WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Jerzy Limon, a Polish academic who was honored by Queen Elizabeth II for creating and directing a Shakespeare theater and festival in Poland, has died of COVID-19. He was 70.

Magdalena Hajdysz, a spokeswoman for the Gdansk Shakespeare Theater, said Limon died at a hospital in Gdansk in northern Poland.

Limon was a professor, a translator and writer specializing in Shakespeare and Elizabethan theater. He taught at the Gdansk University and, as visitor, at New York’s Hunter College, Washington’s Shakespeare Institute and at the University of Delaware and the University of Colorado.

He was the creator of the Gdansk Shakespeare Theater, a replica of an Elizabethan-era theater which opened in 2014. Britain's Prince Charles and Poland’s Oscar-winning movie director Andrzej Wajda were patrons of the project, and Prince William and his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, took a tour of the theater with Limon in 2017.

Actors from around the world staged Shakespeare’s plays and those by his contemporaries at the theater, and an annual festival was launched in 2017.

In 2014, Limon was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Andrzej Wajda

Head of Poland’s Shakespeare theater, Jerzy Limon, dies