Summaries

Antony Brenton
At the court of Shakespeare

The paper argues the political constants in the history of mankind. Tyrrany in the XXI century is the same as it was in Shakespeare's time and as it is reflected in his historical dramas. Thus, Shakespeare helps us understand the historical processes and psycolodgy.

Stanley Wells
Shakespeare and Co.

The paper presents the summary of the book Shakespeare and Co. (Allen Lane, 2006; Pantheon, USA, 2007) in which the author tries to give an account of the relationships between Shakespeare and the actors and playwrights of his time. Shakespeare was not a lone eminence but a fully paid-up member of the theatrical community of his age, a working playwright with professional obligations to the theatre personnel without whose collaboration his art would have been stifled. The Bard was one who, like most other playwrights of the period, actively collaborated with other writers, not necessarily always as a senior partner. He worked within the same intellectual and theatrical environment as his contemporaries. Shakespeare was subject to the same commercial and social pressures and interacted with fellow dramatists and actors throughout his career.

Ann Pasternak Slater
«Shoe-strings, hearts and empires! Mysterious sympathy!»: Shakespeare's Theatrical Icons

The title of this paper is taken from Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, and is a quotation from an appallingly bad play by «Scythrop» (=Shelley). The author considers the use of staged images in the work of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, with special attention to the relationship between such theatrical icons and the moralized images of 16th century emblem books, specifically Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes. The paper is concentrated in particular on the arming and disarming scenes in Antony and Cleopatra, the tortoise in Jonson's Volpone, Desdemona's handkerchief, the healing of Ligarius and Caesar's haunting of Brutus in Julius Caesar.

Michael Payne
Shakespeare's Imagination

In his paper the author considers the category of imagination which is so important in Shakespeare's works. The Bard is fully aware of the great power of this human ability which allows to unite the creator and his audience. He makes it the subject of his contemplation in the Sonnets and the dramas. But he also gives way to it in his genuine creative work. It is imagination that makes Shakespeare's works so variable, enjoyable, inspiring, puzzling and sometimes disillusioning.

Peter Cummings
Turning Inside Out: Shakespeare's Chiastic Wit

This paper presents a study of an ancient rhetorical figure — chiasmus as a widely used speech device by Shakespeare. The author suggests that this age-old structure both accommodates wit with its brevity, eloquence, and surprise, and associates itself both consciously and unconsciously with wit's incisive economy of means. There is a very strong connection in Shakespeare's thinking between what wit is and does, and the figure of chiasmus itself. Chiasmic phrases are so numerous and brilliant in his works that the scholar offers to take them for Shakespeare's finger prints.

A.N. Gorbunov
The Ideal of Marital Love in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne

The presentation discusses the images of marital love as drawn by these three poets of English Renaissance. We have focused, respectively, on Spenser's The Epithalamion, Shakespeare's «problem plays», and Donne's lyric.

M. V Aleksandrenko
«The Winter's Tale»: the tragedy of Leontes

Many students of The Winter's Tale tend to place high emphasis on the issue of Leontes' seemingly unmotivated jealousy, while in itself the latter is but a symptom of a deep and disturbing personal crisis of Leontes caused by the acutely felt discrepancy between his own idealistic treatment of the notions of innocence and fidelity and the ambiguous shapes they actually take. Leontes attempts to create his own pronouncedly austere system of values, which he imposes on his family and surroundings and which is supposed to replace what he regards as a declining natural order. His conflict with «great creating nature» destroys this tyrannical system and shatters the very basis of his own political and familial identity, which is partially restored only after Leontes is reconciled with his family and Polixenes. But even though his deeds are fallacious, their preconditions are not. Regarded from this point, Leontes may be considered a genuinely tragic hero, standing against the existing order by his keen feeling of the disturbingly inconsistent nature of human life.

V.A. Rogatin
Alliteration types in drama

All poetry in the Old English tradition used alliteration whereas in later metrical forms rhyme would hold the lines together. Elizabethans (including Shakespeare) did not favor rhymes in drama. However, alliteration seems to a bigger issue with Shakespeare than a mere euphonic device. The initial phoneme repetitions frequently quoted do not often consider diachronic pronunciation standard or, more importantly, syntactical distribution. That is why there is a temptation to contrast alliterative modes in a drama with the Anglo-Saxon Canon.

