Cynthia Shannon asked Andrew Dickson:

What's the most interesting thing you learned while researching Shakespeare (maybe something that didn't make it into the book)?

Andrew Dickson Oooh, tricky! Thanks for the question. I learned so many things -- I hadn't realised that there are now more professional performances of Shakespeare done annually in Germany than there are in the UK, or that (probably) more people attend Shakespeare festivals in the US than anywhere else globally, or that there are more reinterpretations of the plays in Indian cinema than in the English-speaking world ... I think I was most surprised by how important Shakespeare seems to be to many different cultures worldwide, and how those cultures have made him their own. Sometimes the darker sides of that were surprising, too -- I hadn't realised how the Nazis were so deeply into Shakespeare, and that they tried to claim him as a German writer.

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