Location: Authorship and Appropriation Conference, University of Dundee

In the course of the eighteenth-century, William Shakespeare became not just a national poet but an international one too. Michael Dobson, Vanessa Cunningham, Michael Caines and many more have shown how pivotal a role the actor-manager David Garrick played in the consecration of England’s national poet. I demonstrate here that Garrick also made an enormous contribution to Shakespeare’s international standing. In both France and Germany, adaptors and appropriators came to Shakespeare through Garrick.