Search Shakespeare Quotes

True it is,/ That these are not the droids for which thou search'st. -Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi

This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.

Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume.

You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I’m sorry, but they’ve all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I’m concerned, they didn’t make it out alive either, so I’m sure as hell not going to go to them for advice.

His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them: and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

This door is lock’d. And as my father oft Hath said, a lockèd door no mischief makes. So sure am I that, thus, behind this door Cannot be found the droids for which we search. And thus may we move on with conscience clear.

Uncle Auberon (who was quite an old gentleman) had stopt listening to them both a while ago and had wandered off to resume his search for a book. It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it (though he had had it in his hand not a hundred years before). So Mr Goodfellow said nothing but quietly turned himself back into William Shakespeare.

He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.

there are no devils. Inhumanity is the real evil,

Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, “look something up.” Indeed the very phrase—when it is used in the sense of “searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference”—simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxford historian named Anthony Wood used it. Since there was no such phrase until the late seventeenth century, it follows that there was essentially no such concept either, certainly not at the time when Shakespeare was writing—a time when writers were writing furiously, and thinkers thinking as they rarely had before. Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

Gratiano speakes an infinite deale of nothing, more then any man in all Venice, his reasons are two graines of wheate hid in two bushels of chaffe: you shall seeke all day ere you finde them, & when you haue them they are not worth the search

I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of a bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past, I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself.

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well. Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. The starters of crazes. Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old. He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer.

In its full-blown intensity, anxiety is the most painful emotion to which the human animal is heir. “Present dangers are less than future imaginings,” as Shakespeare puts it; and people have been known to leap out of a lifeboat and drown rather than face the greater agony of continual doubt and uncertainty, never knowing whether they will be rescued or not.

[Talking about Rosalind in As You Like It] She disguises herself as a boy, drops all the covering inhibitions of "femininity", and really searches for her true self (...) Her disguise gives her the ability to find out about herself, what she really thinks and feels (...). And she can do all this freely, without having anyone in power tell her how women should or should not behave.(...)

but what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume.

Violent men unknown to me have occupied my mind all my adult life—long before 2007, when I first learned of the offender I would eventually dub the Golden State Killer. The part of the brain reserved for sports statistics or dessert recipes or Shakespeare quotes is, for me, a gallery of harrowing aftermaths: a boy’s BMX bike, its wheels still spinning, abandoned in a ditch along a country road; a tuft of microscopic green fibers collected from the small of a dead girl’s back.

Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain; As painfully to pore upon a book To seek the light of truth while truth the while Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look. Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes. Study me how to please the eye indeed By fixing it upon a fairer eye, Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed, And give him light that it was blinded by. Study is like the heavens’ glorious sun, That will not be deep searched with saucy looks. Small have continual plodders ever won Save base authority from others’ books. These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights, That give a name to every fixed star, Have no more profit of their shining nights Than those that walk and wot not what they are. Too much to know is to know naught but fame, And every godfather can give a name. a

If we divide human attributes into "masculine" and "feminine" and strengthen only those attributes that "belong" to that sex, we cut off half of ourselves from ourselves as human beings, condemned forever to search for our other half. The world is in desperate need of multilayered human beings with the voices, stamina, and insight to break through our current calcified ways of doing things, (...) The patriarchal structures of honor, shame, violence, and might is right, do as much harm to Hamlet, Edgar, Lear, and Coriolanus as they do to Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macduff (...) (...) To have feelings, intuitive flights of understanding, a desire to have knowledge of what is happening below the surface, to serve. These are often called "feminine" attributes, and it is true that many women in the plays possess them. But they also belong to Kent, Ferdinand, Florizel, Camillo, as well as the women. So they are not "feminine" attributes: they are human attributes.

LUKE Thou dost not understand, thou useless scamp. I search not for a friend in this damp place, But for a Jedi master wise in skill! YODA O Jedi master! Yoda that you seek it is. ’Tis truly Yoda! LUKE [aside:] A strange turn of events! This tiny sprite May yet prove useful if he knows the man. [To Yoda:] Attend: thou know’st of Yoda, little one? YODA I’ll take thee to him. Aye, but first, let us eat food. Come, I good food have! LUKE I follow. R2, stay and watch the camp— Mayhap some hope still lives within this damp.

Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, “One perhaps.” One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still. (He looked into the hedge, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of the stars, if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at his post, the fine figure of a soldier?

what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume.

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 lacked the authority, and London audiences the sophistication, to manage this). And this challenge to the status quo is probably not something that would have gone down well at the Curtain in 1599. But Shakespeare had a clear sense of what veteran playgoers were capable of and saw past their cries for old favorites and the stereotypes that branded them as shallow “groundlings.” He committed himself not only to writing great plays for the Globe but also to nurturing an audience comfortable with their increased complexity. Even before the Theatre was dismantled he must have been excitedly thinking ahead, realizing how crucial his first few plays at the Globe would be. It was a gamble, and there was the possibility that he might overreach and lose both popular and courtly audiences.

He strode forward, heedless of the murmuring that began among the women when they saw him. Then Sara turned, and her gaze met his. Instantly a guilty blush spread over her cheeks that told him all he needed to know about her intent. “Good afternoon, ladies,” he said in steely tones. “Class is over for today. Why don’t you all go up on deck and get a little fresh air?” When the women looked at Sara, she folded her hands primly in front of her and stared at him. “You have no right to dismiss my class, Captain Horn. Besides, we aren’t finished yet. I was telling them a story—” “I know. You were recounting Lysistrata.” Surprise flickered briefly in her eyes, but then turned smug and looked down her aristocratic little nose at him. “Yes, Lysistrata,” she said in a sweet voice that didn’t fool him for one minute. “Surely you have no objection to my educating the women on the great works of literature, Captain Horn.” “None at all.” He set his hands on his hips. “But I question your choice of material. Don’t you think Aristophanes is a bit beyond the abilities of your pupils?” He took great pleasure in the shock that passed over Sara’s face before she caught herself. Ignoring the rustle of whispers among the women, she stood a little straighter. “As if you know anything at all about Aristophanes.” “I don’t have to be an English lordling to know literature, Sara. I know all the blasted writers you English make so much of. Any one of them would have been a better choice for your charges than Aristophanes.” As she continued to glower at him unconvinced, he scoured his memory, searching through the hundreds of verse passages his English father had literally pounded into him. “You might have chosen Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, for example—‘fie, fie! Unknit that threatening unkind brow. / And dart not scornful glances from those eyes / to wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.’” It had been a long time since he’d recited his father’s favorite passages of Shakespeare, but the words were as fresh as if he’d learned them only yesterday. And if anyone knew how to use literature as a weapon, he did. His father had delighted in tormenting him with quotes about unrepentant children. Sara gaped at him as the other women looked from him to her in confusion. “How . . . I mean . . . when could you possibly—” “Never mind that. The point us, you’re telling them the tale of Lysistrata when what you should be telling them is ‘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 labour by both sea and land.’” Her surprise at this knowledge of Shakespeare seemed to vanish as she recognized the passage he was quoting—the scene where Katherine accepts Petruchio as her lord and master before all her father’s guests. Sara’s eyes glittered as she stepped from among the women and came nearer to him. “We are not your wives yet. And Shakespeare also said ‘sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more / men were deceivers ever / one foot on sea and one on shore / to one thing constant never.’” “Ah, yes. Much Ado About Nothing. But even Beatrice changes her tune in the end, doesn’t she? I believe it’s Beatrice who says, ‘contempt, farewell! And maiden pride, adieu! / no glory lives behind the back of such./ and Benedick, love on, I will requite thee, / taming my wild heart to thy loving hand.’” “She was tricked into saying that! She was forced to acknowledge him as surely as you are forcing us!” “Forcing you?” he shouted. “You don’t know the meaning of force! I swear, if you—” He broke off when he realized that the women were staring at him with eyes round and fearful. Sara was twisting his words to make him sound like a monster. And succeeding, too, confound her.

Technologist Kevin Kelly suggests, “If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology, . . . then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions. A Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach fugue, then, are in the same category as Google’s search engine and the iPod. They are something useful produced by a mind.

