Speaking of Shakespeare
Conversations about things Shakespearean, including new developments in Shakespeare studies and Shakespearean performance and education across the globe. These talks are also available on YouTube under the search term, 'Speaking of Shakespeare'. This series is made possible by institutional support from Aoyama Gakuin University (AGU) in central Tokyo and is also supported by a generous grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Speaking of Shakespeare
SoS #31 | Edward Wilson-Lee: Shakespeare, Books, Water, Africa, and the New World
Thomas Dabbs speaks with Edward Wilson-Lee of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. Wilson-Lee is the author of “Shakespeare in Swahililand,” a study of how Shakespearean plays made their way into East Africa. He is also the author of “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books,” which examines the life of Columbus’s son, Hernando Colón, and Hernando’s dream of a library that held universal knowledge. This work is supplemented with another book on Colón’s catalogue, a collaboration with José María Pérez Fernández entitled “Hernando Colón’s New World of Books: Towards a Cartography of Knowledge.” Wilson-Lee also has another book that will appear in August 2022, entitled “A History of Water, being an account of a murder, an epic, and two vision of global history.”
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:41 - Formative years, East Africa, books and adventure
00:07:04 - A History of Water
00:16:15 - Shakespeare in Swahililand
00:32:10 - The travels of translation
00:39:50 - Shakespeare for the people, Shakespearean adaptation
00:45:30 - Hernando Colón and preserving knowledge
00:56:20 - The found book and ordering knowledge
01:19:28 - Scholarship in narrative form; the wandering scholar
01:15:50 - Japanese translation and closing remarks