ABSTRACT
The West European media report almost nothing that they associate with America in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner. Most things engender a palpable tone of irritation, derision, annoyance, dismissal. Setting out a painful array of evidence regarding anti-Americanism in Europe, Markovits observes that presence and passion of anti-American discourse among Europeans much preceded administrations of George W. Bush. The phrase “the real existing America” is a winning one, and not only because it echoes the earlier, equally attractive phrase “actually existing Marxism.” In its claim to represent Shakespeare Across Lands, then, a collection like this may strike a US reader as slightly ironic, and in a number of ways. “The Main Street of America,” Route 66 functioned, from 1926 through the 1950s, as the major westward route for those traveling across the US. Final example of anti-Americanism in recent European criticism of Shakespeare comes with Gabriel Egan’s Shakespeare and Marx , a volume in Oxford University Press’s “Shakespeare Topics” series.
