The seeds for this volume were planted in the fertile soil of Guimarães, Portugal, during a colloquium organized by Francesca Rayner and the Centre for Humanistic Studies of the Universidade do Minho in October 2015, where scholars presented papers on the subject of "Shakespearean Collaborations." Two themes emerged across many of the papers: the intercultural negotiation through Shakespeare and the consideration of spatial studies of Shakespeare. These ideas, germinated in Portugal, were then

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... ross-pollinated with similar topics by other multinational Shakespearean scholars for this special issue on "Shakespeare in Cross-Cultural Spaces." As we worked on this issue through 2016, the significance of discussing our first theme of cross-cultural relations became increasingly urgent. While, on the one hand, the world was marking the 400 th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, on the other hand, political and cultural borders were being re-imagined and re-made: the United Kingdom voted to exit from the European Union, the mass-migration of refugees from war-torn countries such as Iraq, Syria and Libya continued to increase, and the U.S. president, Donald Trump, threatened to build a wall across the Mexican border during his campaign. It seemed that the currents of Shakespeare studies and performance, which were celebrating diversity and interculturalism as witnessed by publications such as Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard (2016) and productions such as Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet with the Black actor, Paapa Essiedu, in the lead role (both reviewed in this issue), were moving in the opposite direction to these international events. This disconnect became amply clear when an American Shakespeare academic, Paul Hamilton, was deported despite having spent nine years studying and teaching in the U.K. Therefore, we chose the term "cross-cultural" due to the different meanings it offers-it could simply mean correlation and comparison between different cultures; it could denote something that transcends cultural differences and "goes across" them; it could stand for an intersection, a cross-roads, where different cultures, like different roads, meet briefly before diverging again; equally, it has connotations of conflict and could mean cultures that are adverse to or at cross-purposes with each other.