Worlds Elsewhere Read Online Free Page B

Shakespeare’s works had arrived only a century ago, but where he was now so popular (so I read) that there were many times more schoolchildren learning the plays in Mandarin translation than there were in Britain and America studying the English originals.
    Five journeys, five acts; the same number, I was pleased to realise, as a play. This expedition into global Shakespeare wouldn’t be anywhere near completist, even in the countries I visited – such a thing was surely unachievable – but it made incursions into four continents and at least nine languages (none of which I really spoke). It was daunting and, like all daunting things, also wildly exhilarating. From agonising about how much I was having to miss out, I began to get excited by the possibilities, by the collisions and reverberations my route might set up – through places and cultures that wound across and around each other, back to Britain, out again to locations much further afield.
    On a brief trip to an arts festival in St Petersburg, a way of salving my conscience for spurning Russia, I told a director what I was planning to do: an impossible quest, I knew, but …
    Unlike most British people I’d spoken to, who expressed bafflement at the idea of chasing Shakespearian apparitions across the world, he didn’t seem remotely fazed. ‘There will be many Shakespeares,’ he said with the gnomic solemnity special to Russian theatre directors. ‘You must let them be unrecognisable.’
    *
    There was one conundrum to resolve before I went: the dot on my map next to the coast of Sierra Leone, the site of those supposed performances of
Hamlet
and
Richard II
in 1607.
Had
the plays really been performed on board ship by a company of English sailors in the roiling West African heat, within Shakespeare’s lifetime?
    I arranged my first expedition, to the British Library in London. It emerged that only a fragment of the hundred-page journal of William Keeling, the ‘generall’ of the
Dragon,
survives, in the archives of the East India Company. All that exists is a single page, badly torn. It covers an early part of the voyage, March and April, when the ship had still been wallowing across the Atlantic. No mention of Sierra Leone, still less of Shakespeare.
    Sections of the Keeling journal had been printed by an editor called Samuel Purchas in 1625, in a huge, five-volume anthology called
Purchas his Pilgrimes,
stuffed with tales of English naval derring-do. Finding the Keeling diaries ‘very voluminous’, Purchas explained that he had been so bold as to edit them ‘to express only the most necessary observations for sea or land affairs’. Again, no Shakespeare. The diary entries relating to
Hamlet
and
Richard II
had only been picked up much later, in the nineteenth century, by an East India Company clerk, one Thomas Rundall, who – not apparently thinking them especially interesting – printed a transcription in the appendix of another compendium of English sea voyages. That was in 1849; it was another two decades before anyone noticed them and realised what they could mean. The story didn’t become more widely circulated until the 1920s, when it was taken as stirring proof that British sailors had transported English culture to the furthest ends of civilisation.
    The problem was this: by then the evidence itself had long since vanished. The East India Company was notorious for throwing out its early records; indeed, when it became the India Office in 1858, a ‘Destruction Committee’ had been formed to do exactly that. That single page excepted, the original Keeling diary had disappeared at some point between 1625 and the late nineteenth century. Two journals from the 1607–08 voyage of the
Dragon
are extant, overflowing with colourful detail about the journey – the dates match and the elephant-hunting expedition is there – but neither makes any mention of shipboard