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In his own time, William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was rated as merely one among many talented playwrights and poets, but since the late 17th century has been considered the supreme playwright and poet of the English language. No other playwright's work has been performed even remotely as often on the world stage as Shakespeare's. The plays have often been drastically adapted in performance. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the era of the great acting stars, to be a star on the British stage was synonymous with being a great Shakespearean actor. Then the emphasis was placed on the soliloquies as declamatory turns at the expense of pace and action, and Shakespeare's plays seemed in peril of disappearing beneath the added music, scenery, and special effects produced by thunder, lightning, and wave machines. Editors and critics of the plays, disdaining the showiness and melodrama of Shakespearean stage representation, began to focus on Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, to be studied on the printed page rather than in the theatre. The rift between Shakespeare on the stage and Shakespeare on the page was at its widest in the early 19th century, at a time when both forms of Shakespeare were hitting peaks of fame and popularity: theatrical Shakespeare was successful spectacle and melodrama for the masses, while book or closet drama Shakespeare was being elevated by the reverential commentary of the Romantics into unique poetic genius, prophet, and bard. Before the Romantics, Shakespeare was simply the most admired of all dramatic poets, especially for his insight into human nature and his realism, but Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge refactored him into an object of almost religious adoration, George Bernard Shaw coining the term "bardolatry" to describe it. These critics regarded Shakespeare as towering above other writers, and his plays not as "merely great works of art" but as "phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers" and "with entire submission of our own faculties" (Thomas De Quincey, 1823). To the later 19th century, Shakespeare became in addition an emblem of national pride, the crown jewel of English culture, and a "rallying sign", as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841, for the whole British empire.

It is difficult to assess Shakespeare's reputation in his own lifetime and shortly after. England had little modern literature before the 1570s, and detailed critical commentaries on modern authors did not begin to appear until the reign of Charles I. The facts about his reputation can be surmised from fragmentary evidence. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he seems to have lacked the stature of the aristocratic Philip Sidney, who became a cult figure due to his death in battle at a young age, or of Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare's poems were reprinted far more frequently than his plays; but Shakespeare's plays were written for performance by his own company, and because no law prevented rival companies from using the plays, Shakespeare's troupe took steps to prevent his plays from being printed. That many of his plays were pirated suggests his popularity in the book market, and the regular patronage of his company by the court, culminating in 1603 when James I turned it into the "King's Men," suggests his popularity among higher stations of society. Modern plays (as opposed to those in Latin and Greek) were considered ephemeral and even somewhat disreputable entertainments by some contemporaries. Some of Shakespeare's plays, particularly the history plays, were reprinted frequently in cheap quarto (i. e. pamphlet) form; others took decades to reach a 3rd edition. After Ben Jonson pioneered the canonisation of modern plays by printing his own works in folio (the luxury book format) in 1616, Shakespeare was the next playwright to be honoured by a folio collection, in 1623. That this folio went into another edition within 9 years indicates he was held in unusually high regard for a playwright. The dedicatory poems by Ben Jonson and John Milton in the 2nd folio were the first to suggest Shakespeare was the supreme poet of his age. These expensive reading editions are the first visible sign of a rift between Shakespeare on the stage and Shakespeare for readers, a rift that was to widen over the next two centuries. In his 1630 work 'Timber' or 'Discoveries', Ben Jonson praised the speed and ease with which Shakespeare wrote his plays as well as his contemporary's honesty and gentleness towards others.

