Jean Jules Jusserand

Jean Jules Jusserand was a French diplomat, historian, and literary scholar whose long engagement with English culture informed his criticism. What to Expect of Shakespeare began as a lecture delivered to the British Academy and considers how readers and scholars might approach Shakespeare without reducing the plays to rigid formulas. The work belongs to Jusserand's broader study of English literature, which ranged from medieval travelers and the early English novel to major Renaissance writers. His diplomatic career included service as France's ambassador to the United States, yet scholarship remained a sustained part of his public life. Issued in 1911, the Shakespeare lecture later generated related manuscript and translation material. What to Expect of Shakespeare is therefore a compact contribution within a much larger Anglo-French intellectual career. It reflects a critic interested in historical context, literary personality, and the limits of prediction when confronting imaginative genius.