The nautical expression that “Rats leave a sinking ship” is an observed truth. Not only will they attempt to save themselves but they will also assist in saving others. In fact studies show that they will be more apt to help their fellow rats if they had experienced a previous dunking themselves. Although detested by human’s rats are in fact very compassionate social animals that crave company. Research has proven that they will help another rat in distress before searching for food even though they may be hungry. Although not proven it has been observed that they have an innate knowledge of impending disaster and if they are seen abandoning ship, it just might be wise to follow. This is born out in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act I, Scene II where he wrote: “In few, they hurried us aboard a bark, bore us some leagues to the sea; where they prepared a rotten carcass of a boat, not rigged, nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats instinctively had to quit it.” Of course this nautical concept is fortunately not frequently witnessed, however in a metaphorical sense it is now being witnessed politically. The New York Times's Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns have written articles concerning the tumult behind the scenes in the world of Donald Trump. “In private, Mr. Trump's mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts…” Many others claim that he is not up to the task and could actually be a danger to our country if not the World. On Twitter, Bill Kristol a conservative and the Editor at large of the Weekly Standard says that the New York Times story suggest suggests prominent members of Trump's team are already beginning their recriminations in anticipation of a Republican defeat in November. Although I usually save my political remarks for my personal Facebook page, the obvious cannot be ignored and it has been universally apparent that our “Ship of State” has been heading into uncharted waters, rife with dangers herebefore unknown!

That was an inspiring service, Thomas, and I believe it should be followed by an inspiring bit of entertainment.” Kitty clapped her hands. “Oh yes! What a lovely idea.” “What shall we do then?” Nathaniel asked. “Why don’t we have Liza perform for us?” Kitty said. Eliza snapped her head toward her sister. “Me?” Kitty tilted her head. “Yes, like you used to do! I haven’t heard you perform Shakespeare in so long.” Nathaniel sat back down. “I have heard tales of your talents, Eliza. Shakespeare is one of my favorites. It would be a great honor if you’d perform for us.” Eliza turned to Thomas, shooting him a stern but playful glare. “Did you have anything to do with this?” Thomas attempted to smother a telling grin. “Nothing whatsoever.” She turned again toward her sister. Kitty bit her lip and tilted her head farther as if to say “pretty please?” Eliza looked around the room tapping her foot, searching for a reason to decline. The last thing she wanted was to make a fool out of herself. “I’d love to, Kitty, but it’s been such a long time and I don’t have any of my books with me. I really need to freshen my memory before I do anything like that and I’m out of practice on my recitations. I’m sorry, my dear.” “Not to worry.” Nathaniel popped out of his chair again and went to fetch a small bundle by the front door. “It so happens that I’ve brought such a book with me.” Eliza threw an accusatory glance at Thomas. He grinned wide as the horizon, and leaned back in his seat. She couldn’t get out of it now. She was trapped. She pinched her lips and laced her fingers in her lap. Nathaniel came to her chair and held the thick book in front of her. “Your reputation precedes you, Miss Campbell. You must indulge us, please.” Eliza

Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, don’t fixate on the end. We go about the world focused on worldly concerns. We accept the inevitable and direct our energies to other things. Yet the recognition that our time is finite is always with us, helping to shape the choices we make, the challenges we accept, the paths we follow. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker maintained, we are under a constant existential tension, pulled toward the sky by a consciousness that can soar to the heights of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Einstein but tethered to earth by a physical form that will decay to dust. “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”2 According to Becker, we are impelled by such awareness to deny death the capacity to erase us. Some soothe the existential yearning through commitment to family, a team, a movement, a religion, a nation—constructs that will outlast the individual’s allotted time on earth. Others leave behind creative expressions, artifacts that extend the duration of their presence symbolically. “We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”3 Others still seek to vanquish death by winning or conquering, as if stature, power, and wealth command an immunity unavailable to the common mortal. Across the millennia, one consequence has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophesies of an afterlife, to teachings of reincarnation, to entreaties of the windswept mandala, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, often with hope, sometimes with resignation, to gesture toward eternity. What’s new in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the big bang, but also of the future. Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory. From planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae, nothing is everlasting. Indeed, as far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, but so too is life itself. Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment. Still, here on earth we have punctuated our moment with astonishing feats of insight, creativity, and ingenuity as each generation has built on the achievements of those who have gone before, seeking clarity on how it all came to be, pursuing coherence in where it is all going, and longing for an answer to why it all matters. Such is the story of this book.

