Shakespeare’s Restless World: Shakespeare Goes Global

Synopsis: Last in a twenty-part radio series in which the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, presents an object-based history of the time of Shakespeare to explore how Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences made sense of their rapidly changing environment.
In this episode MacGregor looks at some of the many copies of Shakespeare’s plays in existence today, and speaks to some of the people, such as Germany’s leading literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, whose lives his words have touched in order to examine how Shakespeare has managed to go global.
Series: Shakespeare’s Restless World
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Radio
Transmission details: 11 May 2012 at 13:45 (Channel: BBC Radio 4)
Duration: 15 mins

Production type: Documentary/Educational/News
Plays: Julius Caesar; Merchant of Venice, The; Tempest, The
Subjects: Drama; History
Keywords: Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); Cultural history; Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920 -)

Notes: The entire series is available on CD from http://www.bbcshop.com and as a podcast http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r4shakespeare.
General: There are 232 known copies of the First Folio in existence.
History: Part of the Shakespeare Unlocked season on BBC.
Reviews: Source: Radio Times, BBC programme information
For more detail about the programme and its objects (including transcript) see the BBC Restless world website http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/shakespeares-restless-world/ (accessed May 2012)

SHAKESPEARE