Quotes About Shakespeare

Nothing is easier than talking," said St. Clare. "I believe Shakespeare makes somebody say, 'I could sooner show twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow my own showing.' Nothing like division of labor. My forte lies in talking, and yours, cousin, lies in doing.

Some people will say, "Why read a comic book? It stifles the imagination. If you read a novel you imagine what people are like. If you read a comic, it's showing you." The only answer I can give is, "You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?"

Did you know that the author William Shakespeare invented more than seventeen hundred words, including 'assassination' and 'bump'?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.