This program explores Shakespeare’s radical influence across time and place. We’ll trace how his language and political vision helped inspire the rhetoric of the American Revolution, even echoing in the Declaration of Independence. We’ll consider the historical forces that transformed Shakespeare into a cultural authority whose work could be enlisted for causes of liberation, often speaking to those on the margins of power. And we’ll look far beyond the eighteenth century to moments when Shakespeare became a clandestine ally, such as his use by the French Resistance during World War II to carry coded messages of defiance.