Shakespeare's Restless World 20. Shakespeare Goes Global
May 11, 2012
A journey through how the 1623 First Folio turned a local playwright into a worldwide presence. Encounters with personal marginalia, wartime readings, and prison resistance show intimate and political uses of the text. Global adaptations from film to South Sudan highlight cultural reinvention. Reflections on why these plays travel across media and time.
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Shakespeare In The Warsaw Ghetto
- Marcel Reich-Ranicki married his fiancée quickly to prevent her resettlement during the Warsaw Ghetto deportations.
- The Shakespeare line
First Folio Turned Plays Into Portable Texts
- The 1623 First Folio transformed Shakespeare from a theatre writer into a global author by collecting 36 plays in one book.
- The Folio let people who never saw performances make Shakespeare part of their private lives.
A Scottish Reader's Marginalia
- William Johnston in Dumfrieshire annotated his First Folio, underlining passages and commenting in margins in the 1620s.
- Johnston's copy later reached Meisei University in Tokyo and is now viewable digitally, showing early personal engagement with the plays.
