William Shakespeare as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after "Volpone", although we cannot know for certain which roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in "As You Like It", and the Chorus in "Henry V", though scholars doubt the sources of
Reputation of William Shakespeare to claim that Shakespeare was actually a German playwright who just written his plays in English. By the middle of the 19th century, Shakespeare had been incorporated into the pantheon of German literature. In 1904, a statue of Shakespeare was erected in Weimar showing the Bard of Avon staring into the distance, becoming the first statue built to honor Shakespeare on the mainland of Europe. In the Romantic age, Shakespeare became extremely popular in Russia. Vissarion Belinsky wrote he had been “enslaved by the drama of Shakespeare”. Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, was heavily influenced by "Hamlet" and the history