Dominic Dromgoole: Shakespeare our best ambassador for democracy

Tomorrow, the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the Globe’s summer season opens with a production of Hamlet. The company will play three shows in our familiar “Wooden O” before setting sail from Tower Bridge on a beautiful topsail-rigged schooner, bound for Amsterdam. Over the next two years, these 12 actors will perform Hamlet in every single country on Earth, travelling by train, plane, automobile, boat, bus and the odd camel with the set in their suitcases. It is a unique and completely unprecedented project.

When we first came up with the idea, we briefly considered the idea of omitting certain countries from our itinerary on the basis of their human rights records. There have already been calls for us to boycott specific places, and I can only imagine that this issue will rear its head again from time to time. But we quickly realised that “every country in the world” really had to mean “every country in the world”. Any policy of selection or exclusion would be false to the spirit of the tour, which is about a passionately held and genuine belief that presenting Shakespeare to as many people as possible in as diverse a range of places as possible can only be a good thing.

Shakespeare was the great citizens’ playwright. Here in England we have been fortified for centuries by his ideas of citizenship, and wherever the plays have travelled they’ve promoted the idea of what it is to be a free and independent citizen. Shakespeare was a very subtle writer, and the ways he found to subvert and interrogate are brilliantly clever and discreet.

Wherever Hamlet goes, it spreads insight, offers wisdom, asks questions. It was originally written for the court of James I, an indisputably paranoid and repressive regime. It then toured around northern Europe, and in 1608 was performed aboard a ship for the rulers of Yemen. It was performed behind the Iron Curtain throughout the Seventies and Eighties, flying under the radar of even the most tyrannical despots. For more than 400 years, and in dozens of languages and hundreds of contexts, Hamlet has survived, thrived and resisted ideological pigeonholing.

We are very proud of our record of working with NGOs over the years: Amnesty, PEN, Reprieve and Human Rights Watch among them. We’ve raised money for their operations, provided space for them and felt their influence in our approach to Shakespeare and in much of our new writing. But ultimately we are not a campaigning charity — we are a theatre. It is our business to have faith in the power of theatre per se, and to try to make the world a better place through art.

We are fully aware that, in some places, our audiences will be restricted by geography or by politics. We are doing everything in our power to open it up as much as possible — in some countries we will simply set up on a beach or in a village square and play for free to whoever is willing to watch. But what we really want to do is simply to put Hamlet in the air of a country, in the ears of a country, with the hope that those who see it will go out and talk about it — because we believe Shakespeare can do no harm and may do a powerful amount of good.