ABSTRACT
Let us shift backward as far as we can in the European literary tradition, all the way to what some might think is the primordial period or, as the Greeks of the Classical period of the fifth century b.c.e. would have liked to put it, all the way back to their own original author, Homer. Here we find the prototypical Bard, separated by well over two millennia from that ultimate Bard of the English-speaking world, Shakespeare.
