EXPeditions - The living library of knowlegde3 Sep 2025

Islam Issa - Shakespeare in popular "world" culture

Islam Issa, Professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University, looks at the influence of Shakespeare in popular culture.

About Islam Issa "I am a professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University.

I’m most interested in cultural history and literary criticism, but particularly reception studies: how and why we read literature, and why that matters."

Key Points

• Education systems and cultural hierarchy are factors that have contributed to Shakespeare’s status as a global phenomenon. • Shakespeare’s plays have a certain simplicity in structure and language, which also facilitates their translation. • Representations of the Other reveal perceptions of the so-called Other during Shakespeare’s time, while offering an opportunity to understand the reactions of different communities today to those texts. A global phenomenon

There are many ways to approach Shakespeare’s presence. We can start by saying that Shakespeare’s a phenomenon. We don’t quite know why. For decades, many of us have been trying to understand: why Shakespeare? Certain things come to mind. The education system, one could say, imposes Shakespeare. Cultural hierarchy, in some ways, imposes Shakespeare.

For example, think of Romeo and Juliet. Many people have called Layla and Majnun, which is a similar story, the Romeo and Juliet of the East. Yet this story was written hundreds of years before Romeo and Juliet. So there’s no doubt that a cultural hierarchy exists. Shakespeare has a special status. Shakespeare is one of the most popular and respected writers around the world.

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