ABSTRACT
This chapter covers a short chapter in the history of Shakespeare’s reception in Portugal. Paulo Quintela was first and foremost a scholar of German, and his interest in Shakespeare, made obvious in some of his writings, was part and parcel of that professional description. In broader terms, his stay abroad would have instilled in him that formative and culturally integrative understanding of higher education which had provided the rationale for the foundation, little more than a century earlier, precisely of the University of Berlin. The passage by Hauptmann is quoted in the opening pages of one of the graduation theses discussed, and indeed some salient features of these academic pieces derive from the Germanist’s specific background. The political predicament that characterised the Portuguese experience throughout the twentieth century, whilst often placing cultural agents under duress, also created the conditions for a creative reaction that at times rose in proportion to the challenge.