Better three hours too soon than a minute too late. William Shakespeare

Kazuo Ishiguro was pushing for such an expansion in his 1917 Nobel Lecture. After speaking so movingly about the effect singers have on his writing and discussing a film, amidst his literary musings and remembrances, he ended with a plea that serves well as a conclusion to this Nobel Prize section with its comments on future generations, genre and form: “… we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities. Second: we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them.

Kazuo Ishiguro was pushing for such an expansion in his 1917 Nobel Lecture. After speaking so movingly about the effect singers have on his writing and discussing a film, amidst his literary musings and remembrances, he ended with a plea that serves well as a conclusion to this Nobel Prize section with its comments on future generations, genre and form: “… we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities. Second: we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them. In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers. We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision, around which to rally.

If anyone was defending science, it seemed to be the German team. Nobody could dispute that the panel of the original Flower had been decayed by wormwood. As Hammerschmidt-Hummel pointed out, “It had already been described in these terms by British experts at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, among them the director of the National Portrait Gallery.” Yet now the panel appeared improved, “showing no signs of wormwood damage… [and] the peripheral areas, which in the original painting are brittle and have been broken or chipped away in places, exhibit no such damage in the portrait inspected in the RSC depository.

Then in 1979 a flurry of low blows began to unfold when the Flower was restored by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Ashmolean owns no notes regarding their conservation work on the Flower—nor do the portrait’s current owners at the Royal Shakespeare Company. All we know for sure is that this restoration changed the Flower in ways unimaginable.

Two portraits alike in homeliness were competing for the love of a nation, and suddenly one of them reappeared decked out like Jesus complete with halo. It seemed a bit suspicious to my mind.

The Flower’s greatest champion, when all was said and done, would prove to be the German professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, the same scholar who put forth the theory the Droeshout might have been copied from a death mask. In 2002 Hammerschmidt-Hummel had just completed a six-year research project with the German FBI and a Justice League team of scientists that attempted to employ crime-solving facial-recognition technology to establish the consistencies of facial features within a select number of accepted images of William Shakespeare. Her study would eventually lead her to make some interesting accusations, one of which involved portrait switchery.

Hammerschmidt-Hummel cried foul play, and it’s interesting to observe how the scholarly world reacted to a respected professor’s accusations against London’s vaulted curatorial world. Her evidence that the portrait had been switched continued to be ignored; instead, certain scholars went schoolyard on the professor. Professor Stanley Wells, as quoted in The Times, even described Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s claim as “disgraceful” and added that many books written on Shakespeare contained similar

We tend to project our own culture backward onto history and paint ourselves over dead tribes,

Was it possible, I began to wonder, that somebody had overpainted the portrait to protect it? We’ve already delved into the notion that Shakespeare might have fallen out of favor while alive or recently dead, but we know for a fact that he fell into disgrace when the Puritans gained power in 1653 under Lord Protector Cromwell and declared Shakespeare and his ilk spawn of Satan. After nailing shut the Globe and other such lairs, the Puritans started torching art. Did some Clopton hero disguise the family portrait to protect the poet from these buzzkill iconoclasts? In an 1883 lecture, the collector John Rabone stated as much: “It was suggested that the [Hunt] painting had been obscured in Puritanical times, as many portraits had been, to conceal it, as players then were in ill odour.

The tragedy we know today came to us patched together with lines lifted from the works of another playwright, Thomas Middleton. Since Macbeth was not considered one of Shakespeare’s last plays, it’s difficult to explain why the tragedy had to be cobbled together in that manner. Was it possible that Macbeth, due to its bloodthirsty portrayal of Scottish royalty, had been censored by James I? Was Macbeth always the shortest play in the canon, or was its brevity the result of censorship? Could its author have suffered dire consequences as a result of a king’s displeasure, and was that the reason “the Scottish play” had always been associated with bad luck?

the 1601 Essex Rebellion, an armed uprising against the crown that was started at the Globe Theatre with an illicit production of Richard II. The rebellion ended with five courtiers being beheaded and the Fair Youth Earl of Southampton tossed into the Tower. If Strong was correct, that connection to treason might help explain why the picture had been repeatedly altered in strange fantastic ways while residing inside the Royal Collection.

