Shakespeare's World Almost every nation on earth reads, studies and performs the works of William Shakespeare. No writer of any country, nor any age, has ever enjoyed such universal popularity. Neither has any writer been so praised. As William Hazlitt observed, "The most striking peculiarity of Shakespeare's mind was it's generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds." It is perhaps this quality that has earned Shakespeare the supreme accolade, that of lending his name to an era. Other than a monarch or an emperor, few can boast that a time or place is so exclusively theirs. As we talk about Napoleonic Europe or Victorian England, so we spe