Of course, Shakespeare, as well as most of his contemporaries, was unfamiliar with early medieval poetry, especially since Henry VIII's church reforms had brought an end to holiday performances of miracle plays. Still, the ballad persisted in his day, he used them as song lyrics, and these ballads integrated outer conflicts with traditional elements of diction.

We provide criteria for identification of alliterative cases in King Lear, with consideration for the four types of fabric used (prose, blank verse, couplets, and songs). Cases of alliteration are discussed as: 1) lexical collocations (set phrases); 2) morphemic repetitions; 3) associative unities; 4) inner consonances enhanced by other phonetic devices, and 5) cross alliteration (as parallel to the use of quatrains in a sonnet). We can also bring functions as a descriptive criterion for alliteration, for sometimes its role is as purely mnemonic, but more frequently the effect is higher humor or deeper pathos.

Igor V. Peshkov
Captive Time in Aristotle and in Shakespeare

Hamlet's research and revival of the time matrix set forth by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. Medieval aftermath and Shakespeare's prophesy of modern chaotic and non-directed time, dispersed in space.

Aristotle's triad in Scenes 1, 2 and 3 of the tragedy. Gradual disintegration of the progressive sequence in following Scenes 4 and 5. Hamlet's experiments with time. Open-ended denouement, with a cyclic return to the sense of time.

Vladimir A. Lukov
Shakespeare's Cult in Pre-Romanticist Culture

In early 18th century, Shakespeare regained popularity, his plays, even though re-written, filled the repertoire of European theatres. Voltaire happened to be one of the first to popularize Shakespeare. In the second half of the century the first edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works appeared in France (J. Eschenburg and P. Le Tourneur). In the 1770s Shakespeare was finally established an international phenomenon (Goethe and Herder playing no small part of his reputation). However, the cult promoted by these writers should be distinguished from the actual influence of his works.

Pre-Romanticist taking after Shakespeare did gain solid ground in literary development, beginning with plots (medieval history, fantasy, mystery) and up to the larger-than-life character dimensions, the overall image of Emperors' Time and Fate (where didactic treatment of history loses relevance), from balance to loss of harmony, from logic to emotion and expressiveness, to the revival of Shakespeare's technique in structure and style, including his metaphors. The popularity of Shakespeare also gave rise to a new concept of a poet as Genius and Creator.

V.P. Shestakov
Shakespeare On Tennis

The image of tennis as a game meets a variety of modifications in Shakespeare's plays. England borrowed it from France where it was popular at the court and knew it in its early form as jeu de pomme. Shakespeare analyzes the historical aspects of the game which became one of the symbols of the humanistic epoch as well as its metaphoric ambiguity. The article is devoted to a watertight analysis of all the allusions to tennis in Shakespeare's art.

G.M. Kruzhkov; M.G. Kruzhkov
Shakespeare's Vocabulary: Myths and Figures

The authors, a philologist and a mathematician, investigate the amount of words used by Shakespeare, applying a new method elaborated by them specially for this purpose. They reasonably assert that the number of words used by a writer depends on the volume of the literary text under observation. As a result of counting they argue that the widely spread opinion of an exceptionally rich vocabulary in Shakespeare's works is no more but a myth.

Vitaly R. Poplavskiy
The Tragedy of Hamlet in the Renaissance and Classicist Aesthetics

While the roots of the tragedy may be traced to pagan ancient Greece and to the cult of sacrifice, the beginning of the Christian era put an end to the practices of murder and self-murder performed to propitiate the gods. Hamlet's indecisiveness can be to a large extent interpreted as his attempt to comprehend to which god he should do sacrifice of Claudius or of his own life. Since revenge was strictly forbidden in Christian ethics, the very conscience of the Renaissance intellectual was a great obstacle in the way of his attempt to fulfill the mission imposed by the infernal Ghost. Both the world and an individual man are incorrigible — that is the idea of Shakespeare's play. In this regard, Shakespeare's Hamlet, who doesn't want to sacrifice anyone, can be called an anti-hero or a hero of an anti-tragedy. The Renaissance tragedy is, in essence, a thriller, while the tragedy in its original form was based on the paramount importance of a sense of duty.

