Quotes from James Shapiro

Let me once get from this country and give me a dungeon or a hovel in any other").

The unprofitable game of profiling what could or couldn't be true of Shakespeare's character, based on what his characters said or did, had begun.

With Malone's decision to parse the plays for evidence of what an author thought or felt, literary biography had crossed a Rubicon.

Malone's biographical note to 'Sonnet 93' thus introduced yet another centrepiece of modern Shakespearean biography: the tendency to confuse the biographical with the autobiographical, as writers projected onto a largely blank Shakespearean slate their own personalities and preoccupations.

It's no small irony that anyone investigating the development of Delia Bacon's ideas confronts much the same problems as Shakespeare's biographers.

Underlying his reasoning here was the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier, a countess and so on.

the damage done by Malone was far greater and longer-lasting. He was the first Shakespearean to believe that his hard-earned expertise gave him the right, which he and many scholars have since tried to deny to others, to search Shakespeare's plays for clues to his personal life.

The framework within which she imagined the world of the English Renaissance, also typical of her day, was limited to monarchs, courtiers and writers.

if one goes through Francis Meres's list of the best English dramatists in 1598 one quickly discovers that commonplace books and early drafts of published plays don't survive for any of these popular Elizabethan playwrights.

The memorials best befitting Shakespeare's stature and accomplishments were in fact created and preserved by those who honoured his legacy: a monument and a gravestone in Stratford's church; and, seven years after his death, a lavish collection of his plays, prefaced by commendatory verses and his portrait. At the time, no English playwright had ever been posthumously honoured with such a collection.

Shakespeare had no Boswell–but neither did Marlowe, Jonson, Webster or any other contemporary dramatist.

In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare's works as autobiographical.

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods; / They kill us for their sport

Shakespeare's sonnets give us no access to his personal history.

our collective nightmares are connected to the sins of our national past, papered over or repressed in the making of America and its greatness; on

Over-identification on the part of Shakespeare's biographers had mutated into an over-identification on the part of his readers.

what started with the Sonnets migrated to the plays, though the claim that Shakespeare was speaking for himself through his dramatic characters was more difficult to sustain.

As the pages that follow confirm, race may not be a reality, but racial thinking is, and, as such, warrants closer examination.

Bacon wanted to reach a similar conclusion without doing the painstaking philological analysis at the heart of this critical endeavour. She was content to insist, rather than demonstrate, that Shakespeare was as much a myth as Homer or Jesus.