Chapter 3 Shakespeare 2012 – Staging a Cosmopolitan Capital
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As part of London’s 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, the Cultural Olympiad, a nationwide programme celebrating the arts with a variety of cultural events, showcased the World Shakespeare Festival. This article analyses the festival’s attempt to employ Shakespeare as a cultural tool to establish London’s cosmopolitanism and thereby redefine a multi-ethnic national identity for Britain. Focusing on two events from the programme, the British Museum’s exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World as well as London’s Globe to Globe festival, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism reveals the festival’s staging of a ‘universal concern’ which does not equilibrate the ‘respect for legitimate difference’ (Appiah 2006: xv).