Skip to main content
Shakespeare & Beyond

Taking Hamlet around the globe

Photo: Helena Misioscia

To celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 2014, Shakespeare’s Globe in London sent a group of actors on a two-year tour to perform Hamlet all around the world, in what ended up as a total of 197 countries, and finishing on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016.

Dominic Dromgoole, the Globe’s artistic director who directed this traveling production, has written a new book about it, Hamlet Globe to Globe. Below, we share an excerpt from it that speaks to why the Globe took on this ambitious project and why they chose Hamlet.


Hamlet Globe to Globe“Translated into too many languages to count, and performed more times than Shakespeare ate hot dinners, and cold ones, or drew breath for that matter, Hamlet is one of those rare documents that can be said to have brought the world closer together. Audiences all over the planet have shared in its capacity to enlarge the spectator’s openness and desire to question. It has not only shrunk space; it has also contracted time. Each person who watches or hears it is telescoped back to the moment in 1601 when an audience in the Globe first heard the opening words  ‘Who’s there?’ Just as those first spectators share in every subsequent time those words have begun an evening of queasily soulful entertainment. We all share in the suspended window of time within which a play floats, experiencing our own night of only-happening-now uniqueness and sharing the pleasure with the millions of others who have heard the same words in other times and places.