ABSTRACT
Shakespeare was born in Europe. As a European poet and playwright, his literary training and artistic materials came from a common European culture shared by most artists and thinkers of his time. The history of the way in which “Shakespeare” spread across Europe brings together energies of all national European cultures across the centuries. The history of Shakespeare in Europe overlaps with history of Shakespeare in Britain, and it is this cultural reverse of No Man’s Land, that some of more astonishing encounters have taken place. The cultural analysis of such manifestations of Shakespeare’s European afterlife has yielded abundant results. In a number of cases it has revealed rather surprising trajectories of reception, revealing the existence of vital traditions also where Shakespeare has been roaming “without his language”. In “The Anti-Americanism of EU Shakespeare”, Douglas Bruster reads what he refers to as “EU Shakespeare”. He sees it as a school engendered in Europe, emerging from a hidden anti-American stance.
