On 6 July 2005 the International Olympic Committee announced that London would be the host city for the 2012 Olympics Games. Some two years later (4 June 2007) the ‘London 2012’ brand was launched with the motto to ‘inspire a generation’ – an objective that would be met not just by the main event but also through the staging of a Cultural Olympiad, ‘the largest cultural celebration in the history of the modern Olympic and Paralympic Movements’. And at the heart of this giant undertaking (more than 2,500 cultural projects bore the London 2012 imprimatur) was Shakespeare. As the British Museum–British Petroleum ‘Shakespeare Staging the World’ exhibition (mounted as a centrepiece of this Cultural Olympiad) proclaimed, he is ‘Britain's greatest cultural contribution to the world’. Similarly the nationwide World Shakespeare Festival was announced as ‘a celebration of Shakespeare as the world's playwright’. Representing the most widely distributed and banner component of the Cultural Olympiad celebrations, this Festival was ‘[p]roduced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in an unprecedented collaboration with leading UK and international arts organisations, and with Globe to Globe, a major international programme produced by Shakespeare's Globe’; according to the World Shakespeare Festival's website, ‘it's the biggest celebration of Shakespeare ever staged’.