In 2016 Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanaian ancestry, starred as Hamlet in Simon Godwin’s lauded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, set in a post-colonial African state whose non-specificity nonetheless irritated some reviewers. We contend, however, that the production mixed multiple referents of blackness (Eastern African, West African, Caribbean, South African, 1970s African American) in order deliberately to create an imaginary post-colonial domain where these different kinds of diasporic blackness engaged with each other through the figure of Hamlet and his art. We therefore examine how the concept of race changes with the transatlantic or transnational movement among spaces in this production.

Physicians, readers and scholars have long been fascinated by Shakespeare's medical language and the presence or mentioning of healers, wise women, surgeons and doctors in his work. This dictionary includes ailments, general medical concepts (elements, humours, spirits) and cures and therapies (ranging from blood-letting to herbal medicines) in Shakespeare, but also body parts, bodily functions, and entries on 'the pathological body' taking into account recent critical work on the early modern body. It will provide a comprehensive guide for those needing to understand specific references in the plays, in particular, archaic diagnoses or therapies ('choleric', 'tub-fast') and words that have changed their meanings ('phlegmatic', 'urinal'); those who want to learn more about early modern medical concepts ('elements', 'humors'); and those who might have questions about the embodied experience of living in Shakespeare's England. Entries reveal what terms and concepts might mean in the context of Shakespeare's plays, and the significance that a particular disease, body part or function has in individual plays and the Shakespearean corpus at large.

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This chapter opens our discussion of “variable objects” by exploring the extent to which objects in Othello can act expressively in the visual medium of film. In tandem, it offers another methodological approach to global Shakespeare, one that addresses concerns about how Shakespeare might speak or play in translation and through variable objects. In Vibrant Matter Bennett argues for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. Watching three films of Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles – a South Indian art film in the Dravidian language Malayalam, a North Indian ‘Bollywood’ movie in the Uttar Pradesh dialect Khariboli, and an Italian teen movie adaptation – allows focus more narrowly upon what, adapting Bennett, we might call the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the “tragic loading"” of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy.