The project is an original part of a complex research on Shakespeare’s heritage and its global significance. The project’s ultimate goal is to develop, implement and publish an electronic dictionary «The World of Shakespeare: An Electronic Encyclopaedia» as an information web-resource by the year 2010. The project will be furthered and updated on the Internet after the fulfillment of the grant obligations.

The project aims at the solution of scientific problems that include thorough comprehension and all-round representation of the importance of Shakespeare for the Russian culture and for the rest of the modern world. The urgency of this scientific problem consists in an absolute necessity to systematize the extensive data about the inclusion of Shakespeare into the worldwide cultural thesaurus, with a view to deeper understanding of the Russian culture. The concretization of the problem consists in revealing the uniqueness of the world of Shakespeare and enhancement of the significance of the Russian tradition in the perception and research on the British playwright’s heritage in the world of Shakespeare studies.