During the Interregnum (1642–1660), all public stage performances were banned by the Puritan rulers. Though denied the use of the stage, costumes and scenery, actors still managed to ply their trade by performing "drolls" or short pieces of larger plays that usually ended with some type of jig. Shakespeare was among the many playwrights whose works were plundered for these scenes. Among the most common scenes were Bottom's scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream and the gravedigger's scene from Hamlet. When the theatres opened again in 1660 after this uniquely long and sharp break in British theatrical history, two newly licensed London theatre companies, the Duke's and the King's Company, started business with a scramble for performance rights to old plays. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the Beaumont and Fletcher team were among the most valuable properties and remained popular after Restoration playwriting had gained momentum. In the elaborate Restoration London playhouses, designed by Christopher Wren, Shakespeare's plays were staged with music, dancing, thunder, lightning, wave machines, and fireworks. The texts were "reformed" and "improved" for the stage. A notorious example is Irish poet Nahum Tate's happy ending King Lear (1681) (which held the stage until 1838), while The Tempest was turned into an opera replete with special effects by William Davenant. In fact, as the director of the Duke's Company, Davenant was legally obliged to reform and modernise Shakespeare's plays before performing them, an ad hoc ruling by the Lord Chamberlain in the battle for performance rights which "sheds an interesting light on the many 20th century denunciations of Davenant for his adaptations". The modern view of the Restoration stage as the epitome of Shakespeare abuse and bad taste has been shown by Hume to be exaggerated, and both scenery and adaptation became more reckless in the 18th and 19th centuries. The incomplete Restoration stage records suggest Shakespeare, although always a major repertory author, was bested in the 1660–1700 period by the phenomenal popularity of Beaumont and Fletcher. "Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage", reported fellow playwright John Dryden in 1668, "two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's". In the early 18th century, however, Shakespeare took over the lead on the London stage from Beaumont and Fletcher, never to relinquish it again. By contrast to the stage history, in literary criticism there was no lag time, no temporary preference for other dramatists: Shakespeare had a unique position at least from the Restoration in 1660 and onwards. While Shakespeare did not follow the unbending French neo classical "rules" for the drama and the three classical unities of time, place, and action, those strict rules had never caught on in England, and their sole zealous proponent, Thomas Rymer, was hardly ever mentioned by influential writers except as an example of narrow dogmatism. Dryden, for example, argued in his influential Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) – the same essay in which he noted that Shakespeare's plays were performed only half as often as those of Beaumont and Fletcher – for Shakespeare's artistic superiority. Though Shakespeare does not follow the dramatic conventions, Dryden wrote, Ben Jonson does, and as a result Jonson lands in a distant second place to "the incomparable Shakespeare", the follower of nature, the untaught genius, the great realist of human character.

In the 18th century, Shakespeare dominated the London stage, while Shakespeare productions turned increasingly into the creation of star turns for star actors. After the Licensing Act of 1737, a quarter of plays performed were by Shakespeare, and on at least two occasions rival London playhouses staged the very same Shakespeare play at the same time (Romeo and Juliet in 1755 and King Lear the next year) and still commanded audiences. This occasion was a striking example of the growing prominence of Shakespeare stars in the theatrical culture, the big attraction being the competition and rivalry between the male leads at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, Spranger Barry and David Garrick. There appear to have been no issues with Barry and Garrick, in their late thirties, playing adolescent Romeo one season and geriatric King Lear the next. In September 1769 Garrick staged a major Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford upon Avon, which was a major influence on the rise of bardolatry. It was at the Shakespeare Jubilee that Garrick thanked the Shakespeare Ladies Club for saving Shakespeare from obscurity: "It was You Ladies that restor'd Shakespeare to the Stage you form'd yourselves into a Society to protect his Fame, and Erected a Monument to his and your own honour in Westminster Abbey." As performance playscripts diverged increasingly from their originals, the publication of texts intended for reading developed rapidly in the opposite direction, with the invention of textual criticism and an emphasis on fidelity to Shakespeare's original words. The texts that are being read and performed today were largely settled in the 18th century. Nahum Tate and Nathaniel Lee had already prepared editions and performed scene divisions in the late 17th century, and Nicholas Rowe's edition of 1709 is considered the first truly scholarly text for the plays. It was followed by many good 18th