Introduction

When the Research Centre for Human Values at the Chinese University of Hong Kong convened a small seminar on "Glassy Essence: Shakespeare and Value", five of the contributions in this collection have evolved from papers presented to that seminar. The other two were invited subsequently. The theme, or brief, was and has remained deliberately vague, in order to allow seminar participants and later contributors alike to interpret it as they wished. Graham Bradshaw argues that Shakespeare's "perspectivism" is an important ingredient in his enduring popularity across languages and over time. John Gillies looks at the continuities between Shakespeare's values world and that of post-Revolutionary modernity, specifically in Georg Buchner's 1835 drama Danton's Death. A values world could be seen as one in which individual acts, whether of sincerity, loyalty, betrayal, ambition, repentance or redemption, spring naturally.