Boomerang Shakespeare: Foreign Shakespeare in Britain The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare Vol. 2: The World’s Shakespeare, 1660-Present, ed. Bruce Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 1094-1101.
Shakespeare has become a boomerang business in the twenty-first century—a phenomenon that is fueled simultaneously by globalized local economic and cultural developments. His plays have been traveling the world since his lifetime and now returned to Britain with many different hats, making the familiar strange and bringing home the exotic. U.K. tours have come to define some of the most memorable productions today, and international collaborations have inspired artists in Britain and elsewhere. Boomerang Shakespeare encompasses a range of events, including non-Anglophone productions, co-productions by British and foreign artists, local events celebrating Shakespeare’s global afterlife, and British productions that incorporate elements from more than one culture in its cast, style, or set.