century editions, crowned by Edmund Malone's landmark Variorum Edition, which was published posthumously in 1821 and remains the basis of modern editions. These collected editions were meant for reading, not staging; Rowe's 1709 edition was, compared to the old folios, a light pocketbook. Shakespeare criticism also increasingly spoke to readers, rather than to theatre audiences. The only aspects of Shakespeare's plays that were consistently disliked and singled out for criticism in the 18th century were the puns ("clenches") and the "low" (sexual) allusions. While a few editors, notably Alexander Pope, attempted to gloss over or remove the puns and the double entendres, this was quickly reversed, and by mid century the puns and sexual humour were (with only a few exceptions, notably Thomas Bowdler) restored permanently. Dryden's sentiments about Shakespeare's imagination and capacity for painting "nature" were echoed in the 18th century by, for example, Joseph Addison ("Among the English, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others"), Alexander Pope ("every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself"), and Samuel Johnson (who scornfully dismissed Voltaire's and Rhymer's neoclassical Shakespeare criticism as "the petty cavils of petty minds"). The long lived belief that the Romantics were the first generation to truly appreciate Shakespeare and to prefer him to Ben Jonson is contradicted by praise from writers throughout the 18th century. Ideas about Shakespeare that many people think of as typically post Romantic were frequently expressed in the 18th and even in the 17th century: he was described as a genius who needed no learning, as deeply original, and as creating uniquely "real" and individual characters (see Timeline of Shakespeare criticism). To compare Shakespeare and his well educated contemporary Ben Jonson was a popular exercise at this time, a comparison that was invariably complimentary to Shakespeare. It functioned to highlight the special qualities of both writers, and it especially powered the assertion that natural genius trumps rules, that "there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature" (Samuel Johnson). Opinion of Shakespeare was briefly shaped in the 1790s by the "discovery" of the Shakespeare Papers by William Henry Ireland. Ireland claimed to have found in a trunk a goldmine of lost documents of Shakespeare's including two plays, Vortigern and Rowena and Henry II. These documents appeared to demonstrate a number of unknown facts about Shakespeare that shaped opinion of his works, including a Profession of Faith demonstrating Shakespeare was a Protestant and that he had an illegitimate child. Although there were many believers in the provenance of the Papers, they soon came under fierce attack from scholars who pointed out their numerous inaccuracies. Vortigern had only one performance at the Drury Lane Theatre before Ireland admitted he had forged the documents and written the plays himself.

English actors started visiting the Holy Roman Empire in the late 16th century to work as "fiddlers, singers and jugglers", and through them the work of Shakespeare had first become known in the Reich. In 1601, in the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland), which had a large English merchant colony living within its walls, a company of English actors arrived to put on plays by Shakespeare. By 1610, the actors were performing Shakespeare in German as his plays had become popular in Danzig. As a part of an effort to get the German public to take Shakespeare more seriously, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe organised a Shakespeare jubilee in Frankfurt in 1771, stating in a speech on 14 October 1771 that the dramatist had shown that the Aristotelian unities were "as oppressive as a prison" and were "burdensome fetters on our imagination". Goethe praised Shakespeare for liberating his mind from the rigid Aristotelian rules, saying: "I jumped into the free air, and suddenly felt I had hands and feet Shakespeare, my friend, if you were with us today, I could only live with you". The German critic Ernst Osterkamp wrote: "Shakespeare's importance to German literature cannot be compared with that of any other writer of the post antiquity period. Neither Dante or Cervantes, neither Moliere or Ibsen have even approached his influence here. With the passage of time, Shakespeare has virtually become one of Germany's national authors." Shakespeare was first translated into Russian by Alexander Sumarokov, who called Shakespeare an "inspired barbarian", who wrote of the Bard of Avon that in his plays "there is much that is bad and exceedingly good". Voltaire was a prominent figure in this debate. In Essai sur la poésie épique (1728), he declared himself to be an admirer of the English theatre, especially of its tragedies, which he considered to be superior to all the other genres brought to the English stage. Voltaire's appreciation for the English theatre was so sincere that he tried to import some of its characteristics into France. The adoption of such features was not immediate or easy. In Discours sur la tragédie (1731), Voltaire had analysed all the rules that had to be categorically respected in French theatres, all the events that could be represented and those that were absolutely forbidden. As a result, «la delicatesse», la «bienséance» e la «coutume»Voltaire showed his will to partly abandon such conventions, mainly because they were