The initial genre basis of the tragedy was revived in the aesthetics of Classicism with its idea of public duty and inevitable sacrifices. Thus, the story of Hamlet lost its philosophical profundity but became more understandable. In the plays written in the 18^th century, Hamlet truly deems it to be his duty to bring order to the state of Denmark. He loves Ophelia whose father is a criminal. It is very difficult to kill one's sweetheart's father, even for the sake of your country's good — that's the idea of the Hamlet plays by Alexander Sumarokov (1748) and Stepan Viskovatoff (1811). It is these transformations in the very structure of the inner conflict that caused significant twists in the tragedies about Hamlet.

G.N. Shelogurova
Ghosts in Ancient Tragedies and in Shakespeare

Ritual and myth as sources of such images. The status of the royal ghost. The essence of a ghost personage: real versus imagined; in Aeschylus this reflects the playwright's basic worldview (the sublunary world and the realm of death coexist), whereas Shakespeare depicts such visitations as ethical deviations («the time is out of joint»). The protagonists of Aeschylus (The Persians), Sophocles (Electro) and Euripides (Electro) are intent upon establishing contact with the dead. Hamlet or Macbeth will regard the intervention as a catastrophy. Constant attributes of the ghost personage in their origin and evolution. The functions they perform: prophesy (minor with Shakespeare); revelation of mystery (such mysteries are different from one epoch to another); invocation (most frequently, to revenge The Eumenides, Hamlet). The position of the ghost in the dramatic composition: (1) As Prologue (the ghost of Polydorus in Euripides' Hecuba, Tantalus and Thiestes in Seneca's Thiestes and Agamemnon, respectively). (2) As another character provided with a certain reason for his appearance (the reasoning is stated by Aeschylus, and Shakespeare prefers to keep it veiled); the ghosts in their hierarchical status towards other personages: Darius and the Ghost Hamlet, the pleaded to, and the pleader. The fairy-tale nature of Alcestis in Euripides' drama.

N.E. Mikeladze
«Hawk — Handsaw» Opposition and Its Meaning in «Hamlet»

The «hawk — handsaw» opposition (II, 2, 374—375) is interpreted at two complementary levels: semantic and phonetic. The first is intended for «judicious» spectators and contains a reference to the legend of Osiris — the earliest Mediterranean plot about the son's revenge for his treacherously murdered father. The second is meant for «unskillful» or «barren» spectators and refers to the medieval mnemonic visual alphabets. This «dark» phrase concludes Hamlet's interrupted discourse about Man (II, 2, 293—310) and clarifies its message.

S.A. Makurenkova
XX-th Century as Mirrored in Shakespeare's «Hamlet»: Tristan Tzara

The paper deals with the modernist literary text of the XX-th century in the theoretical aspect of a cited word. Borrowed from the classical piece of literature the alien word enters the space of interaction with the original text by a new writer thus forming a new artistic reality revealing new meanings. In her paper the author traces Shakespeare's tracks in the work of the dada leading figure Tristan Tzara.

Boris N. Gaydin (Moscow)
«Anti-Hamlet» in T. Stoppard's Plays

The presentation considers the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by T. Stoppard as an example of modernist perversion of a well known plot. The author evaluates the significance of «anti-Hamlet» approach in the piece of art as well as in the Shakespeare criticism.

V.S. Florova «Any Mother's Child»

(Dramatis Personae in Shakespeare's Sonnet 21)

Shakespeare's Sonnet 21 is usually treated as a poem setting against a great number of artificial pieces written by Petrarch's imitators. Some scholars consider it to be the beginning of Shakespeare's future controversy with the rival poets (group 78—86). Moreover, the sonnet brings another important problem concerning the mode of address. It is not impossible that the sonnet was not addressed to the Fair Friend, but rather to the Dark Mistress, therefore, it is connected with Sonnet 130, where the poet's female beloved is described in the anti-Petrarch style. Undoubtedly, all these questions are of less importance than the one of the sonnet's poetics. The latter brings a rather more interesting and nearly overlooked problem. The sonnet under discussion has two more speech acts besides the comparison-by-contrast, which are the direct appeal (O, let me... truly write | And then believe me...) and representation of the speaker's beloved (my love is as fair | As any mother's child, though...). Besides, these speech acts are widely different. Here comes the question: who is the addressee the speaker is appealing to and urging to believe a true presentation of his lovel Is it the same person represented as the object of the speaker's love? Or perhaps he is just any potential reader of the sonnet? We can formulate the chief question of our analysis as follows: what is the role of each dramatis persona in the sonnet, and how is it expressed in the types of speech chosen by the author?

