Shakespeare in a Changing World

Abstract

In the Index Translationum, William Shakespeare appears as one of the three most translated writers in the world, after Agatha Christie and Jules Verne. Shakespeare has become a canonical figure in many literatures around the world, undergoing different kinds of changes in different cultural contexts. Translating of any text involves far more than the transposition of words written down in one language into another, since texts are always embedded in a culture and the expectations of that culture are inevitably variable. This chapter will look at changing attitudes to Shakespeare today, noting an increased uneasiness with Shakespeare’s subject matter and with his language in the English-speaking world and contrasting this with the continued esteem in which Shakespeare is held in other cultures. The question posed by Terry Hawkes about how we decide whose historical circumstances will have priority, Shakespeare’s or our own, in the continued dialogue between past and present is at the core of this chapter.