Associating Shakespeare with freedom, individuality and authenticity is not original: as I hope to have shown, the association has a rich history. In recent times, however, this way of thinking about Shakespeare has waned among academic critics. This is regrettable. It deprives us of a powerful resource – the imagination of a great writer – through which to resist encroachments on personal freedom (which, sadly, are set to become ever more oppressive). That Shakespeare might have a special significance in this context was not lost on two twentieth-century novelists who wondered what a world in which freedom and individuality had been abolished might look like. In the totalitarian setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity’ (85). Winston's dream about his dead mother at the beginning of the novel brings him to the awareness that ‘Tragedy … belonged to the ancient time … Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep and complex sorrows' (32).