Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, on tonight's program, Global Shakespeare and Whose Bard Is It Anyway? It was Bruce Lee who once said,

Be like water. Well, has there ever been a writer more like water than Shakespeare,

transformed into opera by Italy's Verdi into film by Japan's Kurosawa, made over by political

regimes such as Mao's China, reimagined by German dramatists from

Schiller and Brecht and beyond. And as the 2012 World Shakespeare season at the Globe

Theatre showed, where 37 productions in nearly 50 languages were performed, a figure whose plays

resonate across the world. So far, well, well known.

But something news afoot. There's now a move to establish the idea of a global Shakespeare,

a right who belongs to no single language or culture, no particularly historical medium or period,

according to the global Shakespeare website. Let's call it a cosmopolitan

Shakespeare, certainly not an English Shakespeare rooted in the language and in a particular

moment of history to which the work cannot be reduced but from which it cannot be wholly severed.

And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves a curse they were not here

and hold their manhood's chief, while then he speaks that fought with us upon St. Crispin's Day.

Teriba, let's hear the decision.

Let's hear the order of our ma'lakeatine our own. Lawrence Olivier is a rather English in a English, Henry V, and Sami Wattarzi in a Palestinian production of Richard

the Second that was seen at the globe.

Now, of course, there are many competing accounts of Global Shakespeare,

as well as dissenters from the whole project.

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