Introducing Shakespeare: A Graphic Guide - Nick Groom, Piero 2013

And Now a European Shakespeare?

This national partisanship has changed since the Second World War. The post-war suspicion of “leader characters” — men who can bend a society, even a nation, to their will — has been mediated by attending to other equally charismatic but less dictatorial and more communal figures. So too, the biographical conception of Shakespeare has shifted to the cosmopolitan.

THIS CHANGE NOW EMPHASIZES MY ALLIED FRENCH AND ITALIAN AND DUTCH FRIENDS, MY KNOWLEDGE OF LATIN AND CONTINENTAL LANGUAGES. SHAKESPEARE IS REINVENTED AS A EUROPEAN.