Epilogue

Abstract

During both the Elizabethan and the Jacobean phases of his career, Shakespeare participated in creating what are widely considered to be the greatest plays in the English language and, many would say, the greatest that humanity possesses. Their claim to greatness rests in very considerable measure upon a universality that has manifested itself in a variety of ways. A production of Coriolanus that opened in Paris on 9 December 1933 triggered riots that contributed to a change in the government of France. Germans such as Goethe and Schlegel played indispensable roles in establishing the excellence of Shakespeare’s works, and the Nazi government that came to power in Germany during the 1930s included Shakespeare’s plays among the works that it designated as properly German. The journal Hamlet Studies is published in New Delhi, India. Grigori Kozintsev has filmed Russian versions of King Lear and Hamlet, and among the films of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa are two — Throne of Blood and Ran — based upon Macbeth and King Lear respectively. The 1986 meeting of the International Shakespeare Association took place not in Stratford-upon-Avon or even London, not in Washington, D. C., or Toronto, but in the western sector of a Berlin that was then still divided by the Wall and the Cold War. The site of the ISA’s 1991 meeting was Tokyo.