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We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the ..
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reading
readers-and-writers
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James Shapiro |
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9c2e9ea
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We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the ..
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reading
readers-and-writers
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James Shapiro |
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168f76e
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It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to co..
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shakespeare
history-of-thought
collaboration
teaching
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James Shapiro |
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Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more
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James Shapiro |
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I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead
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James Shapiro |
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Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting h..
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shakespeare-criticism
henry-james
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James Shapiro |
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No bishop, no king"; he might have added, "No devil, no divine right."
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James Shapiro |
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By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present, Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold. The most convincing way of showing this was to ask playgoers to keep both plays in mind at once, to experience a new Hamlet while memories of the old one, ghostlike, still li..
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James Shapiro |
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Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
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James Shapiro |
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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),"
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James Shapiro |
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5f0408b
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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.
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James Shapiro |
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f9e6525
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Shakespeare's way out of the dilemma of writing plays as pleasing at court as they were at the public theater was counterintuitive. Rather than searching for the lowest common denominator, he decided instead to write increasingly complicated plays that dispensed with easy pleasures and made both sets of playgoers work harder than they had ever worked before. It's not something that he could have imagined doing five years earlier (when he la..
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James Shapiro |
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Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety" (Antony, 2.2.245-46)."
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James Shapiro |
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How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child" (Lear, 4.279-80)."
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James Shapiro |
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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.
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James Shapiro |
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92a6e42
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WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles
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James Shapiro |
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100c6b0
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you there was, or might be, such a man / As this I dreamt of?"--he can only answer like a Roman, "Gentle madam, no,"
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James Shapiro |
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Genius may be a necessary precondition for creating a masterpiece but it's never a sufficient one.
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James Shapiro |
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Is his benevolent art meant to distract us from Prospero's absolutist exercise of authority over his subjects?
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James Shapiro |
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9f89c35
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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!
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James Shapiro |
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c56cabe
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Lear wills his own death: "Break, heart, I prithee break"
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James Shapiro |
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Sonnet 55 that "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme" [1-2])."
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James Shapiro |
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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)
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James Shapiro |
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a8f4c66
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Albany had declared that "All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deservings" (24.297-99)."
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James Shapiro |
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8a2af20
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I am a man more sinned against than sinning" (Lear, 9.60)."
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James Shapiro |
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Sonnet 138, which begins: "When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies")."
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James Shapiro |
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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.
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James Shapiro |
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he will equivocate at the gallows; but he will be hanged without equivocation.
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James Shapiro |
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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."
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James Shapiro |
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As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods; / They kill us for their sport
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James Shapiro |