an impediment for the realisation of some scenes he was working on, firstly the death of Julius Caesar. The main impediment for this scene was the rule that in French tragedies, characters could commit suicide, but not murder. Voltaire fought to change this convention, supporting his thesis with examples from Ancient Greek theatre and the contemporary English theatre, where assassinations were regularly represented on stage. However, Voltaire also stated that English tragedies could turn into « un lieu de carnage». He personally translated the speech of Brutus in Julius Caesar, becoming the first Frenchman to translate a passage from a Shakespearean play. His translation was included in Discours sur la tragedie, published in 1730. Some years later, he translated Hamlet's monologue, which was published in Les Lettres philosophiques (1734). Shakespeare's popularity steadily increased during the century and others tested themselves with translating the Bard. The appearance of numerous translations points out a change in the taste of French playwrights and audiences. In 1746 Pierre Antoine La Place published eight volumes containing summaries of every Shakespearean play and partial translations of some of them. Between 1776 and 1782 Pierre Letourner translated the complete corpus of Shakespeare's plays. His work also included comments on Shakespeare, particularly on his ability to depict human emotions and make characters talk in a language close to that used in everyday life. Letourner's translations do not lack errors, but his work was fundamental in spreading the knowledge of Shakespeare and the English theatre in France.

Shakespeare remained almost unknown in Italy until the beginning of the 18th century. The most translated and admired English poets were Alexander Pope, John Milton, Thomas Gray and James Thomson. The knowledge of Shakespeare spread in the peninsula in two different ways. On one hand, Italian intellectuals who sojourned for a period of time in England had the possibility to witness theatrical representations and to write about their experiences; their texts, then, travelled back to Italy. On the other hand, many English people travelled to Italy in the 18th century, since it was one of the many destinations on the Grand Tour. The occasions for interactions between English and Italian people were numerous. Moreover, English people who migrated or were banished from England, often chose Italy as their new home. However, many French translations and adaptations of Shakespearean plays began to circulate in Europe in this period, and the majority of Italian writers started to read Shakespeare in French. Few people knew English and dictionaries were not widely available. For Italians, their first approach towards English plays was often through French renditions and, even though they presented substantial differences from the originals, they introduced the knowledge of English theatre and its rules into Italy. One of the most famous and most read French adaptations was La mort de César by Voltaire, based on Julius Caesar by Shakespeare. In 1705, Apostolo Zeno wrote Ambleto, which was staged in Venice the following year. Ambleto was not a translation of Hamlet, not even an adaptation. The only similarity with Hamlet was its source of inspiration, and it has now been verified that the author did not know Shakespeare. The production was so successful that it was brought to the stage of the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1712. The play was staged again in Italy in 1750, but it had not been influenced by the Shakespearean Hamlet. As a matter of fact, it was identical to the first version of 1706. This is a signal of how there was no real interest for the English theatre and its characteristics in Italy, yet. In 1729, Paolo Rolli published an Italian translation of the first six books of Paradise Lost. In the preface, he praised Shakespeare and compared him to Dante. In 1739 he published a translation of one of Hamlet's monologues. The first complete Italian translation of a Shakespearean tragedy was Giulio Cesare by Domenico Valentini, printed in 1756. Valentini used the English edition of the tragedy printed in 1733 by Lewis Theobald for his translation. In his preface, he stated that he did not understand English, therefore, he asked for the help of some knights, whose identity is still unknown. It is probable that they were English knights who were visiting Siena as part of The Grand Tour. It was common for Italian and English people to meet in social and cultural gatherings. This is probably how Valentini met them and asked them to assist him in the process of translation. Other intellectuals worked on Shakespeare towards the end of the century. Giuseppe Baretti published Discours sur Shakespeare et M. r de Voltaire in 1777; Alessandro Verri translated Hamlet and Othello between 1769 and 1777; Francesco Algarotti, who did not appreciate English theatre, changed his mind when he saw a representation of Julius Caesar in London. He also translated the passages he thought were the most salient in Brutus's speech. Giustina Renier Michiel translated Othello, Macbeth and Coriolanus between 1798 and 1801. It is still uncertain whether she worked alone. Letters exchanged with Cesarotti lead scholars to think that she may have been helped by another Italian writer. It is also possible that she worked alone, using a French rendition to help with the translations. The question is still unsolved.