Let’s have a glance at Strong’s theory. Okay, the 2nd Earl of Essex, a former court favorite, had been the leader of the failed rebellion against the crown. In Strong’s strange-fantastic scenario, the pregnant Lady Essex, hoping to prevent the beheading of her husband following his arrest, had with great speed commissioned this sexy full-length portrait of herself and sent it to Elizabeth as a plea to spare her husband’s life. Strong made no attempt to explain why Lady Essex, who was famously despised by Elizabeth, would have thought it wise to paint herself as the Virgin Queen’s pregnant twin—the two women didn’t even look alike in real life. We are asked to believe that Lady Essex decided to co-opt the queen’s symbol of the goddess Diana in a nearly nude portrait in which the deer, presumably representing her husband Essex, was being crowned by the queen?

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.

Stated simply, nobody had ever unearthed a work of genius with de Vere’s name stamped on it. Nor did we have an ad vivum painted portrait of Edward de Vere, only a seventeenth-century copy of a now lost circa-1575 portrait (artist unknown) that showed the earl posing beneath a wide-brimmed sugarloaf hat. A French cloak of gold braid (a proper dandy changed cloaks three times a day) was thrown over the left shoulder of a gold doublet uniquely tasseled at the wrist. Welbeck Abbey lent this portrait of de Vere to London’s National Portrait Gallery back in 1964, and for as long as I kept tabs on it, that portrait remained hidden inside an NPG storehouse in Wimbledon in spite of great public interest in de Vere. Was the NPG worried that tourists might flock like maenads to this dashing portrait of de Vere instead of ogling over the greatly unbeloved Chandos?

Eventually the talk turned to Roland Emmerich’s movie when Charles mentioned that Anonymous would incorporate the same incestuous plotline put forth in his book. I dropped my fork right as Larry shot me a horror-filled glance. We didn’t have to be discreet. Beauclerk knew he was treading on sacred ground. Here the Oxfordians were finally achieving respectability—their tribe had infiltrated academia and even the justices of the Supreme Court had split on whether de Vere wrote Shakespeare—and now this Shakespeare-as-motherfucker movie would be used to ridicule the entire movement.

Everything about the Ashbourne spat in the face of the Stratford everyman myth. How in hell could anyone think, even for a moment, that this sitter had been raised milking cows in some dung-filled barn? “Here is a nobleman,” the portrait sang, and in fact even that dangling glove motif in English portraits had been created to distinguish rank from riffraff: only noblemen posed in that manner. The sitter’s face was ethereal, almost regal, as if he were mulling over a line of iambic pentameter or searching for an elusive rhyme.

In his article, Barrell had cited a letter by Ketel’s biographer that proved Ketel had indeed painted de Vere. Barrell then pointed out that the Ashbourne had likely resided for decades at Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire, where a 1695 will mentioned a portrait of “the earl of Oxford my wife’s great grand-father at [full] length.” In 1721 that de Vere portrait was again noted by the antiquarian George Vertue, but by 1782 this framed picture had vanished; yet that year’s inventory recorded a new portrait now hung in the main dining hall: an unframed three-quarter-length Will Shakespeare. De Vere full-length with frame disappears, Shakespeare three-quarter-length unframed appears, and all this taking place some thirty-five miles from where the Ashbourne would be discovered. It was hard to fault Barrell’s logic here, I felt, especially since the Folger itself had recorded the Ashbourne as owning no original edges, meaning the picture had been cut down in size at some point.

Only a portion of the Folger collection was on display—if display is the right word for a museum closed to the general public—

the library itself was closed to the general public and that in order to enter the “library library”—as she described it—you had to apply for a scholar’s pass months in advance. Such passes were generally restricted to PhD candidates.

