The one part of Asia which Shakespeare did mention with more insistence вЂ“ India, where Titania and her pregnant mortal votaress gossiped together вЂњin the spicГЁd Indian air, by nightвЂќ before the birth of the little changeling boy who, though he remains offstage, motivates so much of A Midsummer NightвЂ™s Dream вЂ“ has appropriately been the one with the longest and richest history of engagement with the Shakespeare canon, admittedly because it once endured the longest and most fraught history of engagement with British colonialism.В Although the incorporation of examinations about Shakespeare into the process of recruiting Indians into the running of the colonial civil service in the nineteenth century was intended to foster cultural deference, ShakespeareвЂ™s works soon escaped this framework, becoming the basis for popular hybridized dramas in Indian languages вЂ“ Bhanumati Chittavilasa, for instance, a Bengali Merchant of Venice (1852).Дuring the twentieth century, especially after independence, the emergent Bollywood cinema industry took up Shakespeare (the supplanting by film of an older colonial tradition of touring the plays in English is simultaneously lamented and enacted by the first Merchant-Ivory film, Shakespeare Wallah, 1965), and recent years have seen high-profile Indian Shakespeare films achieve worldwide acclaim. In that ShakespeareвЂ™s works - taught, translated, adapted and performed - have long since roamed clean through the bounds of modern Asia, however, this deficiency in the Shakespeare canon has been thoroughly rectified, and even within the British performance tradition his works have been widely inflected by Asian techniques, conventions, and perspectives. Although he had apparently seen Emmineux MolineuxвЂ™s world map of 1599 вЂњwith the augmentation of the IndiesвЂќ ( Twelfth Night, 3.2.75), and although Falstaff hopes to make Mistresses Page and Ford his вЂњEast and West IndiesвЂќ ( The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1.3.64), Shakespeare (unlike his colleague Fletcher) never set a play in Indonesia, and he makes no reference to either Japan or China, getting only as near as the legendary neighbouring realm of Cathay (and then only when Sir Toby Belch and Pistol each use the slang term вЂњCathayanвЂќ as an insult in the same two plays). ShakespeareвЂ™s sense of the geography of the rather larger area we now call Asia, like that of many fellow Elizabethans, is more vague.

When a weary Egeon laments in the first scene of The Comedy of Errors that in quest of his lost son he has spent five years вЂњRoaming clean through the bounds of Asia,вЂќ Shakespeare is characteristically using the word only in its classical sense, to indicate the Roman province of Asia Minor, a territory roughly equivalent to that of modern Turkey.

Shakespeer influence