In 1613, a beautiful Stuart princess married a handsome young German prince. This was a love match, but it was also an alliance that aimed to meld Europes two great Protestant powers. Before Elizabeth and Frederick left London for the court in Heidelberg, they watched a performance of The Winters Tale. In 1943, a group of British POWs gave a performance of that same play to a group of enthusiastic Nazi guards in Bavaria. Nothing about the story of England and Germany, as this remarkable book demonstrates, is as simple as we might expect. Miranda Seymour tells the forgotten story of Englands centuries of profound connection and increasingly rivalrous friendship with Germany, linked by a shared faith, a shared hunger for power, a shared culture Germany never doubted that Shakespeare belonged to them, as much as to England, and a shared leadership.
