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Birmingham library brings Shakespeare to life in dozens of languages

It is a little-known fact that Birmingham is home to the largest Shakespeare collection in any public library in the world.

Created in 1864 to celebrate the playwright’s 300th birthday, it was the world’s first great Shakespeare collection and once held such standing that the Soviet government deposited 300 items in the collection during the depths of the cold war.

But in recent years the Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial Library has become a neglected asset, according to Professor Ewan Fernie, chair of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University and director of the Everything to Everybody project, which is striving to bring the archive into the heart of 21st-century life.

“We’re attempting to revitalise the collection with people and communities across the city, so it becomes something that is rediscovered and reproduced by Birmingham people now,” said Fernie. “If we don’t do that it’s going to die, the world is changing and our culture is changing.”

World’s Stage, a series of seven short films, is the project’s latest instalment, featuring a cast of 140 multilingual people from Birmingham, who perform in most of the 93 languages to be found in the collection.

Split into five acts, the films showcase people of various ages, communities and backgrounds performing Shakespearean lines in a huge range of languages and dialects, largely without subtitles.

“We wanted to see and hear Shakespeare in these beautiful languages,” said Daniel Tyler-McTighe, director of art collective 27:31, who collaborated with Bafta-winning film-makers John Roddy and Ollie Walton on the films. “Even if we don’t understand those languages, we just wanted to enjoy them as performances or as visuals.”

The films explore the concepts of speaking, learning, owning, loving and living Shakespeare in a diverse and vibrant city – children from a local primary school perform a scene from Henry V in multiple languages, while another film features a cacophony of overlapping voices over scrapbooked Shakespeare works.

It culminates in a powerful eight-language version of the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech from As You Like It.

Fernie said embracing the multilingual aspects of the collection was an essential part of making Shakespeare relevant to modern Birmingham, the second most diverse city outside London, whose inhabitants speak over 100 languages.

“We’re hoping to both speak to the different constituencies of the city, but also to bring them together in a productive dialogue about who Shakespeare might be in Birmingham in the 21st century,” he said.

Back in the 19th century, Birmingham’s Shakespeare library was created instead of a statue of the Bard in the city as a way of giving his work to the people in the belief that doing so would genuinely “enrich and extend” our culture, Fernie explains.

“The more we found out about the history, the more we felt we’ve got to try again to do what they tried to do in the beginning, to give Shakespeare to the people.”