Prof. Dr. Balz Engler is emeritus of English Literature at Basel University, Switzerland, where he taught from 1980 to 2007. He has written books on Shakespeare translation, on the relationship between poetic texts and their modes of communicating, and on literature as performance and its cultural implications. He served on the boards of the European Society for the study of English, the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, the European Shakespeare Research Association and the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social sciences.