Last year I was preparing a talk for a high-school audience. “What would I be discussing?” one of my brothers asked. “Shakespeare,” I said. “Haven't you done yet?” he replied. Rather, as readers of this journal will know well, studies of Shakespeare proliferate, placing his works in an ever-expanding range of contexts. Since the year 2000 there has been a miniboom in Shakespeare biographies, the public face, perhaps, of a newly invigorated historicism. Most often, of course, these studies take up Fredric Jameson's clarion call, “Always historicize,” without his strong commitment to dialectical materialism.

The three books under review here are, in various ways, exemplary instances of another strong recent trend in Shakespeare studies. From teasing out the strains of empire in Shakespeare's works, scholars have turned to their global afterlife, as founding texts of so many colonies and ex-colonies, and as texts with an enduring appeal far beyond the territories of the British Empire, even at its late nineteenth-century peak. Studies have traced the global dissemination of Shakespeare and, importantly, have emphasized the local and the specific within this global force. Each subsequent culture, it seems, develops distinctive Shakespeare variants. This scholarship combines approaches founded in forms of performance studies that will be familiar to many readers here, together with those that broach wider archives. Here my brother might perhaps be most disappointed, for the worldwide Shakespeare archive is immense and in many cases scarcely yet tapped—whether the research goal is analyzing Shakespeare performances in a specific sense (of performances aimed at paying audiences) or in the wider scene of “performing” or “enacting” an idea of Shakespeare. These three books show what can be done, ranging freely across both forms of “performance” analysis.

But what sense can be made of all this energetic scholarship? Is there more on offer than reclaiming the nation-state when, in an age of globalization, the nation-state was thought to be passing out of existence? The books reviewed here provide quite different answers through disparate approaches to the issues around adapting, appropriating, and translating Shakespeare. They show how so many different cultures have learned to live with Shakespeare, partly because they haven't yet learned how to live without him.

Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia's collection Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage has the widest geographical coverage of the three. Its essays examine examples of “native” Shakespeare from Ireland, the Americas (including Canada and the Caribbean), Australia, and Africa. In all such places “Shakespeare” is a foreign body, part of the imperial equipment with which English colonizers traveled the globe. Analyzing native Shakespeares, then, is partly a matter of telling the “story of how native cultures bear the imprint of contact with those peoples who were part of its history,” as the editors put it in their usefully concise introduction (3). But that imprint is only half of the story, collectively, that these essays tell. For here Shakespeare is not something “done” to a series of supine natives, like Caliban brought low by the duplicity of Trinculo and Stephano. The model for these native Shakespeares is rather the Caliban who conceives the cracked, magnificent freedom song (“Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom”) Leslie Fiedler long ago proclaimed as “the first American poem.”

Dionne and Kapadia's collection shows how, in Calibanic style, “natives” have deployed Shakespeare as a counterhegemonic force, critiquing English models of interpretation and performance, and claiming the right to restage in their own image or rewrite in their “indigenous” languages. The term “indigenous” here is complex: sometimes it means the “original,” precontact peoples, as in Maureen McDonnell's account of aboriginal influences on a Sydney As You Like It. Sometimes too “indigenous” means those who now inhabit a place, but whose presence can be traced to the course of empires, as in Richard Wright's African-American citations of Shakespeare addressed by John Carpenter, or the Cuban Romeo and Juliet Donna Woodford-Gormley discusses. These examples claim through Shakespeare a kind of indigeneity, though their cultural occupation of New World space is due to the slave trade.

As well as thickening the map of native Shakespeares we know, the editors seek to enlarge the formal range of reenactments and appropriations we should consider. Their laudable aim is to expand “the category of appropriation to examine how Shakespeare is situated in a range of social practices: various educational, artistic, and political discourses, social rituals, and revisions in novels” (6). Their point is that if Shakespeare continues to signify around the world, this is because his texts have a life well beyond the stage and the classroom, and the afterlife of Shakespeare retains its status as a uniquely puzzling and complex case. No matter how fervently admirers of Marlowe or Webster enjoy seeing their plays performed, they do not have a wider cultural reach comparable to Shakespeare.

