Skip to main content
Shakespeare & Beyond

'Worlds Elsewhere': Shakespeare's imagination roaming far and free

'Worlds Elsewhere' by Andrew Dickson
'Worlds Elsewhere' by Andrew Dickson

'Worlds Elsewhere' by Andrew Dickson

William Shakespeare is a global phenomenon. In the four centuries since his death, the British playwright’s works have appeared at times and places where we might least expect them. Why is this so? Shakespeare was no world traveler. So then why do his plays appeal to and resonate with so many different peoples?

Andrew Dickson set out on a personal journey to answer this question, traveling across four continents and six countries. He even visited the Folger Shakespeare Library, to see the 82 First Folios in our collection. The fruit of his travels appears in a new book, Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys around Shakespeare’s Globe, published April 5 by Henry Holt.

In the excerpt below, Dickson writes of the international flavors that permeate Shakespeare’s plays. Although much of what we know about Shakespeare tracks him in a limited geographical space—Warwickshire (where he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon) and London, a hundred miles to the southeast—his “imagination roamed far and free.”