“What’s past is prologue”: the Verona Shakespeare Fringe, Five Years and Counting

How has Shakespeare remained one of the most influential cultural figures in the world more than four centuries after his death? This volume explores the extraordinary vitality of Shakespeare’s global afterlives through the lens of the Verona Shakespeare Fringe (VSF), an international festival founded during the Covid-19 pandemic to celebrate innovation, intercultural dialogue, and the transformative power of performance. Combining critical reflection with artists’ voices and case studies from productions staged in Verona, the book examines how Shakespeare continues to transcend linguistic, cultural, and geographical boundaries. From Ukrainian reinterpretations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Comedy of Errors to Taiwanese Beijing Opera King Lear, multilingual Hamlets, and experimental collaborations between companies from across Europe and beyond, the volume reveals Shakespeare as a shared theatrical language through which contemporary societies negotiate questions of identity, memory, justice, and belonging. More than a history of a festival, this book is an exploration of Shakespeare as a living cultural practice. It demonstrates how festivals function as spaces of artistic experimentation, international collaboration, and community building, while reflecting on theatre’s enduring capacity to respond to moments of crisis and renewal. Richly illustrated and grounded in current Shakespeare scholarship, it offers a compelling portrait of performance as a meeting place where diverse traditions converge and where Shakespeare’s works continue to generate new voices, new encounters, and new futures.

Annadora Zuanel holds an MA in Publishing and Journalism from the University of Verona, where she also attended the TraSCrea Master in Intermedial Translation and Creative Writing, organised by the Skenè Research Centre.