Shakespeare: The World As Stage Quotes
"He is at once the best known and least known of figures."
"It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures."
"For the rest, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron—forever there and not there."
"We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it."
"It cannot be emphasized too strenuously that there is nothing—not a scrap, not a mote—that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person."
"Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an academic obsession."
"The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like."
"It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him. In fact we know more about Shakespeare than about almost any other dramatist of his age."
"Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away."
"If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions."
"Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form."
"There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favored places than this."
"For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature."
"His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."
"Yet curiously English was still struggling to gain respectability."
"But what must it have been like when they were brand new, when all their references were timely and sharply apt, and all the words never before heard?"
"Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school."
"He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge."
"Essex would have saved his own head and a great deal of bother if only he had been born with a little patience."
"In Scotland he was James VI, but in England he became James I."
"It was said that one could identify all his meals since becoming king from the stains and gravy scabs on his clothing."
"Shakespeare’s plays might have been lost, too, had it not been for the heroic efforts of his close friends and colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell."
"The plays are sometimes divided into acts and scenes but sometimes not."
"Her face was caked permanently in a thick mask of white makeup, her teeth were black or missing."
"The one drawback of the scheme was that it would inevitably kill innocent Catholic parliamentarians."
"It is only because they have been published as a sequence—probably an unauthorized one—that we take them to be connected."
"He was graceless in motion, with a strange lurching gait, and had a disconcerting habit, indulged more or less constantly, of playing with his codpiece."
"His only concession to hygiene, it was reported, was to daub his fingertips from time to time with a little water."