ‘turn Turk’. In Measure for Measure we hear gossip about ‘China dishes’. The ‘Indies’ – in Shakespeare’s time America as well as the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia – make a fleeting appearance in several texts, notably A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Oberon and Titania wage a fairy-tale war over an enigmatic boy ‘stolen from an Indian king’. No fewer than five plays – Dream, Henry VI Part III, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing and Richard II – mention that remotest location of all from England, the Antipodes’.

  Shakespeare was not merely indulging his own curiosity about worlds elsewhere (or those of his audiences); as scholars have recently begun to understand, he reflected the world as it was changing around him. Though England lagged far behind colonial powers such as Spain and Portugal, international trade had begun to make its presence felt by the end of the sixteenth century, particularly in London, where the Royal Exchange became a nexus for merchants from across the globe. In 1600, the East India Company was founded to capitalise on the spice routes through Arabia and towards Asia, while other joint-stock companies soon thrust west towards the Americas. In 1603 the Scottish James I took the throne, accompanied by his Danish queen, Anne, ushering in a new, more geopolitically open era after the combative defensiveness of the Elizabethan period.

  As well as experiencing this first upsurge in global trade – spices, silks, tobacco, exotic foodstuffs – Shakespeare and other Londoners jostled among a melting pot of immigrants, including people from the Jewish diaspora, Spanish ‘blackamoors’, former slaves from North and West Africa and religious refugees from the European continent. Simply by strolling down to the docks or around St Paul’s, nicknamed ‘the whole world’s map’ by one contemporary writer, the playwright could have heard half the languages of Europe. The expansion of British influence is attested to by the extraordinary fact that in the summer of 1603, around the time Shakespeare was writing Othello, a small clutch of Native Americans were shipped across from Chesapeake Bay and ordered to paddle their canoe up the Thames for the amusement of spectators.

  Shakespeare (who, as a Warwickshireman, was himself an alien of sorts) seems to have been particularly intimate with the city’s expatriates. As well as reading French and Italian, he knew people who could correct his grammar: from around 1602 he lived with the family of a French Huguenot refugee, Christopher Mountjoy, and his wife in Bishopsgate in the City of London, an area known for the diversity of its residents, teeming with Flemish, Dutch and French families. He was apparently on nodding terms with the Italian translator of Montaigne, John Florio, and perhaps acquainted with the Bassanos, a family of Italian Jewish musicians. One thinks of Bob Dylan’s lines in ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’:

  Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley

  With his pointed shoes and his bells

  Speaking to some French girl …

  Footwear notwithstanding, they are accurate enough: not only did Shakespeare know at least one ‘French girl’, Christopher and Marie Mountjoy’s daughter Mary, he acted as a go-between in her marriage to a young apprentice (and later testified in a lawsuit regarding it).

  Soon after moving in with the Mountjoys, in 1603, Shakespeare for the first time became a royal servant, putting him into contact with visitors not only from mainland Europe but from far beyond. Ambassadors and tourists from elsewhere in Europe came to see his plays at the public theatres; at court, meanwhile, his newly renamed King’s Men played more often than any other company, including for foreign dignitaries.

  If Jaques is right to suggest in As You Like It that ‘all the world’s a stage’ – the phrase is held to be the motto of the original Globe – then the stage was also a way of reflecting the world back at these increasingly diverse audiences. The Swiss doctor Thomas Platter, who came to London as a tourist in 1599 and witnessed the first-known performance of Julius Caesar, claimed that the theatre was the means by which Londoners found out what was happening abroad: ‘the English,’ Platter remarked, ‘for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters … at home.’

  There were more literal voyages, too. Rummaging in early production history, I came across a tale frequently repeated in accounts of Shakespeare and the world beyond British shores. It seems almost too good to be true, offering a tantalising connection between the East India Company, the globalising currents beginning to flow through London, and Shakespeare. In March 1607 – the same year the playwright might have begun work on Pericles – a vessel called the Red Dragon weighed anchor at Tilbury and headed into the North Sea. Commanded by the young captain William Keeling, the Dragon was the flagship of the Company’s third voyage to the Far East. Keeling’s destination was Java in Indonesia; he had orders to buy as many spices as could be squeezed into his hold and open trade negotiations for the English in India and Aden, at the tip of the Arabian peninsula.

  Things went badly for the Dragon almost from the off. Foul weather split up the convoy of three ships, and a man was swept overboard. Another crew member was found enjoying what a ship’s diarist called ‘carnall copulation’ with a dog, and whipped at the mainmast. A lack of reliable maps created navigational headaches, and despite being bound for the east via the Cape of Good Hope, the Dragon and her smaller companion the Hector were driven south-west, and ended up crossing the equator near Brazil, the wrong side of the Atlantic altogether, in June. ‘Inforced by Gusts, Calmes, Raines, Sicknesses, and other Marine inconveniences’, they ended up recrossing it a month later. Water was running low; dysentery and scurvy were rife. Desperate to save his voyage, Keeling hit upon the idea of heading for the coast of Africa, to repair and refuel. They finally reached a Portuguese trading outpost in Sierra Leone in early August.