The Folger was either the most or least honest research library in the world.

First the Folger gobbles up all the would-be bards it can buy, then it partitions them away from the public while refusing to allow researchers to gaze into them via spectral technologies. Why purchase a portrait to hide it? Why not display it, alongside its spectral results, in a museum open to the public?

Well, to start, goodbye Stratford-upon-Avon tourist industry and the millions it raked in annually. Goodbye Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Goodbye Stanley Wells and goodbye to some 367 well-imagined yet now highly comical Shakespeare biographies. Goodbye to the reputations of countless red-faced academics. And, last but not least, goodbye to the “I Think Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare!” T-shirt company.

The traditional academics, the powerful white men Twain referred to as “thugs,” had simply ignored her findings, which made me wonder if there were even a path to victory here. Could anyone ever hope to rouse the public into questioning the accepted history of an icon like Will Shakespeare?

And whenever we have been furnished a fetish,” Twain wrote, “and have been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong, that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our devotion.

Were my murderous theories really that insane? Hadn’t Marlowe been stabbed dead by intelligencers involved in that same succession intrigue? Hadn’t Ben Jonson been imprisoned for his satiric plays? And didn’t Tom Nashe flee London in fear of his life? Was it really that farfetched to believe that Shakespeare, who had ridiculed all the power players of his day, and whose play Richard II once helped instigate an armed rebellion against the crown, might have gotten himself murdered? And if Shakespeare were murdered, and if the crown had passed to James instead of to a proper Tudor heir, then at what point in our history of horror begetting horror would the royal family have stopped covering up those sordid facts and fessed up to not only having murdered the greatest artists of all time but to stealing the crown of England from the rightful heir to the throne? Never. They would never admit it. The cover-up would last forever.

No, all that mattered was somebody with the correct degree had published a paper in an academic journal that made everybody else feel better about Will Shakespeare. That done, the gavel came clapping down as the Ashbourne portrait was declared innocent on all charges of depicting Edward de Vere.

On February 7, 1601, about two years before the queen’s death, an uprising against the crown had begun at the Globe Theatre with a treasonous production of Richard II in which Elizabeth was satirized as the incompetent Richard surrounded by villainous counselors. This rebellion, which would march on London the following morning, was led by two fallen favorites, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, and Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. We can’t be sure of their motive in starting this doomed rebellion, but it seems likely these two hyper-educated earls, symbols of the fast-fading English Renaissance, had been attempting to free their aged queen from the grasp of her powerful secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, in order to thwart Cecil’s plan to control the crown upon Elizabeth’s death.

Five earls, three barons, and sixteen knights were implicated in the uprising, yet Shakespeare survived that rebellion unremarked upon. He was not summoned before the Star Chamber like Marlowe. He did not have his papers seized or his books burned. He was not punished in any way. Although clearly aligned with the Essex faction, he wasn’t even called as a witness. Who was protecting Shakespeare at this point? The

Five earls, three barons, and sixteen knights were implicated in the uprising, yet Shakespeare survived that rebellion unremarked upon. He was not summoned before the Star Chamber like Marlowe. He did not have his papers seized or his books burned. He was not punished in any way. Although clearly aligned with the Essex faction, he wasn’t even called as a witness. Who was protecting Shakespeare at this point?

Imprisoned in the Tower, Southampton was in no position to protect anybody. So if Southampton wasn’t protecting Shakespeare, who was? And how, and why?

It’s easy to forget that Shakespeare didn’t originally divide his plays into acts or scenes. Those delineations began after his productions migrated to the indoor Blackfrairs Theatre with its crew of ribald child actors. The need to replace candles demanded that breaks be inserted into the plays, and the rest, for better or worse, was structural history.

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.

there were pods of surly teenagers camped out in the booths, and who could blame them for being so authentically surly? Their hometown had been turned into an Elizabethan Disney World with their lives spent weaving between moo-cow tourists.

