This remarkable volume challenges scholars and students to look beyond a dominant European and North American "metropolitan bank" of Shakespeare knowledge. As well as revealing the potential for a new understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Martin Orkin explores a fresh approach to issues of power, where "proximations" emerge from a process of dialogue and challenge traditional notions of authority.
Since their first performances, Shakespeare's plays and their audiences or readers have journeyed to one another across time and space, to and from countless and always different historical, geographical and ideological locations. Engagement with a Shakespeare text always entails in part, then, cultural encounter or clash, and readings are shaped by a reader's particular location and knowledge. Part I of this book challenges us to recognize the way in which "local" or "non-metropolitan" knowledges and experiences might extend understanding of Shakespeare's texts and their locations. Part II demonstrates the use of local as well as metropolitan knowledges in exploring the presentation of masculinity in Shakespeare's late plays. These plays themselves dramatize encounters with different cultures and, crucially, challenges to established authority.
Challenging the authority of metropolitan scholarship, twenty-first-century global capitalism and the masculinist imperatives that drive it, Orkin's daring, powerful work will have reverberations throughout but also well beyond the field of Shakespeare studies.

Martin Orkin, who teaches in the Departments of English and Theatre at the University of Haifa, is author of Shakespeare Against Apartheid and Drama and the South African State. He is also co-editor, with Ania Loomba, of Postcolonial Shakespeares, and editor of At the Junction: Four Plays by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company.

Acknowledgements. Introduction: Travelling to Shakespeare's Late Plays Part 1: Local Knowledge and Shakespeare's Global Texts 2. Intersecting Knowledges: Shakespeare in Timbuktu 3. Active Readers: Whose Muti in the Web of it? 4. William Tshikinya -Chaka I Presume? Cultural Encounter in Performance Part 2: Encountering Men in Shakespeare's Late Plays Prologue: The 'Infirmities of Men' in Pericles. Cymbeline: 'That Most Venerable Man Which/I did Call my Father'. The Winter's Tale: 'Let No Man Mock Me'. The Tempest: 'Any Strange Beast there Makes a Man'. Afterword: The Unruliness of Patriarchy. Select Bibliography