List Of Shakespeare Quotes

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porpentine. But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O list!

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee, And for thy maintenance; commits his body To painful labor, both by sea and land; To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe; And craves no other tribute at thy hands But love, fair looks, and true obedience- Too little payment for so great a debt. Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband; And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, And no obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending rebel, And graceless traitor to her loving lord? I asham’d that women are so simple ‘To offer war where they should kneel for peace, Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway, When they are bound to serve, love, and obey. Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, But that our soft conditions, and our hearts, Should well agree with our external parts?

The annoying thing about reading is that you can never get the job done. The other day I was in a bookstore flicking through a book called something like 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (and, without naming names, you should be aware that the task set by the title is by definition impossible, because at least four hundred of the books suggested would kill you anyway), but reading begets reading--that's sort of the point of it, surely?--and anybody who never deviates from a set list of books is intellectually dead anyway.

O Kate, nice customs curtsy to great kings. Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confin'd within the weak list of a country's fashion; we are the makers of manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults.

The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is LIfe in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children--Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together

I sat there listening to him talk and talk and I realised something really important. I thought I was in love with him for all those years but it turned out I was in love with the idea of William. The actual reality was a bit of an anti-climax. I thought, well, William would never shove the word WAG into pop songs to make me laugh and he wouldn’t bite the chocolate off chocolate-covered strawberries for me and he’d never, ever watch a film with Sandra Bullock in it, unless it was a Shakespeare adaptation and then he’d spend the entire film listing all the historical inaccuracies and he’d never go down on me for half an hour because he’d lost a game of Scrabble. Point of fact, I can’t imagine William doing anything that would mess up his hair, and he’s started popping the collars of his shirts and have I mentioned that he’s not you? He’s not you, Max, and that’s why I’m actually really pleased that he’s engaged and he’s moving to Warwickshire so I don’t have a constant reminder of what an idiot I’ve been.

That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all. This includes a list of things such as: social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos, picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games; going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children’s plays, adult plays … I am not interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Year’s, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of Art. How can a man who is interested in almost nothing write about anything? Well, I do. I write and I write about what’s left over: a stray dog walking down the street, a wife murdering her husband, the thoughts and feelings of a rapist as he bites into a hamburger sandwich; life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that, I write a lot of crap like that

All achievers had plans that they clearly listed or outlined and run to their fulfillment. If you want to make it as they did, you have to make a plan that defines your purpose; you must write out and clearly define who you are and who you want to be, what you have to do to be that person and how it will be done.

I don’t think anyone, my publishers, my agent, or myself, expected the book to do anything like as well as it did. It was in the London Sunday Times best-seller list for 237 weeks, longer than any other book (apparently, the Bible and Shakespeare aren’t counted). It has been translated into something like forty languages and has sold about one copy for every 750 men, women, and children in the world. As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post-doc of mine) remarked: I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.

One sin, I know, another doth provoke; Murder's as near to lust as flame to smoke.

I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night And for the day confined to fast in fires Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house, 19 I could a tale unfold whose lightest word 20 Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, 21 Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their 22 spheres, 23 Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part, 24 And each particular hair to stand an end, 25 Like quills upon the fearful porpentine. 26 But this eternal blazon must not be 27 To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O list! 28 If thou didst ever thy dear father love—

She always felt that she knew everything about him that could be known - not that he was simple, but that he was knowable, like a list of errands, like an encyclopedia. He had a birthmark on the third toe of his left foot. He wasn't able to urinate if someone could hear him. He thought cucumbers were good enough, but pickles were delicious - so absolutely delicious, in fact, that he questioned whether they were, indeed, made from cucumbers, which were only good enough. He hadn't heard of Shakespeare, but Hamlet sounded familiar. He liked making love from behind. That, he thought, was about as nice as it gets. He had never kissed anyone besides his mother and her. He had dived for the golden sack only because he wanted to impress her. He sometimes looked in the mirror for hours at a time, making faces, tensing muscles, winking, smiling, puckering. He had never seen another man naked, and so had no idea if his body was normal. The word "butterfly" made him blush, although he didn't know why. He had never been out of the Ukraine. He once thought that the earth was the centre of the universe, but learned better. He admired magicians more after learning the secrets of their tricks.