Perhaps it was because Greville’s poetry had a little too much in common with Shakespeare’s? And it wasn’t just me who noticed that. The critic Glynne Wickham once argued that Shakespeare had based his Love’s Labor’s Lost on a play Greville wrote. The Shakespearian Charles Lamb shocked his friends Coleridge and Wordsworth by choosing Greville as the one person from literary history whose ghost he would most like to interrogate. John Baxter observed that Shakespeare and Greville “share remarkably coincidental general intentions.” The sonnet-cycle scholar Martha Foote Crow noted Greville’s poetry “comes nearer to Shakespeare’s philosophical grasp than does the attempt of any other Elizabethan sonneteer.” Lytton Sells wrote, “In variety of tone and topic [Greville’s] Caelica resembles the sonnets of Shakespeare more than any other poet of his time.

The Master of Shakespeare, by A. W. L. Saunders, after citing many of the above details, hung its hat on those similarities of poetic style while arguing that Greville, a famously amiable patron, had been the master of a long-standing collaboration marketed as “Will Shake-speare,” whose contributing members included Mary Sidney, Tom Nashe, Francis Bacon, Kit Marlowe, George Peele, and Samuel Daniel.

Wait, I thought. First de Vere and now Mary Sidney? That made two contenders for the title of Shakespeare who stood publicly accused of having fucked horses. What would Sherlock Holmes have made of such a clue?

The emptiness of that monument in front of me was another reason the locals thought Greville wrote Shakespeare. Inside the First Folio, Ben Jonson had called Shakespeare “a monument without a tombe,” and here was just such a monument. Jonson had also described Shakespeare as the “Sweet Swan of Avon.” Greville’s heraldic beast was the swan—he’d even worn a swan-topped helmet into the tilts—and Warwick Castle, where Greville had been living when the First Folio was published, was perched directly over the Avon River.

You can’t write a bestselling biography called I Don’t Know Who the Hell Wrote Shakespeare and Neither Do You nor can you print up a sellable T-shirt or coffee mug on that theme. But it’s the truth, you don’t know, and neither do you, or you, or you, but as a culture we won’t admit we don’t know who wrote Shakespeare. We desperately want to know. But we don’t. And likely never will.

As it turned out, there was another portrait buried beneath the Flower, an Italian-looking painting likely from the sixteenth century that portrayed the Virgin Mary, baby Jesus, and toddler John the Baptist. Prior to the Flower’s restoration, the Ashmolean and the Royal Shakespeare Company already knew from the portrait’s 1966 X-ray that this portrait existed beneath the paint. Yet today nobody can explain why they chose to dissolve the existing backdrop on what was arguably the most authentic painted portrait of Shakespeare in the world.

1996, Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel had obtained a high-resolution Ektachrome of the Flower portrait from Brian Glover, the collection director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

So vexed was the professor that she boarded a flight to examine the current Flower portrait and later informed David Howells, the new curator of the Royal Shakespeare Company, that the painting currently on display was not the same portrait depicted in her earlier photograph. Her claim was backed by Reinhardt Altmann of the German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation, who supplied a written report stating the current picture had to be a copy. Professor Wolfgang Speyer, an expert on Old Masters at the Dorotheum in Salzburg, added: “The picture must have been restored, or, to put it more precisely ‘repainted’… During this process everything was smoothed out on the surface but the character had been utterly lost.

Those theaters, banished outside city limits as vaguely satanic, were essentially larger-scaled bait pits that offered a competing menagerie of mutilations, executions, murders, rapes, etc. The scripts were of course infused with Tudor propaganda to be lapped up by the illiterate masses. As one drunk groundling spat at an actor, another clamored onstage to protect Mercutio in a swordfight. (Eventually the Globe had to ban all steel at the door.) Meanwhile, the more affluent patrons hardly noticed the play at all, there being too many other distractions, such as dice and cards, with pickpockets, blackmailers, and prostitutes working the crowd. Like it or not, the Globe was a G thang, a drunken vice-ridden delivery system of Tudor duplicity, its grand finale each evening not the play but the bawdy jig that followed.

