Person details

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616). English poet and dramatist. His works seem to have stimulated particular interest in the vernacular Czech theatre, among patriotic Czech literati, artists and composers in Prague from the middle nineteenth-century onwards, quite possibly as a response and alternative to patronage of Schiller, Goethe and the German poets. This was particularly manifest in the staging by the Czech Umělecká beseda of an ambitious anniversary Shakespeare Festival in 1864.