we’re not helping. So now we’re helping. Me: (Standing in doorway, looking bewildered.) Thanks, I guess. Joey: (Takes away Stevie’s hand.) But that’s not fair! Alex: What’s not fair? Stevie: (Striking Shakespeare pose.) All’s fair in love and sisters. Me: You guys are weird, you know that? Stevie: Go ahead. Take it. Go. (Makes shooing-dog motion with hands.) OK. Bye-bye, then. Joey: (Calling after Alex.) Bye-bye, Birdie! Me: (Leaves room, taking list. Sisters behind me mumbling and grumbling — Joey

I don’t think anyone, my publishers, my agent, or myself, expected the book to do anything like as well as it did. It was in the London Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks, longer than any other book (apparently, the Bible and Shakespeare aren’t counted). It has been translated into something like forty languages and has sold about one copy for every 750 men, women, and children in the world. As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post- doc of mine) remarked: I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.

There used to be big men in the world, men of mind and power and imagination. There was St Paul and Einstein and Shakespeare…’ He had several lists of names from the past that he would rattle off grandly at such times, and they always gave me a sense of wonder to hear. ‘There was Julius Caesar and Tolstoy and Immanuel Kant. But now it’s all robots. Robots and the pleasure principle. Everybody’s head is a cheap movie show.

In those days, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin de Luxembourg – if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s : a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barriere d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below. Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give a gravedigger. ‘Never mind’, said he, “you can pay me the next time, ‘ and then, to his collegue : ‘It’s all right – these gentlemen are a regular customers.

The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold. In the first place, they all tend to direct men's devotion to something which does not exist, for each 'historical Jesus' is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new 'historical Jesus' therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort of guessing (brilliant is the adjective we teach humans to apply to it_ on which no one would risk ten shillings in ordinary life, but which is enough to produce a crop of new Napoleons, new Shakespeares, and new Swifts, in every publisher's autumn list.

Science? The Savage frowned. He knew the word. But what it exactly signified he could not say. Shakespeare and the old men of the pueblo had never mentioned science, and from Linda he had only gathered the vaguest hints: science was something you made helicopters with, some thing that caused you to laugh at the Corn Dances, something that prevented you from being wrinkled and losing your teeth. He made a desperate effort to take the Controller's meaning. "Yes," Mustapha Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of stability. It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled." "What?" said Helmholtz, in astonishment. "But we're always saying that science is everything. It's a hypnopædic platitude." "Three times a week between thirteen and seventeen," put in Bernard. "And all the science propaganda we do at the College …" "Yes; but what sort of science?" asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. "You've had no scientific training, so you can't judge. I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too good–good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook. I'm the head cook now. But I was an inquisitive young scullion once. I started doing a bit of cooking on my own. Unorthodox cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of real science, in fact." He was silent. "What happened?" asked Helmholtz Watson. The Controller sighed. "Very nearly what's going to happen to you young men. I was on the point of being sent to an island.

When Benjamin Bloom studied his 120 world-class concert pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, he found something fascinating. For most of them, their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment. It was, “I’m going to teach you,” not “I’m going to judge your talent.” As you look at what Collins and Esquith demanded of their students—all their students—it’s almost shocking. When Collins expanded her school to include young children, she required that every four-year-old who started in September be reading by Christmas. And they all were. The three- and four-year-olds used a vocabulary book titled Vocabulary for the High School Student. The seven-year-olds were reading The Wall Street Journal. For older children, a discussion of Plato’s Republic led to discussions of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Machiavelli, and the Chicago city council. Her reading list for the late-grade-school children included The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov, Physics Through Experiment, and The Canterbury Tales. Oh, and always Shakespeare. Even the boys who picked their teeth with switchblades, she says, loved Shakespeare and always begged for more. Yet Collins maintained an extremely nurturing atmosphere. A very strict and disciplined one, but a loving one. Realizing that her students were coming from teachers who made a career of telling them what was wrong with them, she quickly made known her complete commitment to them as her students and as people. Esquith bemoans the lowering of standards. Recently, he tells us, his school celebrated reading scores that were twenty points below the national average. Why? Because they were a point or two higher than the year before. “Maybe it’s important to look for the good and be optimistic,” he says, “but delusion is not the answer. Those who celebrate failure will not be around to help today’s students celebrate their jobs flipping burgers.… Someone has to tell children if they are behind, and lay out a plan of attack to help them catch up.” All of his fifth graders master a reading list that includes Of Mice and Men, Native Son, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Joy Luck Club, The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Separate Peace. Every one of his sixth graders passes an algebra final that would reduce most eighth and ninth graders to tears. But again, all is achieved in an atmosphere of affection and deep personal commitment to every student. “Challenge and nurture” describes DeLay’s approach, too. One of her former students expresses it this way: “That is part of Miss DeLay’s genius—to put people in the frame of mind where they can do their best.… Very few teachers can actually get you to your ultimate potential. Miss DeLay has that gift. She challenges you at the same time that you feel you are being nurtured.

