Quotes from James Shapiro

No bishop, no king"; he might have added, "No devil, no divine right.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry

Soothsayer's warning to Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, "If thou dost play with him at any game, / Thou art sure to lose" (2.3.26–27)

First, my fear; then, my curtsy; last my speech. My fear is your displeasure; my curtsy, my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardons.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more

I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead

I am a man more sinned against than sinning" (Lear, 9.60).

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety" (Antony, 2.2.245–46).

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child" (Lear, 4.279–80).

the first American Shakespeare expert, Richard Grant White

White's intervention persuaded Putnam's to renege on its agreement with Delia Bacon. Before the three unpublished and now rejected instalments made it safely back to her, they were lost.

Smith elaborated on this a year later in a book, Bacon and Shakespeare, which claimed, among other things, that the plays were meant to be read, not staged;

WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles

Delia Bacon never found corroborative evidence for her theory

Yankee Lady, sent by Emerson, who has discovered that the 'Man Shakespear' is a Myth, and did not write those plays that bear his name, which were on the contrary written by a 'Secret Associate' (names unknown): she has actually come to England for the purposes of examining that, and if possible, proving it … Ach Gott!

Mark Twain's memory had become capricious and his vivid imagination did not always supply his story with details of crystal accuracy.

A great deal was riding on this argument for Twain, for if the man from Stratford had indeed written the plays, Twain's mostly deeply held beliefs about the nature of fiction and on how major writers drew on personal experience would be wrong.

what led Twain to this conclusion: a conviction that great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical.

By the early twentieth century, autobiography was fast establishing itself as a major form of imaginative writing

For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life–rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined–was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked.

many now saw as the play's most challenging role. But before the 1970s there was a brief moment when

One thing remains certain: as long as anxieties about racial, national, sexual, and religious difference continue to haunt the way we imagine ourselves and respond to others, Shakespeare's words will remain 'not of an age, but for all time.

If your mind is dirty you can run 10,000 miles, but where have you gotten? If you go for a 1-mile run and you're passionately engaged with the world, who cares about the other 9,999?

Genius may be a necessary precondition for creating a masterpiece but it's never a sufficient one.