Dionne and Kapadia frame their expanded archive in three parts. In the first, they focus on textualist appropriations, such as how novelists cite Shakespeare for their own purposes, and how the specific fetish of the Shakespeare book has made its way into subsequent cultures. The examples presented refute any Bloomian anxiety of influence. Rather, the model drawn on is Bakhtin, for the uses of Shakespeare in Part 1 are actively in dialogue with the presumed “master text,” and through that dialogue Shakespeare's presence is energetically carnivalized—quite literally so in the form of the Shakespeare “Mas” or masquerade Craig Dionne evokes in his “Commonplace Literacy and the Colonial Scene: The Case of Carriacou's Shakespeare Mas.” The lead essay in this section is Thomas Cartelli's splendid “The Face in the Mirror: Joyce's Ulysses and the Lookingglass Shakespeare.” Ireland, as an early “colony” of England, is such a complicated example of the inextricable issues of language, ethnicity, and religion, and it deserves attention in the “native” context, more usually restricted to “Third World” examples. Joyce deploys a masqueraded version of Hamlet and a gleeful satire of late nineteenth-century sentimentalizing. The result, Cartelli suggests, is not to have written a proto-postcolonial novel in 1922, but rather to expose late empire discourses and identities from which postcolonial Irish texts could later emerge.

Part 2 moves to a more familiar kind of production archive, using Bhabha's Third Space theory to discuss Shakespeare productions actively in dialogue with his authority. Again the mix of essays is eclectic and enlightening, ranging from Jennifer Drouin's analysis of Québécois (joual) rewritings of Shakespeare to MacDonnell's discussion of an aboriginal As You Like It, where the language remained Shakespeare's but, through the ethnicity of the cast, Australia-specific issues related to indigeneity and land rights could be played out. In this part also Niels Harold wittily contrasts experiments in staging prisoners' Shakespeare with the bizarre postmodern genre of self-help and business pamphlets that use Shakespeare for self-enhancement; and Parmita Kapadia reviews Bengali jatra Shakespeares from India, breaking out of the imperial straitjacket of the kind of “English” production we see in the 1965 Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah. Her commitment to an eclectic form of Shakespeare which “speaks to the complexities of an evolving hybridity” (101) is one followed throughout this volume.

The third group of essays shifts the argument to ideas of nationalism. Can there be a “national” identity that is distinct and yet not rigidly framed as a simple self–Other binary? Can the Shakespeare “Other” be mingled with a “national” self without being recolonized? The editors certainly hope so. Part 3 uses tropes of translation to show this, with essays on Césaire's famous Tempest adaptation, a Cuban, Spanish Romeo and Juliet and Tayeb Salih's beautiful exposé of Othello's construct of racial ideology, Season of Migration to the North. Most arresting here is Ameer Sowrawardy's account of “Twin Obligations in Solomon Plaatje's Diposho-phoso,” a 1930 reworking in Setswana of The Comedy of Errors. This early comedy would not strike most readers as having an easy resonance with the cultural politics of South Africa, but Sowrawardy makes an excellent case for Plaatje as a Shakespeare translator or mediator whose works should be known by many, and not just those born in South Africa.

The essays collected in Part 1 of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 9 (2009)—the special section on South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century—make an excellent primer for those looking for more South African Shakespeare. Readers with interests in the area of national and postnational adaptation will find this collection valuable. The guest editor for South African Shakespeare is Laurence Wright, who has written for many years both within and beyond South Africa around issues such as these: How does one construct a cultural history of Shakespeare in South Africa? How do we keep reading Shakespeare while thickly describing resonant, specific productions or publication? Can you write a continuous “history” of Shakespeare in a postcolony, or should you rather adopt the approach Gary Taylor made famous in his groundbreaking Reinventing Shakespeare (1989), framing a narrative around a few, epochal dates?

Wright's introduction, “South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century,” is a solid preface to the cultural and historical specifics and a fearless survey of scholarship in the field, especially in locating for readers the development of arguments from Martin Orkin through to David Johnson and Natasha Distiller. Wright shows a fierce, loving commitment to the “place” of South Africa, but comes to a wise conclusion as to what that place might continue to be. Like the authors of Native Shakespeares, he writes from beyond the idea of the nation-state as a static, fixed category, and he invites us to examine the twentieth century as a period where “South African Shakespeare” was something you might arrive at and then, as it were, rest. Rather, he suggests that, in the future, “class, race and gender conflict [will] assume new guises, new shadings… . Shakespeare will probably remain part of the cultural manifold … [yet] continue to play a minor role in South Africa's cultural life” (24). As ever, the South Africa situation is a strange, tragic mirror for other “settler” colonies, each with their subjugated indigenous populations, and a dominant Creole group, striving to establish its uniqueness while using the languages and cultures of Europe to do so. In South Africa, there are two such “European” groups of course, Afrikaner and English, and very much larger indigenous groups. For all of them, the collection shows, Shakespeare retains a resonance.

