This book analyzes one of the most vehement arguments of the Enlightenment era, the so called "argument of Voltaire with Shakespeare". There is no doubt that Voltaire did more than any other writer of the eighteenth century to familiarize the continent with Shakespeare; on the other, it is exceedingly difficult to do justice to his pioneer work, by reason of the foolish, and often flippant, antagonism to the English poet which he developed in his later years. Kagarlitskii shows that Voltaire"s criticism reveals the historical and esthetic limits of classicism. This book is also about the European theatrical culture of the last three centuries