Shakespeare on Stage in Europe Since the Late Seventeenth Century

The centrality of Shakespeare in the reception of early modern English drama in seventeenth-century Europe is of German invention. In 1865, Albert Cohn saw Shakespeare as a source and great model for seventeenth-century German drama. He created a canon of six early modern German plays, which he published together with their alleged Shakespearean analogues or sources, including The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet . His example influenced a number of scholars and can be said to have predetermined recent research, which still tends to compare seventeenth-century German plays with their alleged Shakespearean models.