The knowledge of Shakespeare and his works in European countries, including Spain, arrived centuries after his death and not always easily. While it is possible that some Shakespeare plays may have arrived in Spain as soon as the end of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century, the earliest documented example of a work of Shakespeare's in Spain is The Two Noble Kinsmen, circa 1640. But the first editions to reach Spain were in recusant libraries and did not have an impact on playwrights and play goers in Spain. There is weak evidence that a First Folio and strong evidence that Second Folio containing historical dramas arrived in the country after 1632, the year in which the latter was published in England. There is also evidence of a third Folio imported in Spain in 1742 but it is now lost. However, these editions alone were not sufficient to spark the interest of Spanish writers and critics. Shakespeare's works began to be read by a larger number of intellectuals in the 18th century; however, Shakespeare did not arrive to Spain in his original language, but he began to be studied thanks to French adaptations and rewritings. Spanish scholars rarely read Shakespeare in English. The arrival of Shakespeare in the country brought with it the debate on theatre, its rules, its virtues and vices. The classical rules of Spanish, French and Italian theatre, derived from the classical theatre, were often an obstacle for the introduction of innovations coming from different theatrical traditions. English theatre, for instance, did not respect classical rules. This provoked admiration but, at the same time, rejection for Shakespeare and his works: on one hand his imagination was admired but on the other he used too many features that did not find their place in the Spanish tradition. Those critics who expressed their judgment on the Bard in the 18th century judged him from a classical perspective and since he did not comply with the classical rules of theatre, he was not worth of appreciation. As a consequence, his works began to be translated only at the end of the 18th century. The first Spanish translation of Shakespeare dates to 1798, when Leandro Fernandéz de Moratìn translated Hamlet. However, the first tragedy to be translated directly from the original English version, without the mediation of a French text, dates to 1838 and it was Macbeth translated by José García de Villalta. Shakespearean plays began to be represented in Spanish theatres only at the beginning of the 19th century but they were often neoclassic adaptations derived from French rewritings. Between 1808 and 1817 Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth were brought to the stage. Shakespeare began to be appreciated more with the advent of Romanticism.

Theatres and theatrical scenery became ever more elaborate in the 19th century, and the acting editions used were progressively cut and restructured to emphasise more and more the soliloquies and the stars, at the expense of pace and action. Performances were further slowed by the need for frequent pauses to change the scenery, creating a perceived need for even more cuts to keep performance length within tolerable limits; it became a generally accepted maxim that Shakespeare's plays were too long to be performed without substantial cuts. The platform, or apron, stage, on which actors of the 17th century would come forward for audience contact, was gone, and the actors stayed permanently behind the fourth wall or proscenium arch, further separated from the audience by the orchestra, see image right. Through the 19th century, a roll call of legendary actors' names all but drown out the plays in which they appear: Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), John Philip Kemble (1757–1823), Henry Irving (1838–1905), and Ellen Terry (1847–1928). To be a star of the legitimate drama came to mean being first and foremost a "great Shakespeare actor", with a famous interpretation of, for men, Hamlet, and for women, Lady Macbeth, and especially with a striking delivery of the great soliloquies. The acme of spectacle, star, and soliloquy Shakespeare performance came with the reign of actor manager Henry Irving at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in London from 1878 to 1899. At the same time, a revolutionary return to the roots of Shakespeare's original texts, and to the platform stage, absence of scenery, and fluid scene changes of the Elizabethan theatre, was being effected by William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society.