What is a novel, anyway? Only a very foolish person would attempt to give a definitive answer to that, beyond stating the more or less obvious facts that it is a literary narrative of some length which purports, on the reverse of the title page, not to be true, but seeks nevertheless to convince its readers that it is. It's typical of the cynicism of our age that, if you write a novel, everyone assumes it's about real people, thinly disguised; but if you write an autobiography everyone assumes you're lying your head off. Part of this is right, because every artist is, among other things, a con-artist. We con-artists do tell the truth, in a way; but, as Emily Dickenson said, we tell it slant. By indirection we find direction out -- so here, for easy reference, is an elimination-dance list of what novels are not. -- Novels are not sociological textbooks, although they may contain social comment and criticism. -- Novels are not political tracts, although "politics" -- in the sense of human power structures -- is inevitably one of their subjects. But if the author's main design on us is to convert us to something -- - whether that something be Christianity, capitalism, a belief in marriage as the only answer to a maiden's prayer, or feminism, we are likely to sniff it out, and to rebel. As Andre Gide once remarked, "It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written." -- Novels are not how-to books; they will not show you how to conduct a successful life, although some of them may be read this way. Is Pride and Prejudice about how a sensible middle-class nineteenth-century woman can snare an appropriate man with a good income, which is the best she can hope for out of life, given the limitations of her situation? Partly. But not completely. -- Novels are not, primarily, moral tracts. Their characters are not all models of good behaviour -- or, if they are, we probably won't read them. But they are linked with notions of morality, because they are about human beings and human beings divide behaviour into good and bad. The characters judge each other, and the reader judges the characters. However, the success of a novel does not depend on a Not Guilty verdict from the reader. As Keats said, Shakespeare took as much delight in creating Iago -- that arch-villain -- as he did in creating the virtuous Imogen. I would say probably more, and the proof of it is that I'd bet you're more likely to know which play Iago is in. -- But although a novel is not a political tract, a how-to-book, a sociology textbook or a pattern of correct morality, it is also not merely a piece of Art for Art's Sake, divorced from real life. It cannot do without a conception of form and a structure, true, but its roots are in the mud; its flowers, if any, come out of the rawness of its raw materials. -- In short, novels are ambiguous and multi-faceted, not because they're perverse, but because they attempt to grapple with what was once referred to as the human condition, and they do so using a medium which is notoriously slippery -- namely, language itself.

Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” Consider Shakespeare: we’re most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton tracked the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, measuring how often they’re performed and how widely they’re praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development. In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit. Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies. In science, Einstein wrote papers on general and special relativity that transformed physics, but many of his 248 publications had minimal impact. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.* Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone. But during that period, he filed well over one hundred patents for other inventions as diverse as stencil pens, a fruit preservation technique, and a way of using magnets to mine iron ore—and designed a creepy talking doll. “Those periods in which the most minor products appear tend to be the same periods in which the most major works appear,” Simonton notes. Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

if one goes through Francis Meres’s list of the best English dramatists in 1598 one quickly discovers that commonplace books and early drafts of published plays don’t survive for any of these popular Elizabethan playwrights.

Among history’s greatest literary figures, Dickens’ name is listed alongside Shakespeare’s. He was the most widely read author of his time. Soldiers in the American Civil War carried his books to read aloud around nightly campfires. He was more popular in Russia than many of the great Russian novelists. His twenty novels are all still in print, and he remains popular today.

What’s past is prologue. Written by William Shakespeare in The Tempest, it is also inscribed on a monument outside of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. How true that is.

That’s how I feel now, here in California, in my little house behind the big house. I have my list of approved players—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Harper Lee, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Shakespeare, King David.

The list of what the world would not allow was long for mourning over.

Americans honored Mazzini; the old-guard Protestants erected a politically charged “Spanish Columbus” on the Mall in 1892 as a rebuke to the Italian-Americans; lovers of poetry (including future assassin John Wilkes Booth) honored Shakespeare—the list goes on and on. After Hitler invaded Poland, the statue of Jagiello, which stood proudly in front of the Poland pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, was orphaned. Eventually, it wended its way to the park too, to serve as a symbol of Polish resistance to Nazism.

