Andrew Dickson’s startlingly original and joyously entertaining Worlds Elsewhere traverses decades and continents to reveal Shakespeare and his works in a fantastic array of new guises…

‘Extraordinarily exhilarating … like no other Shakespeare criticism you possess ever read’ (Margaret Drabble) ~ ‘A tour de drive by any standards’ (David Crystal) ~ ‘Revelatory’ (James Shapiro) ~ ‘Brilliantly unique’ (Michael Pye)

Anti-apartheid activist, Bollywood screenwriter, Nazi pin-up, hero of the about Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe Outrageous West: that is Shakespeare as you have never seen him before.

Through the sixteenth-century Baltic to the American Revolution, from colonial India towards the skyscrapers of modern-day Shanghai, Shakespeare’s plays appear at most fascinating of that time period and in the most unexpected of areas. No additional writer’s work continues to be performed, translated, modified and altered in such a remarkable variety of ethnicities and languages. But what is it about William Shakespeare – a guy from Warwickshire who never once set feet outside Britain – that has produced him in the home in a lot of locations around the globe?

Venturing across four continents, six countries and 400 years, Andrew Dickson uses us on a personal journey rich in insight and surprise. We enter the air-conditioned vault deep beneath Capitol Hill where the world’s largest collection of Initial Folios is stored; discover the shadowy history of Joseph Goebbels’s obsession with Shakespeare; and uncover the real tale behind the scuffed release where Nelson Mandela and fellow Robben Island prisoners inscribed their brands. Both cultural background and literary travelogue, Worlds Somewhere else is an make an effort to understand how Shakespeare is just about the worldwide phenomenon he’s – and just why.