European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA)"The past two decades have witnessed a steadily growing interest among Shakespeareans to study the position of the playwright and poet in European culture from the earliest times to the present. Among other things, this interest has focused on the constitutive role that Shakespeare has played as an important factor of European identity. In order to define this role and the sense of European selfhood at various moments in the history of the Continent (including the British Isles), scholars have studied the shared memories going back to the Greeks and the Romans, but also the 400 years of Shakespearean appropriations, all against the objectives for a European federation based, in addition to economic and political goals, on explicit cultural ideals and objectives."