Е.A. Pervushina
Russian Translators' Reception of the Cyclic Structure of Shakespearean «Sonnets»

The article deals with the problem of genre in translation modification of Shakespeare's Sonnets analyzed as a poetic unity rather than as a collection of separate poems. The great metagenre potential of the original made it possible for translators to discover various types of cyclic organization of the Shakespeare collection. The influence of processes that took place in translating literature was no less important. Thus, dealing with the lyrical cycle as an independent genre form facilitated the perception of Shakespeare's poems as a complete cycle-work. The plurality of parallel translations that is developing intensely in the 20^th—21^st cc. led to understanding «The Sonnets» as a cycle-montage. As a result, the Russian Shakespeare Sonnets make up a complicated artistic conglomeration of various translators' understandings, while Shakespeare himself became a deep mythological prototype of all his co-authors who completed receptive «co-creation» of his sonnets in a new historical and cultural dimension.

А.A. Sharakshane
Editorial Principles in Publishing The Sonnets' Translations

The Azbuka-Klassika Publishers presented its anthology of contemporary translations of The Sonnets in 2004. Its compilers V. Nikolayev and A. Sharakshane aimed at demonstrating what had happened in the experience of Russian acquisition of the sequence during the last fifteen years. The translators featured there class from well known (I. Ivanovsky, S. Stepanov, G. Kruzhkov, R. Vinonen) to less noticed ones.

The general content interpretation is by far the one shared by most scholars, which is basically reflected in the line-by-line translation offered by A. Sharakhane. However, debates concerning authorship and addressees of The Sonnets still persist.

The Russian tradition in The Sonnets' scholarship supplies plentiful questions for debate on general translation approaches, including the unsolvable opposition of word-for-word vs. artistic. In this respect, some Russians prefer precision, while others will support artistry.

There certainly exist differences as to which components of the original must be considered indispensable for a conscientious translator: imagery (abundant in euphuisms), meter, i.e. iambic pentameter with masculine cadences, rhythm and prosody, diction and word punning, anaphoric repetitions, assonances, etc. There is still little chance of agreeing on the style and language in translation.

A.V. Bartoshevich
Is Shakespeare in Stratford Theatre a Tourist Attraction?

The author dwells on the renovation of the theatre in Stratford as a grievous undertaking. He feels nostalgic for the deconstructed Stratford

theatres and renders the detailed history of the place which turns to be the history of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Its stage saw Peter Brook's Titus Andronicus with Sir Lawrence Olivier, and King Lear with Paul Scofield (revolutionary in theatrical history). Here young Peter Hall staged his famous Wars of the Roses, Trevor Nunne stepped beyond his success with the Cats musical, emerging as a major theatre psychologist in Macbeth with Jady Dench and Ian McKellen, and it was here that Anthony Sher appeared as Richard III, whereupon even reserved English critics acclaimed that «this was something to tell our grandchildren about». The author confesses he does not feel happy about the reconstruction plan. We crave a «temple of art», and we get a sanctuary of mass culture and tourist industry.

E.S. Riabova
The Shakespeare Trilogy of Trevor Nunne

In her rather long essay the theatre critic gives a detailed story of Trevor Nunne winning the Royal Shakespeare Company by elaborating a monumental theatrical style in performing Shakespeare's big historical dramas and tragedies.

Е.B. Akimov, A.N. Ushakova
Cleopatra in Shakespeare, Pushkin, Blok

Alexandre Blok's poem Cleopatra (1907) was inspired by the poet's three visits to the Panopticon Show in St. Petersburg, where, among others, he saw a wax figure of the Queen of Egypt. The vision of Cleopatra to a «drunk and arrogant herd» certainly has a Shakespearean dimension per se. The queen expresses fears less she be shown, «as just another mummy» to Roman Plebs, as Shakespeare's Mark Antony prophesied: «...and hoist thee up to the shouting plebeians!» In Blok's lyric Cleopatra recollects: «In times of yore / I used to reign at Egypt's glory. / Yet am I now but wax, but rot, but ashes» (stanza 6). We observe a double allusion in the last verse: to the epigraph from G. Derzhavin in Pushkin's Egyptian Nights, Chapter 2, and to the improvisation on poetic divine license in the same chapter. Blok's declaration of himself as another Caesar and heir to Egypt's legacy follows, juxtaposed to the poet's misery. In the concluding stanza Cleopatra accounts for this contradiction: «My look used to cause tumult and terror, / But now I ardently cause tears — / In a drunken poet's eye / And laugh — in a drunken harlot».

