Monday, April 18, 2022

Book Note: Hamlet: Globe to Globe

Dromgoole, Dominic. Hamlet: Globe to Globe: Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play. New York: Grove Press, 2017.

I read this book during the pandemic, and it was inspiring. It's the kind of book you can dip into and usually find something interesting.

Hamlet: Globe to Globe presents the stories of a troupe of actors from the Globe Theatre (the most recent one) who performed Hamlet in 197 countries over a two-year period.

And many of those performances were fraught with significance or difficulty—or, frequently, both.

Not every venue is covered in the book, and the book is somewhat uneven, but when it's good, it's quite good. I'd like to provide a representative sample. Here, then, is an account of their performance in Prague:






I find the gratitude expressed at the end of that performance to be beautiful.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

No comments:

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest