The year 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death and a year-long celebration of Shakespeare's work and legacy around the world. 

In recent Shakespeare news, New Oxford Shakespeare will credit Christopher Marlowe as the co-author of the three Henry V plays. Debates over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays have engaged generations of scholars, but the influence and reach of the work credited to the Bard are indisputable. Recently at NYPL, Margaret Atwood discussed Shakespeare in the 21st century with Fiona Shaw as part of the British Council's Shakespeare Lives program, touching on Shakespeare on YouTube and reading from her new novel Hag-seed: The Tempest Retold , part of the new Hogarth  Shakespeare series, in which great contemporary writers reinterpret Shakespeare's works. 

Shakespeare also has great appeal beyond the English-speaking world. His work has been translated into more than 100 languages. According to "Fun international facts about Shakespeare" compiled for the British Council, there have been publications and productions of Hamlet in more than 75 languages since 1960, and versions of Romeo and Juliet have been performed in at least 24 countries in the last decade.  In A Night in the Emperor's Garden, published in 2015, Qais Akbar Omar describes his experience with an acting troupe in Kabul that put on a production of Love's Labor's Lost in Dari in 2005, the first public performance of Shakespeare in Afghanistan in 35 years. Listen to an interview with Omar on On the Media. 

"All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players." - As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII 

In Shakespeare and World Cinema , Mark Thornton Burnett identifies over 70 films in languages other than English that were inspired by Shakespeare's plays, including a Romany version of Hamlet from Serbia and a Malagasy Macbeth, Makibefo. Some of these international retellings of Shakespeare's plays are available to borrow from NYPL's World Languages Collection. These films give us an opportunity to experience the universality of Shakespeare's themes in a new cultural and linguistic context, a powerful demonstration that #ShakepeareLives not only at the Globe but around the world!

 

 

If you're an English language learner interested in Shakepeare, check out our Learn English with Shakespeare post!