Like any infamous, unsolved crime, the authorship mystery has attracted a certain class of cranks who sometimes call in claiming to have arrived, irrefutably, at the elusive solution. The authorities seize on these figures, painting all skeptics with the same brush. Those who doubt Shakespeare suffer from an “intellectual aberration,” Sir Sidney Lee declared in the early twentieth century; it was “madhouse chatter,” a “foolish craze,” “morbid psychology.” But the ranks of skeptics have included many formidable minds: novelists, poets, statesmen, Supreme Court justices, scientists, and professors of history, philosophy, theater, anthropology, psychology, and, only occasionally, English. To ask Shakespeare scholars to research the authorship is “like asking the College of Cardinals to honestly research the Resurrection,” wrote Robin Fox, professor of social theory at Rutgers University. At York University in Canada, a professor of theater named Don Rubin created a course on the authorship question. His colleagues in English scoffed, assuring him that no one would sign up, but there was a waiting list every year.

1628 a theologian compiling a list of the best English poets (Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and so on) added, in Latin, “that well-known poet who takes a name from shaking and spear.” The phrase immediately jumps out from the list of other names. Why not simply give him as “William Shakespeare,” like the others? The conspicuous difference suggests something conspicuously different about Shakespeare.

A clergyman named Francis Meres published a book listing Shakespeare among the best English writers and naming a dozen Shakespeare plays: “Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds [comedy and tragedy] for the stage.” Such evidence proves attribution, not actual authorship.

When James came to the throne, he was listed as a member of the playing company, now called the King’s Men, but during the theater season of 1604, numerous records place him in Stratford: He sells malt to a Philip Rogers, lends Rogers two shillings, then sues Rogers to recover the amount plus damages. He invests in Stratford tithes. These are the years when he’s supposed to be writing his greatest plays—Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.

Bard Blood at the Palace,” the Daily Mail announced, reporting that Professor Wells had “crossed swords” with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Wells had apparently asked the queen’s consort if he was a heretic. Philip, never one to tread lightly, responded, “All the more so after reading your book.” Meanwhile, Prince Charles had written to Professor Jonathan Bate, then at Oxford, asking for a list of arguments backing Shakespeare. Was the Prince of Wales plagued by a faltering faith? If he had doubts, it would not be wise to let on—not as president of the Royal Shakespeare Company and not, certainly, as he approached his throne.

The bookstore was listed in most every guidebook to Paris and visitors burbled into the store in happy droves. They were intoxicated by the books and the bohemian writers who lived among them, all the time spending large sums of their holiday money.

But it wasn’t just Twain and Whitman whispering heresies into my ear, a whole ink spill of geniuses had staked their reputations on the argument that “Will Shake-speare” was one of the hyphenated pen names popular among Elizabethan satirists who didn’t fancy being disemboweled in public. The list of gadflies who questioned the official narrative of Shakespeare included Chaplin, Coleridge, Emerson, Gielgud, Hardy, Holmes, Jacobi, James, Joyce, Welles, and of late even Mark Rylance, the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Collectively they believed the Stratford businessman to be a front and a fraud. Whatever the truth, it’s fair to say the authorship debate had long been divided into two camps, artists vs. academics.

Isn’t that awful?” he said, pointing to a list of books on promotion. “The Art of War listed as a business-advice book. What does that tell you about our society?

Far more interesting to me was Greenblatt’s list of every class that had been denied young Will in this hypothetical school experience: “no English history or literature; no biology, chemistry, or physics; no economics or sociology; only a smattering of arithmetic… all backed up by the threat of violence.

