OK, one other thought: Will Shakespeare plays a regular part in Sandman. It was the "Midsummer's Night Dream" issue which won the World Fantasy award and issue 75, the last issue, is about The Tempest. I like those issues well enough, though more in the thrown away parts than the things directly involving the plays.

That preference is somewhat due to feeling that any writer in English is secondary to Master Will.

Wait, no, that's not the right way to put it. In college, my pal Flynn had a professor who had studied under Bloom at U. Chicago. Bloom apparently had a copy of The Republic in which he had underlined every single line in different colors, a coding system which he had developed over decades of approaching the text. And after all this study, Bloom had concluded that, instead of Plato being a subset of philosophy, all of philosophy should be consiudered a subset of Plato, encompassed and anticipated by him. And all the subsequent history of philosophical thought was just a matter of filling in the margins and blanks spaces which Plato hadn't had time to address.

For a fiction writer in English, Shakespeare looms as large. In "The Tempest" issue, Gaiman kicks it up to the point that he has Shakespeare rewriting the Book of Psalms for the King James Bible. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble". And then, with Ben Jonson, WS creates the Guy Fawkes doggerel, "Remember, remember, the fifth of November..."

I don't actually agree that WS encompasses the entire history of fiction in English (nor do I agree with Bloom's purported opinion about Plato), but, like God, it's a hard fiction to resist. Especially since I'm finishing the edits on a damn book which has a title swiped directly from WS.