Shakespeare's heroine herself foresaw «scald rhymers ballading» in irregular meters, and Blok practically quotes from that cue. Poets and harlots in the queen's company is yet another allusion to Pushkin, where Cleopatra's improvisation crowns the story about poets, and one of them, Charsky, makes a reference to Victor Aurelius' evidence of Cleopatra's licentiousness. In this way A. Blok brought together both Cleopatras, that of Shakespeare and of Pushkin, in a memorable fusion.

Irina S. Prikhodko
«Weedy Trophies» of Ophelia and Alexandre Blok

A. Blok in his poems written after the well-known amateur performance in Boblovo, in which he appeared as Hamlet and Lyubov' Mendeleeva as Ophelia, makes intensive use of roses associated with Ophelia on the stage. Neverthless in the well-known picture of Mendeleeva as Ophelia and in the notes by Blok's aunt Maria A. Beketova we can see that Ophelia on the home stage of 1898 was decorated with wild flowers: pink mallows, convolvulus, hop and other wild plants gathered by the actors in the surrounding fields before the performance. In Shakespeare they are also wild or simple garden flowers: daisies, pansies, columbines, rosemary, violets, rue, fennel, even nettles. How can it happen that simple flowers abundant in gardens and fields would transfigure into cultivated and legendary roses and lilies in poetry? Has it occurred automatically as a poetic tradition or is there any other reason for that? A. Kroneberg's translation taken for the home performance by Blok would help solve this problem and raise the question of the two types of poetic translation: from one language to another and from the language of one culture to the language of some other. Blok in his staging experience takes after the first type's tradition, and in his lyric after the second.

Y.B. Orlitsky
«Shakespearian» Prosymetrum in Dramatic Interpretation by A. Vel'tman in A Magic Night (based on A Midsummer Nights Dream)

The play of A. Vel'tman A Magic Night, published in 1844, was an interpretative translation — interpretation of Shakespeare's comedy conceived as the libretto of an opera (music by A. Al'abyev). Up to that time, Russian dramatic writing had already included a few original prosymetric dramas (A. Pushkin, A. Khomyakov etc.), based on the Shakespearian mode. Nevertheless, A. Vel'tman's play represents special interest due to two circumstances. Firstly, the Russian writer made a libretto, so he had to enrich the text with a number of poetic arias and choruses which did not have analogies in Shakespeare's comedy due to which the share of verse in the drama increased. On the other hand, A. Vel'tman translated many cues spoken/ sung by fairy creatures not into verse as in Shakespeare, but into prose, which reduced the verse share. Also, a number of Shakespeare's prosaic cues were made metrical by Vel'tman, the total effect being that of better adaptation to the emerging Russian strategy of alternating verse and prose by creating interim pro-symetrum passages.

N. V Zakharov
Shakespearianism of Dostoevsky: Introducing the Problem

The article covers Shakespeare's powerful influence on the Russian culture, which can be traced from the turn of the XVIII—XIX centuries. The reception of the English playwright in Russia can be characterized by formation

of the «cult of Shakespeare» that has developed into the phenomenon of Russian shakespearianism. The reception of Shakespeare by Russian cultural background led to the beginnings of shakespearianism. It can be considered through close studies of creative works of Dostoevsky, inasmuch as he became one of the most significant connoisseurs and popularizers of Shakespeare's oeuvre in the Russian literature of the «post-Pushkin» era.

K.V. Ratnikov
Shakespeare Jubilee in Russia in 1864: the Poets on Shakespeare

For political reasons Shakespeare's jubilee was not celebrated with a great pomp as it had been planned earlier, but the Russian poets made it a festivity for themselves, giving the worldly renowned British playwright his due by writing poetry and prose in his honour. The article focuses on the poetic declarations of Shakespeare's personality and his creative works by the three Russian poets: J.P. Polonsky, A.N. Majkov and S.P. Shevyrev.

Natalia A. Smirnova
Hamlet in Villains' Country (Shakespearian Metatext in S. Esenin's Poem)

In the early 1920s, Sergey Esenin writes — a dramatic poem entitled Villains ' Country (1922—1923). The very first scene of the poem reproduces the first and fourth scenes of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Later, the Prince of Denmark appears as a kind of model for such people as Chekistov and Nomakh. The culmination of the poem has a parallel to the famous mousetrap from Hamlet and confirms the idea that Esenin intended this as a specific metatext, contributing to the image of a time «out of joint».

