“In the same year that Michelangelo died in Rome, William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon. The greatest artist of the Italian Renaissance, the one whose brush belonged to the ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, seemed to have found a replacement for himself in the greatest artist of the English Renaissance, who created King Lear. Death struck Shakespeare in his hometown on the very day that Cervantes died in Madrid . The two greatest creators of human types in the era of the Spanish and English Renaissance, who created Don Quixote and Hamlet, Sancho Panza and Falstaff, left this world on the same day...”