Book excerpt: Shakespeare at best answers the needs of a particular generation in one country or another. Those needs vary: directors and actors, audiences and common readers, scholar-teachers and students do not necessarily seek the same aids for understanding. Shakespeare is an international possession, transcending nations, languages and professions. More than the Bible, which competes with the Koran, and with Indian and Chinese religious writings, Shakespeare is unique in the world’s culture, not just in the world’s theatres. Shakespeare’s literary and cultural authority is now so unquestioned that it has taken on an aura of historical inevitability and has enshrined the figure of the solitary author as the standard bearer of literary production. It is all the more important, then, to suggest that Shakespeare had a genius for timing—managing to be born in exactly the right place and at the right time to nourish his particular form of greatness. He regularly demonstrates and celebrates the ideas and ideals of Renaissance humanism, often—even in his tragic plays—presenting characters that embody the principles and ideals of Renaissance humanism, or people of tremendous self-knowledge and wit that are capable of self-expression and the practice of individual freedom. Shakespeare himself can be understood as the ultimate product of Renaissance humanism; he was an artist who openly practised and celebrated with a deep understanding of humanity and an uncanny ability for self-expression.