  What they did there was unusual, even by the standards of the voyage so far. While the captain and his colleagues amused themselves by going on an elephant hunt – they managed to wound the creature but not kill it – Keeling’s diary records that his crew indulged a taste for more surprising entertainment while moored in Sierra Leone: drama. On the morning of 5 September, he writes, in biscuit-dry, matter-of-fact prose:

  I sent the interpreter, according to his deseir, abord the Hector, wear he brooke fast, and after came abord mee [the Dragon], where we gave the tragedy of Hamlett.

  Three thousand miles and half a world away from Shakespeare’s Globe, so it seems, the ship’s crew put on a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Three weeks later, on 29 September, this devoted cast of amateurs added Richard II to their shipboard repertoire. To compound the feat, they gave a repeat performance of Hamlet the following March, by then off the east coast of Africa in the Gulf of Aden, near what is now Yemen.

  If these accounts are correct, these would be not only the first performances of Hamlet and Richard II outside Europe, but, in the case of Hamlet, also the first public performance it is possible to pinpoint. In other words, the earliest moment anyone would be able to locate this English play about a German-educated
, Danish prince (itself a collage of classical learning and Icelandic sagas, translated from French) is when it surfaces in West Africa, in front of a polyglot audience that included a Temne-born, Portuguese-speaking interpreter who had converted to Catholicism and at least three other Sierra Leoneans. For anyone interested in the idea of Shakespeare as a global writer, the story is almost too tempting to resist.

  For as much of the summer of 2012 as I could, I sat in theatres, going on my own voyages of discovery. I watched, awestruck and a little perplexed, as the Ngākau Toa group from Auckland performed an epic, Maori-language Troilus and Cressida, complete with strutting haka war dance. I saw the great Catalan director Calixto Bieito’s desolate reimagining of Shakespeare’s pastoral universe, Forests, which was acted out on a mound of earth beneath a stricken tree like something out of Waiting for Godot. I was overwhelmed by King Lear as reinterpreted by the Belarus Free Theatre, who are forced to perform in exile because of their opposition to the Minsk government. Their version of the play was a grim, sardonic folk tale, nonetheless full of heart for a country going to the dogs.

  I realised what I had often felt in a decade of watching British performances of Shakespeare: boredom. We had a cosy attitude to Shakespeare in this country, a way of taking him for granted. We regarded him pre-eminently as one of us; no one did him so well. He had helped define the British theatre tradition, and we repaid him by acting as if that tradition was something we had no interest in escaping. We had entrenched ideas not only about our superior grasp of Shakespeare’s language, but the way those words should be pronounced – a combination of Mummerset and the emollient Received Pronunciation that has been standard practice in British drama schools since the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Yet in translation, so it appeared to me, the plays had a habit of wriggling free. There seemed to be something about being liberated from Shakespeare’s own language that allowed theatre-makers to approach his work with quizzical freshness, to unearth themes and ideas that many British companies, drilled in certain modes of thinking and performing, would never have dared to. These visitors seemed to have found things in the plays that we rarely glimpsed, even in multicultural, twenty-first-century Britain. The renegade Russian director Dmitry Krymov made A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into an anarchic mash-up, complete with teetering, five-metre-high puppets. An Indian company transformed All’s Well That Ends Well, newly translated into Gujarati, into bhangwadi, a popular theatre form that blossomed in Mumbai in the late nineteenth century (‘bhang’ is hash). Deliciously enjoyable, it bore little relation to the hard-edged interpretations of this ‘problem’ comedy usually on offer in the west.

  Standing in the yard at the Globe or the foyer of the Barbican arts centre, surrounded by people talking many different languages – newly arrived tourists; first-, second- and third-generation immigrants; fluent speakers alongside people who had just a smattering – I realised that this Shakespeare felt thrillingly different. And I, a white, male, Cambridge-educated, English-speaking critic who was supposed to know about Shakespeare, barely knew him at all.

  Idling away those summer afternoons and evenings, watching planes on final approach to Heathrow glint through the skies above the Globe, I thought with increasing seriousness about following some of these threads in the opposite direction. Seeing shows was all well and good, but I wanted to go deeper, to examine how Shakespeare had infiltrated literature, education, movies, dance, visual art. What context did the productions I’d been watching, and productions like them, come from? What did Shakespeare actually mean in Seoul, or Bangalore, or Ramallah, or Dar es Salaam? How had he ended up in these places? We were endlessly told that he was the world’s most performed playwright, its most translated secular author – but why? Why was Shakespeare, a writer who barely travelled, so popular globally? And why had he been not only adapted, but also adopted, in so many countries worldwide?

