This is the Jew
That Shakespeare drew.

 

This is the Jew
That Shakespeare drew.
--
As quoted in various reports, including Charles Wells Moulton, The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors (1901), p. 342; William Dunlap, The Life of George Frederick Cooke (1815), p. 26 (quoting an apparently contemporaneous journal account by the subject). Bartlett's Quotations, 10th edition (1919), reports that on the 14th of February, 1741, Macklin established his fame as an actor in the character of Shylock, in the "Merchant of Venice". Macklin's performance of this character so forcibly struck a gentleman in the pit that he, as it were involuntarily, exclaimed,— “This is the Jew That Shakespeare drew!” It has been said that this gentleman was Mr. Pope, and that he meant his panegyric on Macklin as a satire against Lord Lansdowne", Biographia Dramatica, vol. i. part II. p. 469.

 

Alexander Pope

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When learning's triumph o'er her barb'rous foes
First reared the stage, immortal Shakespeare rose;
Each change of many-colored life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new:
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toiled after him in vain.

 

Samuel Johnson

 

Ultimately, Anthony Burgess's emphasis on the multiplicity of meanings latent in the text of Shakespeare's life foregrounds his own appropriation of Shakespeare … Clearly this is not an inconsistency on Burgess's part but a deliberate pointer at the inevitability of appropriating any given text, particularly that most irresistible one of Shakespeare's life.

 

William Shakespeare

 

When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home ... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite.

 

David Lynch

 

Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

 

Susan Sontag

 

Voltaire and Shakespeare! He was all
The other feigned to be.
The flippant Frenchman speaks: I weep;
And Shakespeare weeps with me.

 

William Shakespeare