Other commonplaces go back even further. The proverb we use nowadays, ‘all that glitters is not gold’ is usually traced to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice Act II Scene iv: All that glisters is not gold; Often have you heard that told. The term “glisters” became glitters in time; it is, in effect, the same word. People had indeed ‘often heard that told’, prior to Shakespeare, Chaucer had it as: “Hit is not al gold, that glareth”. So, it was known in English poetry before Shakespeare even got to it. It is such an obvious truth that it is no surprise to discover that earlier civilisations used the same phrase. The Roman poets Shakespeare appears to have immersed himself in, and from whom Dylan, who also studied them at school, liberally quotes, include, amongst their lines, nōn omne quod nĭtet aurum est (‘Not all that glitters is gold’). It was a Latin proverb and well-known enough as to appear in Corpus Juris Civilis (the Book of Civil Law) some two and a half thousand years ago. Dylan puts a version of this ancient saying into the mouth of a grandparent dispensing a list of clichéd advice. Dylan thus acknowledges, as Shakespeare did, that here was an old truth, while simultaneously giving an intriguing twist to the concept: Grandma said, “Boy, go and follow your heart And you’ll be fine at the end of the line All that’s gold isn’t meant to shine Don’t you and your one true love ever part” As with other things we have heard and read and thought many times in our life, many of us never come across a version of this phrase without either hearing it in Dylan’s voice or thinking of its use in Shakespeare’s play and the extra resonance those bring to it. Such is the power of Bards.

My lecture on Shakespeare is long and offensively dry—to the point where I stop listening to the professor and start making a bullet point list in my head about why this class is a waste of my tuition dollars and no one should ever be required to study Shakespeare to get a bachelor’s degree ever again.

The room was large and airy. Shelves lined the walls on three sides, shelves that stretched way above his head, bending under the weight of the hundreds of books stored there. The fourth wall was covered in old newspaper, yellowed and faded but still readable. The room had become a shrine of sorts, he supposed. The books he had saved before the last days. He ran his finger along the spines: Shakespeare, Dickens, Keats, the ancients, all there alongside books from the last century. Nothing wasted, nothing lost. His private collection. He would find it difficult to let them go when the time came, but he would let them go. He couldn’t risk them being found at a later date. There were few incidents where people managed to decode words after Nicene, very few. Nonetheless, he wouldn’t take that chance. They would be destroyed along with everything the wordsmith had managed to salvage. For a second, images of the wordsmith filled his head, but he pushed them away. He turned his back on the books and walked across to the wall of newsprint. Here was a potted history of the past hundred years. The warnings. The signs. Global warming. Water levels rising. It was incomprehensible even now that man had just ignored it all. Young people talked about the Melting as if it were a single event, but it hadn’t been like that. The earth had been heating up for years. His finger touched one of the news sheets. Scientists were warning of an alarming acceleration in the melting of the polar ice caps. They predicted a dramatic rise in sea levels. That was back in the twenty-first century! He shook his head. He chose another article from around the same time. The writer was warning about the disappearing ice caps. “Until recently, the Arctic ice cap covered two percent of the earth’s surface. Enormous amounts of solar energy are bounced back into space from those luminous white ice fields. Replacing that mass of ice with dark open ocean will induce a catastrophic tipping point in the balance of planetary energy.” Torrents of words had followed. Words from politicians assuring people there was no such thing as global warming. Words from industrialists who justified their emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. Words to hide behind. Words to deceive. Useless, dangerous, destructive words… He drew back his hand and punched the wall, hurting his knuckles and leaving a trail of blood on the yellowing paper.

Salmon with Violets SERVES 4 I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows … A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, 2.1 THE BEAUTIFUL COLORS, the presentation, and the wonderful light flavors of this dish typify the sophistication of Elizabethan cuisine. Many types of edible flowers were used in cooking, both for their visual appeal and for their taste. Flowers were not set out onto the table in vases, but rather the dinner platters and the food itself were considered the decoration and were enhanced with flowers. Cookbooks of the time even list instructions on salads “for shewe only” with details on creating large elaborate “flowers” made of various cut vegetables and herbs.

