Shakespeare--world views

the long version

Shakespeare: World Views comprises fifteen papers concerned with the politics of reading and performance in Autralasia, Asia, and Europe. The attention to the history and politics of Shakespeare in performance is matched by an interest in the uses and inscriptions of Shakespeare from postcolonial and new European locations. Two very different essays plot Shakespeare's investments in equally different cartographies: the unsettled and unsettling geographies of the Comedies and the patriarchal territories of Lucrece's Tragedy. Taken together, these essays from widely differing geographic, political, and critical locations attest to the multiplicity of "Shakespeares" available today. This very multiplicity suggests that Shakespeare is being produced as both local and global, paradoxically fragmented and monolithic, a fertile site both for affinity and contest. The effect is a challenge to any easy claim for Shakespeare's unproblematic status as a stable indicator of cultural value. In Singh's words, this collection manifests the "anomalies and contradictions" as well as the rich variety of "Shakespeares" around the world.