Worlds Elsewhere (3 page)

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:

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?

I arranged my first expedition, to the British Library in London. It emerged that only a fragment of the hundred-page journal of William Keeling, the ‘generall' of the
Dragon,
survives, in the archives of the East India Company. All that exists is a single page, badly torn. It covers an early part of the voyage, March and April, when the ship had still been wallowing across the Atlantic. No mention of Sierra Leone, still less of Shakespeare.

Sections of the Keeling journal had been printed by an editor called Samuel Purchas in 1625, in a huge, five-volume anthology called
Purchas his Pilgrimes,
stuffed with tales of English naval derring-do. Finding the Keeling diaries ‘very voluminous', Purchas explained that he had been so bold as to edit them ‘to express only the most necessary observations for sea or land affairs'. Again, no Shakespeare. The diary entries relating to
Hamlet
and
Richard II
had only been picked up much later, in the nineteenth century, by an East India Company clerk, one Thomas Rundall, who – not apparently thinking them especially interesting – printed a transcription in the appendix of another compendium of English sea voyages. That was in 1849; it was another two decades before anyone noticed them and realised what they could mean. The story didn't become more widely circulated until the 1920s, when it was taken as stirring proof that British sailors had transported English culture to the furthest ends of civilisation.

The problem was this: by then the evidence itself had long since vanished. The East India Company was notorious for throwing out its early records; indeed, when it became the India Office in 1858, a ‘Destruction Committee' had been formed to do exactly that. That single page excepted, the original Keeling diary had disappeared at some point between 1625 and the late nineteenth century. Two journals from the 1607–08 voyage of the
Dragon
are extant, overflowing with colourful detail about the journey – the dates match and the elephant-hunting expedition is there – but neither makes any mention of shipboard theatricals. Neither does an abbreviated contemporaneous copy of Keeling's journal, and there are no other records of English sailors staging drama in this period. Though some scholars have staked reputations on the story of
Hamlet
and
Richard II
on the
Dragon,
the growing consensus is that it simply doesn't add up. In the absence of better evidence, the best guess is that it is a particularly malicious forgery. I asked a curator; was it possible the missing diary could turn up somewhere in the nine miles of shelving that contained India Office records? Her expression told me not to hold my breath.