Am ajuns cu vremea la încredinţarea că incultura sau cultura nu sunt în raport cu numărul de cărţi citite şi că acestea nu modifică în esenţă vocaţia înnăscută a cuiva pentru cultură sau incultură. Căci există şi vocaţia inculturii. Cunosc oameni care au citit efectiv biblioteci întregi, au dulapuri cu fişe şi ştiu tot ce se poate şti, dar sunt funciarmente şi fără speranţă nişte inculţi. Asta se vede din felul cum se exprimă şi cum abordează anumite situaţii sau probleme. Alţii care n-au citit toată viaţa decât să zicem o sută de cărţi fundamentale (dar sunt atâtea?) au darul culturii, spiritul lor are apetenţa înţelegerii şi cunoaşterii şi se mişcă cu libertate şi siguranţă în lumea ideilor, esenţelor şi formelor. Fireşte că această apetenţă a spiritului comportă de obicei o irezistibilă şi devorantă sete de lectură: „O sută de mii de cărţi, un milion de cărţi!” cum exclama Papini în acel Uomo finito pe care văd cu melancolie că generaţiile noi ma îl mai pomenesc: să fi fost şi asta una din cărţile a căror tărie se istoveşte după o generaţie? N-am mai recitit-o de aproape douăzeci de ani şi faptul acesta poate că e un indiciu. De ce am recitit de nu ştiu câte ori Don Quijote, Război şi pace, Comedia umană, de pildă, iar pe asta şi atâtea altele nu? Nu e cazul să facem liste, dar recitirile sunt un criteriu de prim-ordin pentru definirea structurii intelectuale a cuiva. Recitirea merge însă destul de greu împreună cu lectura nenumăratelor noutăţi importante care proliferează ca scaunele lui lonescu. În vremea care a început să se îndepărteze, când nu primeam nici cărţi noi, nici reviste, puteam liniştit şi fără jenă să mă îndeletnicesc „a longueur d'année” cu Platon, cu Goethe, cu Shakespeare, dar acum, trebuind mereu să recunosc că nu l-am citit nici pe Updike, nici pe Bellow, nici pe Claude Simon, nici pe cutare sau cutare (cum vedeţi nu sunt în stare măcar să enumăr mai mulţi) încep să am, cum se zice, „complexe”. Mint. Nu le am. Există o formulă barbară: „a fi cu lectura la zi”. La zi! Ce enormă incultură exprimă asemenea vorbă! Sunt de acord că, mai ales în ştiinţă, nu se poate fără informaţie promptă şi – utopic!- completă. [...] Descartes în a doua parte a vieţii, când şi-a clădit opera, nu mai citea aproape nimic. Faulkner (care afecta de altfel cu cochetărie o falsă ignoranţă) mărturisea că propria lui operă nu i-a îngăduit ani de zile să se ţină la curent cu literatura mai nouă. Cine are ceva de spus, cine are, să zic aşa, o „graviditate” spirituală, şi simte crescând în el rodul gândirii şi imaginaţiei proprii, e din ce în ce mai puţin disponibil şi capătă o aparentă incuriozitate pentru alte lucruri. Lectura ca deliciu şi totodată ca mijloc de orientare a spiritului, ca situare pe o axă a existenţei, îşi poate împlini integral funcţia doar cu câteva cărţi inepuizabile. Timeo hominem unium libri: înainte de a avertiza contra mărginiţilor la litera unei singure cărţi, această frază a sfântului Toma de Aquino, declară redutabilă puterea celui care i-a asimilat temeinic spiritul. Dar lectura ca „filatelie” şi ca mijloc de a epata pe ignoranţi e un semn de vacuitate mentală. Vorba lui Montaigne: Surtout, c'est a mon gré bien faire le sot que de faire l'entendu entre ceux

To use an example from school, consider the writers we are all expected to read; the list usually includes Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and William Shakespeare. These writers are seen as representing the universal human experience, and we read them precisely because they are presumed to be able to speak to us all. Now consider the writers we turn to during events promoting diversity—events such as Multicultural Authors Week and Black History Month. These writers usually include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Amy Tan, and Sandra Cisneros. We go to these writers for the black or Asian perspective; Toni Morrison is always seen as a black writer, not just a writer.

Unlike nouns, a class of words that is forever morphing and mutating, the list of pronouns is finite and predictable, subdividing neatly and changed only slightly since the days of Shakespeare:

I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list. SAMPSON Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it. [Enter ABRAHAM and BALTHASAR] ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMPSON I do bite my thumb, sir. ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMPSON [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay? GREGORY No. SAMPSON No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

There is nothing in this list that Emerson had not learned firsthand. These are not abstractions but practical rules for everyday life. The public consequences of such convictions for Emerson were a politics of social liberalism, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, American Indian rights, opposition to the Mexican War, and civil disobedience when government was wrong. The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says six in the morning. On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet and Fuller began her history of the Roman revolution of 1848.

Then, if he says he loves you, It fits your wisdom so far to believe it As he in his particular act and place May give his saying deed; which is no further Than the main voice of Denmark goes withal. Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain If with too credent ear you list his songs, Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open To his master importunity. Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister. And keep you in the rear of your affection, Out of the shot and danger of desire. The chariest maid is prodigal enough If she unmask her beauty to the moon. Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes. The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their buttons be disclosed; And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are more imminent. Be wary then. Best safety lies in fear. Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.