The belief in the unappreciated 18th century Shakespeare was proposed at the beginning of the 19th century by the Romantics, in support of their view of 18th century literary criticism as mean, formal, and rule bound, which was contrasted with their own reverence for the poet as prophet and genius. Such ideas were most fully expressed by German critics such as Goethe and the Schlegel brothers. Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt raised admiration for Shakespeare to worship or even "bardolatry" (a sarcastic coinage from bard + idolatry by George Bernard Shaw in 1901, meaning excessive or religious worship of Shakespeare). To compare him to other Renaissance playwrights at all, even for the purpose of finding him superior, began to seem irreverent. Shakespeare was rather to be studied without any involvement of the critical faculty, to be addressed or apostrophised—almost prayed to—by his worshippers, as in Thomas De Quincey's classic essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" (1823): "O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties ". As the concept of literary originality grew in importance, critics were horrified at the idea of adapting Shakespeare's tragedies for the stage by putting happy endings on them, or editing out the puns in Romeo and Juliet. In another way, what happened on the stage was seen as unimportant, as the Romantics, themselves writers of closet drama, considered Shakespeare altogether more suitable for reading than staging. Charles Lamb saw any form of stage representation as distracting from the true qualities of the text. This view, argued as a timeless truth, was also a natural consequence of the dominance of melodrama and spectacle on the early 19th century stage. Shakespeare became an important emblem of national pride in the 19th century, which was the heyday of the British Empire and the acme of British power in the world. To Thomas Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841), Shakespeare was one of the great poet heroes of history, in the sense of being a "rallying sign" for British cultural patriotism all over the world, including even the lost American colonies: "From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever English men and women are, they will say to one another, 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him'" ("The Hero as a Poet"). As the foremost of the great canonical writers, the jewel of English culture, and as Carlyle puts it, "merely as a real, marketable, tangibly useful possession", Shakespeare became in the 19th century a means of creating a common heritage for the motherland and all her colonies. Post colonial literary critics have had much to say of this use of Shakespeare's plays in what they regard as a move to subordinate and uproot the cultures of the colonies themselves. Across the North Sea, Shakespeare remained influential in Germany. In 1807, August Wilhelm Schlegel translated all of Shakespeare's plays into German, and such was the popularity of Schlegel's translation (which is generally regarded as one of the best translations of Shakespeare into any language), that German nationalists were soon starting to claim that Shakespeare was actually a German playwright who had just written his plays in English. By the middle of the 19th century, Shakespeare had been incorporated into the pantheon of German literature.

In 1934 the French government dismissed the director of the Comédie Française over a controversial production of Coriolanus that had been the occasion for right wing violence, amidst the Stavisky affair. In the international protests that followed, came one from Germany, from none other than Joseph Goebbels. Although productions of Shakespeare's plays in Germany itself were subject to 'streamlining', he continued to be favoured as a great classical dramatist, especially so as almost every new German play since the late 1890s onwards was portrayed by German government propaganda as the work of left wingers, of Jews or of "degenerates" of one kind or another. Politically acceptable writers had simply been unable to fill the gap, or had only been able to do so through producing propaganda. In 1935, Goebbels was to say "We can build autobahns, revive the economy, create a new army, but we cannot manufacture new dramatists." With Schiller suspect for his radicalism, Lessing for his humanism and even Goethe for his lack of patriotism, the legacy of the "Aryan" Shakespeare was reinterpreted for new purposes. Rodney Symington, Professor of Germanic and Russian Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada, deals with this question in The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich (Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). The scholar reports that Hamlet, for instance, was reconceived as a proto German warrior rather than a man with a conscience. Of this play, one critic wrote: "If the courtier Laertes is drawn to Paris and the humanist Horatio seems more Roman than Danish, it is surely no accident that Hamlet's alma mater should be Wittenberg." A leading magazine declared that the crime which deprived Hamlet of his inheritance was a foreshadowing of the Treaty of Versailles, and that the conduct of Gertrude was reminiscent of the "spineless" Weimar politicians. Weeks after Hitler took power in 1933, an official party publication appeared, entitled Shakespeare – a Germanic Writer, a counter to those who wanted to ban all foreign influences. At the Propaganda Ministry, Rainer Schlosser, given charge of German theatre by Goebbels, mused that Shakespeare was more German than English. After the outbreak of the Second World War, the performance of Shakespeare was banned, though this ban was quickly lifted by Hitler in person, a favour extended to no other playwright. Not only did the regime appropriate the Bard, but it also appropriated Elizabethan England itself. To the Nazi leaders, Elizabethan England had been a young, vigorous nation, much like the Third Reich itself, quite unlike the decadent British Empire of the then present day. There were some exceptions to the official approval of Shakespeare, as the great patriotic plays, most notably Henry V, were shelved. The reception of The Merchant of Venice was at best lukewarm (Marlowe's The Jew of Malta was suggested as a possible alternative), because it was not anti Semitic enough for Nazi taste (the play's conclusion, in which the daughter of the Jewish antagonist converts to Christianity and marries one of the Gentile protagonists, particularly violated Nazi notions of racial purity). Hamlet was by far the most popular play, along with Macbeth and Richard III.

