1. See for example the collection edited by Paul Franssen and Ros King, Shakespeare and War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which stemmed from research papers presented and discussed during the Sh:in:E (Shakespeare in Europe) conference on ‘Shakespeare and European Politics’ that took place in Utrecht in 2003.
2. Simon Barker’s War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) was also originally presented as a paper on that occasion and later expanded into a full-length study. During the following biennial Sh:in:E conference in Cracow (2005), war-related issues were the focus of many of the papers presented in response to the proposed topic of ‘Shakespeare and Memory’, among which was an early core of Paola Pugliatti’s subsequently developed monograph on Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).
3. On the other side of the Atlantic, the international conference on ‘Wartime Shakespeare in a Global Context / Shakespeare au temps de la guerre’ (Ottawa, 2009) inspired the collection edited by Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh, Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
4. This possibility was predicted by Le Monde editor-in-chief, Erik Izraeliwicz, in a feature which recently appeared on the front page of Repubblica, Italy’s second-largest circulation daily newspaper: E. Izraeliwicz, ‘La nostra scommessa davanti alle tre A’, Repubblica, 26 January 2012, 1, 13.
5. Luisa Passerini, Il mito d’Europa: radici antiche per nuovi simboli (Firenze: Giunti, 2002), 124 (authors’ translation). Elsewhere Passerini speaks of Europe’s ‘missed chances’, remarking that ‘the idea of Europe has lost, since the Second World War, most of its hopes of regeneration and the aura of utopianism and passion that were still present in the 1930s. By a sort of nemesis, this loss took place at the same time as the actual construction of an institutional European unity began […] The European construction has been largely an affair of political élites.’