A Year of Shakespeare Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival

Paul Edmondson is Head of Research and Knowledge for The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and a priest in The Church of England.

Paul Prescott is Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, University of Warwick, UK. He has published A Year of Shakespeare, Shakespeare on the Global Stage, Othello: Arden Performance Edition and Shakespeare on European Festival Stages with The Arden Shakespeare, and is also active in theatre production as the co-founder of the eco-festival ‘Shakespeare in Yosemite’.

Erin Sullivan is Reader in Shakespeare at the Shakespeare institute, University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice (2022) and Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (2016).

This is an extraordinary collection of essays recording the events of the World Shakespeare Festival, summoning up its kaleidoscopic diversity, its global reach, its oddities, triumphs and provocations- it's Shakespeare criticism as you have never encountered it before, scholarly, experimental, instant, and at times bizarre. It takes Shakespeare from the stage and academe into the age of Twitter and Facebook, and makes you feel you were there, present at all those strange and wonderful productions you missed. It's an exhilarating record of a great and successful Shakespearean adventure. -- Dame Margaret Drabble The book is a physical archive of the 73 plays [of the World Shakespeare Festival], reviewed in rich and entertaining detail by enthusiastic scholars... The book was born out of a desire to capture what may have been a fleeting moment - few of the World Shakespeare Festival plays were granted reviews in the national newspapers, so this book archives and immortalises productions that may have otherwise been forgotten... The editors did a fantastic job sourcing lots of production photos, so the book is heavily illustrated with these interesting and evocative images of actors and sets. The reviewers are a team of professional scholars and graduate students, and while they each have their own unique voice and approach to theatre reviewing, these separate voices come together harmoniously. -- Yolana Wassersug The Shakespeare Bookshop Newsletter 20130501 Provides a comprehensive expert view of the proceedings, with reviews of all 74 productions that capture the vibrancy of this once-in-a-lifetime event. -- Karen Lyon Folger Magazine