Shakespeare is an indispensable and organic part of Esenin's work. For the poet, the English playwright was always relevant and up-to-date. Even the allusion to Hamlet's flute was not made for the purpose of mere ornament; but as one of his tuning instruments or touchstones (the other two were Pushkin and Blok) in his own work.

Shakespeare's Hamlet is found in Esenin's works not only in allusions, reminiscences, themes and motives. We should also note that he becomes the center of Esenin literary self-identification. It is a remarcable example of selfconsciousness in poetry.

М.M. Morozov
The Analysis of «Hamlet» in Its Process of Action

In the Soviet 1930-es Shakespeare's «Hamlet» was not allowed on the Soviet stage. The theatres of that time preferred «Romeo and Juliet» and Shakespeare's comedies. The Soviet authorities denied «Hamlet» fearing to bring its fundamental theme of power before the audience. This is the reason for which the profound analysis of «Hamlet» undertaken for the stage by the

leading Shakespeare scholar, translator and theatre man of that epoch Mikhail Morozov was neither claimed nor allowed for publication. This is for the first time that it appears before the public, thanks to its editor G.A. Sokur.

M.F. Drozdova-Chernovolenko
Mika Morozov: a Revived Portrait of the Epoch

The article is devoted to a complicated situation of the soviet Shakespeare studies. The author being the student of the distinguished soviet Shakespeare scholar M.M. Morozov during the period of the WWII explicitly describes what methods helped her Professor to authentically reveal the sense and consciousness of Shakespeare under the totalitarian state. The article is a vivid and expressive description of how the soviet Shakespeare studies outlived the epoch to acquire its modern shape and international recognition.

N.V. Zakharov
The Information and Research Database «Russian Shakespeare»

«The Information and Research Database «Russian Shakespeare»» includes the publication of the translations of the Shakespeare's works into the Russian language, free arrangements and alterations of his works, the publication of critical works and studies on general questions of the Shakespeare's creative works, the problem of authorship, the history of Shakespeare studies, the separate works of great playwrights, their theatrical and cinematographic versions.

The electronic scientific edition publishes the sources, many of which are inaccessible to the majority of the researchers. All texts are prepared in accordance with the textological requirements, which are set to electronic publication of texts of the classical literature. The inquiry references to the extensive information resources on Shakespeare on the Internet are presented.

«The Information and Research Database «Russian Shakespeare»» contains of full-text electronic library representing the main texts, which characterize the formation of the Shakespeare literary reputation and the perception of his heritage in the Russian culture of the XVIII—XXI centuries.

It is was created for researchers, lecturers, directors and actors of theatre and cinema, all worshippers of Shakespeare's creative works, it can be used in research, teaching, translation and creative activity.

The Federal Service of Supervision over Observance of Legislation in Mass Media Sphere and Protection of the Cultural Inheritance gave out the evidence about the registration of the media (E1 № ФС77—25028) «Russian Shakespeare» as electronic periodical edition in social and educational sphere. The domain www.rus-shake.ru was registered.

The copyright is not applied to the most of the prepared texts. If there is copyright on the publication of some translations, then such items will be published only when the rightholders give their permission.

N.V. Zakharov, VLA. Lukov
«The world of Shakespeare»: an electronic encyclopedia

The project «The World of Shakespeare: an Electronic Encyclopedia» is an original part of a complex research of Shakespeare's heritage and its global significance. The project's ultimate goal is to develop and implement, and publish an electronic dictionary «The World of Shakespeare: an Electronic encyclopedia» as an information web-resource by year 2010. The project will be further maintained and updated in the Internet, after the fulfillment of grant obligations.

The project aims at the solution of scientific problems that include thorough comprehension and all-round representation of the importance of Shakespeare and his work for Russian culture and the rest of the modern world. The urgency of this scientific problem consists in an absolute necessity to systematize the extensive data about the penetration of Shakespeare into the world-wide cultural thesaurus, with a view to deeper understanding of Russian culture. The concretization of the problem consists in revealing the uniqueness of The World of Shakespeare and enhancement of the significance of the Russian tradition in the perception and research on the British playwright's heritage in the world of Shakespeare studies.