SHAKESPEARE AND THE EUROPEAN HERITAGE

A tribute to the pioneering investigations of the Spanish scholar Ángel-Luis Pujante and his commitment to the idea of "foreign" Shakespeare, a Shakespeare who, with or without his language, is capable of meaning many different things to different linguistic and cultural constituencies, the volume brings together the original work of some of the foremost specialists in the field from a variety of European and also Latin American backgrounds. The essays reflect both the manifold nature of Shakespeare's presence in different cultural formations and the range of approaches to the description of that phenomenon. After an introductory essay on Shakespeare and Europe that presents a picture of Shakespeare's status in,and relation to, other cultures on the continent including the UK, the volume is divided into four "fields' of interaction with the writer's work: criticism and commemoration, translation, adaptation and fictionalisation, and stage and performance. While, of course, none of these approaches is exclusive of the others, nor (collectively) do they exhaust the number of possible approaches to Shakespeare's famously elusive work, they at least provide a sample of the rich and varied ways European scholars have engaged with it in recent times. In doing so, they help lay the groundwork for what Pujante and others have long conceived of as a truly European Shakespearean critical heritage.