Wright assembles key moments in the twentieth-century life of Shakespeare in South Africa, from the Cape Town tercentennial celebrations in 1916 and an amateur production in Johannesburg that same year of The Merchant of Venice, a perfect match of play and venue, as Victor Houliston shows, for the city was literally built on top of gold seams. Deborah Seddon's excellent essay on Plaatje's version of Comedy of Errors provides sidebar translations of his Setswana text, so readers can really see how far Plaatje moved Shakespeare. The focus on theatrical production continues with Rohan Quince on counterhegemonic productions during the apartheid era, Wright again on Umabatha (the Zulu Macbeth), and Robert Gordon on the Suzman–Market Theatre Othello and the Doran–Sher Titus Andronicus. All three essays present new archival material and excoriate the celebration of these productions as being truly, essentially “South African,” and show how naively “metropolitan” audiences in London and New York can interpret cultural outputs from brave new worlds. The section then finishes with Rebecca Fensome's analysis of Geoffrey Haresnape's African Tales from Shakespeare (1999). Haresnape closes South Africa's century by writing back, not just to Shakespeare, but also to the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare and Kipling's casting of Anglo moralizing in African fable form. As with Plaatje's translations, Fensome shows that Haresnape's African Tales would make a fascinating supplement to adaptation courses and seminars.

Alexander C. Y. Huang's Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange magnificently demonstrates how much traction you can get with a single, talented scholar tackling a massive archive, and writing one of the most lucid and coherent monographs I have read in several years. Like many readers, I imagine, I have seen video footage of Chinese Shakespeares and have heard presentations at conferences, but Huang shows us much, much more.

Huang's “China” encompasses three principal territories: the core of “mainland” China; Taiwan; and Hong Kong. As with the first two books here, “Shakespeares” encompasses a very wide range of material, in an impressively varied number of media formats. Given the nature of the material, and given the ground Huang is freshly breaking for us, the range he samples is the widest of the three books.

His Shakespeares begin in 1839, at the start of the Opium Wars, proceeding through the late imperial period, the revolutions, the world wars, and the post-1949 or communist era. He then concludes with the staggering amount of Shakespeare-related material being generated by early twenty-first-century Chinese performers, directors, writers, and filmmakers. While the obvious move is to treat, say, Feng Xiaogang's Mandarin Hamlet film The Banquet (2006) as a lavish intercultural spectacle (the equivalent of Bertolucci's Last Emperor or Scorsese's Kundun), Huang rigorously shows how we need to attend to the text of such products as well. To do this, most of us would need good translators, and of course superb cultural interpreters such as Huang himself. Huang's scope here is chronological, and a useful appendix provides a visual chronology at a glance, plotting key cultural outputs in Chinese Shakespeare alongside key “Worldwide Shakespeares.” Within this time frame, Huang works on a topical basis, wisely choosing to draw out resonances from specific texts and performances rather than getting lost in the sheer number of examples he could list.

“China” and “Shakespeare” then are two complex terms, constantly oscillating in relation to each other. Huang shows that we have always already simplified both terms and what they might mean together. Chinese readers knew about Shakespeare before they could read him, as he was used as a cultural marker in Chinese texts from 1839 onward. The Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare were available in Mandarin from 1904, and in 1911 the first translations (of The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth) appeared. For a culture with a centuries-old merchant class and with a profound commitment to spirit worlds of ghosts and demons, the attraction of these specific Shakespeares makes immediate sense. There are, though, surprises. A charming and much loved Much Ado was first staged in 1959 and was still being appreciated in the 1980s. In the Chinese “East” as well as here in the “West,” Hamlet remains a favorite with performers and audiences alike. In China too, as elsewhere, King Lear has been heavily favored for re-visioning and restaging. Wu Hsing-kuo's Lear Is Here (2000), which toured the United States in 2007, enacts a cracked old man onstage, questioning himself as a character and a performer, and turning those questions back on the audience. With such Chinese exemplars, Huang shows, the play might no longer be “the [only] thing,” since the words themselves can be so changed; yet his many Chinese mediators show why, however morphed, Shakespeare still matters.