This paper is an attempt to answer this question through looking at the English Romantic period which is often credited with the return of Shakespeare to the stage. Within this paper, I suggest that Romantic Shakespearean criticism was conceived in opposition to that of its predecessor, not only because of changes in cultural and literary meaning of a poet, but also because of contemporary political conflicts which allowed the Romantic poets to create and celebrate an image of Napoleon in order to help to unite and, in the process, to define their conception of a hero and a poet.
Keywords: Coleridge, Hazlitt, Napoleon, Romantic Shakespeare, the French Revolution
