Quotes from James Shapiro

Her reading left Keller increasingly disappointed by the way that biographers had deified Shakespeare

Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets 'are both made and born'. That all great writing has to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that 'second heat', their laboured revision.

Is his benevolent art meant to distract us from Prospero's absolutist exercise of authority over his subjects?

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no life. / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more. / Never, never, never. Pray you, undo / This button. Thank you, sir. O, O, O, O!

Lear wills his own death: "Break, heart, I prithee break

Sonnet 55 that "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme" [1–2]).

The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest have borne most. We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (24.318–21)

Albany had declared that "All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deservings" (24.297–99).

Shakespeare didn't conceive of his tragedy in Aristotelian terms—that is, as a tragedy of the fall of a flawed great man—but rather as a collision of deeply held and irreconcilable principles, embodied in characters who are destroyed when these principles collide.

he will equivocate at the gallows; but he will be hanged without equivocation.

in late sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon, where malting was the town's principal industry, anybody with a bit of spare change and a barn was storing as much grain as possible.

Antony and Cleopatra: "what love, what accomplishments, what repetitions of natural affections passed between them is not for vulgar minds to imagine, none but so great hearts know them.

biographical information needs to be understood within its immediate context, not through the bias of another cultural moment.

Malone helped institutionalise a methodology that would prove crucial to those who would subsequently deny Shakespeare's authorship of the plays

Schmucker draws a sharp distinction between Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the poet, in what would soon be a favourite gambit of those who doubted his authorship:

By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn't support–his knowledge of falconry for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands or the ways that the ruling class behaved–should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays.

Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeare's plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeare's works through events in his life.

Malone chose to fuse life and works through extended notes that appeared at the bottom of each page of text.

What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

literary biographies, the genre didn't come into its own until the eighteenth century, spurred by an intense interest in life writing

the opening lines of 'Sonnet 93' in 1780, which set the direction of Shakespeare biography–and debates over authorship–on a new and irreversible course.

Steevens was unforgiving. He recognised that Shakespeare scholarship stood at a crossroads, foresaw that once Malone pried open this Pandora's box it could never be shut again.

Every author who writes on a variety of topics will have sometimes occasion to describe what he has himself felt.