Epilogue

Over a remarkably short period in the early twenty-first century, plays such as Peer Gynt in Norway and The Good Hope in the Netherlands came to be staged much more frequently than before, and as a cultural response to the riots in the Parisian banlieues a strongly modernized version of Tartuffe was performed in France. More or less simultaneously, in discussions apparently fuelled by debates on the nation and national identity in public political and cultural discourse, politicians in Norway and the Netherlands suddenly began to talk about the need for a national cultural canon to be added to school curricula.