Review of Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016, by Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead, with Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty, and Mark Houlahan

The year of ‘Shakespeare 400’, four centuries after William Shakespeare’s death in 1616, was a decidedly global affair, with events exhibitions and symposia held throughout the year in dozens of countries. What began as a calendar celebration of the international community of audiences, practitioners and scholars of the works of Shakespeare became by year’s end, for many of those who participated in multiple events, an opportunity to reflect with some sense of fatigue on questions of the scope, scale, and usefulness of the ‘global Shakespeare’ brand. Readers of the Antipodal Shakespeare collection are spared such ennui by virtue of a number of factors readily acknowledged by Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead in the book’s introduction. The book had its origins in an Australia Research Council Discovery project ‘Monumental Shakespeares: a transcultural investigation of commemoration in twentieth-century England and Australia’ (2010 to 2012), so by the time the celebration of ‘global’…