  Global Shakespeare was in the process of becoming a fashionable academic discipline, but the studies I read were in torrid disagreement. Some argued for the universalising force of Shakespeare’s writing, its ability to transcend any barrier of colour, class or creed. Others suggested the shadowy postcolonial obverse of this vision – that the reason a dead, white writer was so inescapable was a by-product of the British Empire and its educational factory farms, which turned out dutiful colonial servants who could quote Hamlet as readily as recite the Lord’s Prayer.

  Other scholars knowingly quoted globalisation theory: the Bard as a trans-national brand, or as an example of what the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has termed ‘liquid modernity’, part of the free-flowing, ideas-based economy of the global web. More practically, some cited the inexorable global expansion of English, and the remorseless growth of TEFL courses; if one were studying the English language, who better to study than that language’s Top Poet? Was it even a good thing that – as the British Council claimed – half the world’s kids studied Shakespeare in some form or other? Wasn’t this cultural imperialism in the guise of cultural relations?

  No single explanation seemed satisfactory. I yearned to get away from theorising. I bought a world map, and began to pepper it with dots. Replica Globe theatres in Cedar City, Utah; Neuss, Germany; Jukkasjärvi, Sweden (the globe’s northernmost Globe, carved from ice). Kimberley in South Africa, birthplace of the first black Shakespeare translator in Africa. The dacha outside Moscow where Boris Pasternak translated Hamlet and King Lear. The theatre village near Saitama set up by Japan’s most prolific Shakespearian director. The Polish tombstone of Ira Aldridge, the African-American actor who became the nineteenth century’s most famous Othello. Points of contact, connection.

  I began pestering theatre producers and academic contacts for phone numbers and email addresses; wangling invitations to festivals and conferences, anything that could make a trip worthwhile. I researched flights, and bought the most lightweight copy of the complete works I could find (the venerable Peter Alexander 1951 edition, no notes and recently reprinted in paperback, 1.2 kilogrammes). I kept on reading – books on Asian performance, Zulu adaptations, eighteenth-century French translations, stagings in the post-conflict Balkans: more Shakespeares than I had ever encountered, and rather more than I knew what to do with.

  An early plan to track down Rah-e-Sabz to Kabul hit a wall when it transpired that the company, conjoined by Shakespearian comedy, had broken up; one of the actors had claimed asylum in Germany, and others had turned their backs on the group, driven apart by the relentless pressures of touring. After much anguish, I reluctantly laid Russia aside, despite its long and honourable Shakespearian history (which encompassed, impressively, a version of The Merry Wives of Windsor supposedly by Catherine the Great). I didn’t have the cash for both Japan and China: I plumped for China, persuaded by absorbing stories I’d read about the vexed and illuminating relationship between Shakespeare and communism. I certainly didn’t have the cash to visit Sweden, even if the Ice Globe had still been standing (it turned out to have been a tourist stunt and had lasted only a few months, a decade ago).

  Nonetheless, a route began to assemble itself, hewn from the chaos. Not one journey, but a series of journeys; explorations, perhaps, or pilgrimages. I had already seen a fair amount of theatre in Germany, where Shakespeare has been regarded as an honorary citizen since the late eighteenth century, and where English actors visited even earlier. It would be fascinating to return, and trace the trail to its beginning. I could return, too, to the United States, in search of how Shakespeare became a popular household name there in the nineteenth century. Then India, where there were now reckoned to be more cinematic adaptations of the plays than anywhere else in the world, in nearly every Indian language one could name. Then South Africa, where the plays had come head to head with the brute realities of race and racism, perhaps more so than anywhere else on the globe. I would end – if I was still, unlike Rah-e-Sabz, in one piece – in China, where Shakespeare’s works had arrived only
a century ago, but where he was now so popular (so I read) that there were many times more schoolchildren learning the plays in Mandarin translation than there were in Britain and America studying the English originals.

  Five journeys, five acts; the same number, I was pleased to realise, as a play. This expedition into global Shakespeare wouldn’t be anywhere near completist, even in the countries I visited – such a thing was surely unachievable – but it made incursions into four continents and at least nine languages (none of which I really spoke). It was daunting and, like all daunting things, also wildly exhilarating. From agonising about how much I was having to miss out, I began to get excited by the possibilities, by the collisions and reverberations my route might set up – through places and cultures that wound across and around each other, back to Britain, out again to locations much further afield.

  On a brief trip to an arts festival in St Petersburg, a way of salving my conscience for spurning Russia, I told a director what I was planning to do: an impossible quest, I knew, but …

  Unlike most British people I’d spoken to, who expressed bafflement at the idea of chasing Shakespearian apparitions across the world, he didn’t seem remotely fazed. ‘There will be many Shakespeares,’ he said with the gnomic solemnity special to Russian theatre directors. ‘You must let them be unrecognisable.’

  *

  There was one conundrum to resolve before I went: the dot on my map next to the coast of Sierra Leone, the site of those supposed performances of Hamlet and Richard II in 1607. Had the plays really been performed on board ship by a company of English sailors in the roiling West African heat, within Shakespeare’s lifetime?