William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
English playwright and poet, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.
Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing. I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.
When we speak of the aim and Art observable in Shakespeare's works, we must not forget that Art belongs to Nature; that it is, so to speak, self-viewing, self-imitating, self-fashioning Nature. The Art of a well-developed genius is far different from the Artfulness of the Understanding, of the merely reasoning mind. Shakspeare was no calculator, no learned thinker; he was a mighty, many-gifted soul, whose feelings and works, like products of Nature, bear the stamp of the same spirit; and in which the last and deepest of observers will still find new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man. They are emblematic, have many meanings, are simple and inexhaustible, like products of Nature; and nothing more unsuitable could be said of them than that they are works of Art, in that narrow mechanical acceptation of the word.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
The souls most fed with Shakespeare's flame
Still sat unconquered in a ring,
Remembering him like anything.
All that glisters is not gold.
Do you know how they are going to decide the Shakespeare-Bacon dispute? They are going to dig up Shakespeare and dig up Bacon; they are going to set their coffins side by side, and they are going to get Tree to recite Hamlet to them. And the one who turns in his coffin will be the author of the play.
Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie
A little nearer Spenser, to make room
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.
The occasionally expressed popular belief that Shakespeare must have helped prepare the translation of the Bible completed for King James in 1610 is based solely on the circumstances that a few famous passages from the translation and from Shakespeare's tragedies are the only specimens of Jacobian English most people ever hear. Rudyard Kipling, however, composed a whimsical short story, Proofs of Holy Writ, in which one of the translators consults Shakespeare and Jonson, and in 1970, Anthony Burgess pointed out that in the King James Bible the 46th word of the 46th psalm, translated in Shakespeare's 46th year, is "shake", while the 46th word from the end (if one cheats by leaving out the last cadential word "selah", is "spear".
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.
Soul of the Age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare...
Thou art a monument, without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and Ludicrous characters and they sometimes produce sorrow and sometimes laughter.
That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge.
Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.
What light through yonder window breaks?
Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.