ABSTRACT
Today, the literal or stricter meaning of the phrase, deriving from Petronius, 'all the world plays the actor' is perhaps more applicable, as it is well established that the whole world performs the works of Globe's best-known playwright, William Shakespeare. Asian Shakespeares may at times be seen as being subsumed by the global; however, it is the argument of this book that not only are they constitutive of the global but they have shifted the grounds of the global. Although Global Shakespeare is a given, it would be a mistake to attribute the spread of his plays to their so-called universal qualities and to assert that all cultures value his work equally for the same qualities. The five essays in this chapter focus on the global mediascape, the cinematic, tele-visual and digital spheres, to demonstrate how this borderless space generates Asian Shakespeares using platforms, media, genres and forms which are already always globalised, using global technology with a global reach.