Given the popularity of Shakespeare in Russia, there were film versions of Shakespeare that often differed from western interpretations, usually emphasizing a humanist message that implicitly criticized the Soviet regime. Othello (1955) by Sergei Yutkevich celebrated Desdemona's love for Othello as a triumph of love over racial hatred. Hamlet in this film resembles a Soviet dissident who—despite his own hesitation, fears and doubts—can no longer stand the moral rot around him. The film was based on a script written by the novelist Boris Pasternak, who had been persecuted under Stalin. It was not until 1946 that Hamlet, as translated by André Gide, was performed in Paris and "ensured Shakespeare's elevation to cult status" in France. The very act of putting on a play by Shakespeare, formerly condemned as a "bourgeois Western imperialist author" whom no Chinese could respect, was in and of itself an act of quiet dissent. Of all Shakespeare's plays, the most popular in China in the late 1970s and 1980s was Macbeth. It has been posited that Chinese audiences saw in this play, first performed in England in 1606 and set in 11th century Scotland, a parallel with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Another critic, Zhao Xun, wrote: "Macbeth is the fifth Shakespearean play produced on the Chinese stage after the smashing of the Gang of Four. This play of conspiracy has always been performed at critical moments in the history of our nation". The play's director, the Shakespearean scholar Fang Ping, who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution for studying this "bourgeois Western imperialist", stated in an interview at the time that King Lear was relevant in China because King Lear, the "highest ruler of a monarchy", created a world full of cruelty and chaos where those who loved him were punished and those who did not were rewarded, a barely veiled reference to the often capricious behavior of Mao, who punished his loyal followers for no apparent reason. A 1981 production of The Merchant of Venice was a hit with Chinese audiences, as the play was seen to promote the theme of justice and fairness in life, with the character of Portia being especially popular, as she is seen as standing for, as one critic wrote, "the humanist spirit of the Renaissance" with its striving for "individuality, human rights and freedom". The theme of a religious conflict between a Jewish merchant vs. a Christian merchant in The Merchant of Venice is generally ignored in Chinese productions of The Merchant of Venice, as most Chinese find do not find the theme of Jewish Christian conflict relevant. Louis Zukofsky had read all of Shakespeare's works by the time he was eleven, and his Bottom: On Shakespeare (1947) is a book length prose poem exploring the role of the eye in the plays. In its original printing, a second volume consisting of a setting of The Tempest by the poet's wife, Celia Zukofsky, was also included.

Shakespeare's reputation continues to have an influence on the film industry, with new versions of his works, such as The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel Coen, being put into production. Regular performances of Shakespeare's plays continue to be held globally, with Shakespeare's works often appreciated by the younger generation of students, the liberal, progressive Gen Z. Critics continue to regard Shakespeare as the greatest writer and poet of the English Language. Shakespeare's plays (especially A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar) are taught in nearly every English speaking school globally and are repeatedly translated into different languages.

The growth of Shakespeare's reputation is illustrated by a timeline of Shakespeare criticism, from John Dryden's "when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too" (1668) to Thomas Carlyle's estimation of Shakespeare as the "strongest of rallying signs" (1841) for an English identity.