The impact of Shakespeare on Romantic literary criticism may be measured in at least three ways. First, his place in the canon: starting in the later eighteenth century, a transformation in taste, led and articulated by critical writings, radically changed the value of Shakespeare. In the world of culture and learning, Shakespeare ceased to be primarily a source of pleasure and of interest almost exclusively in England; he became by the 1830s a universal genius known and admired, throughout the West, for his deep insight into the human condition. His newly exemplary pedagogical value made Shakespeare the basis for England's educational mission in India. Shakespeare's cultural destiny was thus linked to Britain's rise to world power in the decades from the Seven Years' War through the Napoleonic struggles; Britain's wars against France counterpointed and reinforced the challenge Shakespeare offered to the literary values of the French neoclassicism that dominated European thought for more than a century. Second, the place of Romantic critics in the canon of Shakespeare studies: German works by August Wilhelm Schlegel and English works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt are landmarks that still serve as points of departure for fresh thinking nearly two centuries later. Third, Shakespeare was a crucial starting point for important Romantic writers as they made innovative contributions in poetry and fiction, as well as in literary criticism and theory: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, John Keats, Herman Melville.