Nashe, the city’s most feared and fearless satirist, once compared the closing stanza of Harvey’s latest poem to a fart after a bowel movement. Nashe also transformed Shakespeare’s exalted Venus and Adonis into a porn parody about one man’s epic attempt to bring a London prostitute to orgasm using a dildo. Constantly offending authorities, forever on the run, Nashe jumped pen name to pen name: Cutbert Curry-knave to Pierce Penniless to Adam Evesdropper to Jocundary Merry-brains. A pamphlet got him tossed into Newgate Prison, a satiric play forced him to flee London. A friend and collaborator of Shakespeare’s, Nashe died likely of the plague around 1601, two years after the queen thought it prudent to set his life’s work ablaze in a great bonfire of lost lewd literature.

In 1834 William IV, England’s “sailor king,” had obtained the portrait, understood to be Shakespeare, from the descendants of the Sidney clan at Penshurst Place. Could there be a better provenance for Shakespeare than Penshurst? The Sidney family was, after all, the only family ever rumored to have had “the man Shakespeare” pay them a social visit. Mary Sidney even stood accused of having written, or coauthored, the plays of Shakespeare due in part to the elite literary salon she fostered known as the Wilton Circle. Mary’s husband had founded Pembroke’s Men, the first acting troupe to perform Shakespeare’s plays. The hallowed 1623 First Folio was dedicated to their two sons.

Back in 1988 the Folger had X-rayed their Janssen portrait before recasting their star bard into the less enviable role of Sir Thomas Overbury, Disagreeable Jacobean Courtier Poisoned with Tarts and Jellies by the Wife of his Homosexual Lover. In questioning the authenticity of the Cobbe gallant, the skeptics were asking an obvious question: How could this Cobbe “original” depict Shakespeare if its Janssen “copy” depicted Tom Overbury? Even Stanley Wells agreed the two portraits portrayed the same man, but it was his contention that the Folger had erred in debunking and thereby devaluing their prized Janssen Shakespeare. Wells believed both portraits depicted Shakespeare and was quick to point out the Cobbe had been found in a collection descended from the 3rd Earl of Southampton (the consensus Fair Youth of the sonnets)

A few years after the Janssen portrait was debunked by the Folger, the owner of the Cobbe picture scheduled his own restoration—which he decided to do himself—and dissolved a layer of surface paint on his portrait that had possibly been applied, according to Wells, while Shakespeare was still alive. Yet nobody criticized Alec Cobbe for destroying that layer of ancient paint—or for refusing to release some of his portrait’s test results to the public. All that mattered, it seemed, was that our new Soul of the Ages looked like a Calvin Klein underwear model.

Few crimes were considered more scurrilous than suicide, as in Sonnet 66 (“ Tired with all these, for restful death I cry”), as in: Cassius, Brutus, Portia, Romeo, Juliet, Othello, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Charmian, Goneril, and Eros. During Shakespeare’s life, suicide was considered an act of murder against God, Nature, and King, a trinity of stigmas so severe that even a nobleman who offed himself would have his assets seized. Only one man in England had a samurai approach to the art of self-destruction, and that was Shakespeare himself, who seemed to admire it under certain circumstances.

In a town brimming with forged relics, why would anyone take a seemingly legitimate portrait of Shakespeare, one with a provenance that placed it inside the wealthy Clopton clan, and then purposely obscure the face behind Clouseauean whiskers? That might seem an obvious question, yet nobody has asked it in the 136 years since J. P. Norris wrote his Portraits of Shakespeare:

Scientific American had recorded the spectral testing of the Hampton Court portrait—with both X-ray and infrared light—back in 1937. These tests had been administered by a photographic expert named Charles Wisner Barrell, an early authorship-debate gadfly; yet when I contacted the Royal Collection I was informed that the picture’s conservation file was empty.

Professor Stanley Wells, chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, had just anointed a new portrait, one owned by Mr. Alec Cobbe, to be Will Shakespeare.

Within days of Wells’s proclamation, the dogs were loosed upon his dandy. First to attack this new gigolo bard was London’s National Portrait Gallery.

Following some initial criticism from the NPG’s Dr. Tarnya Cooper, their former director Sir Roy Strong lambasted the Cobbe’s legitimacy as fantasy. “Codswallop!” was how he phrased it. Then the formidable Katherine Duncan-Jones, whose writings on the sonnets are considered sacrosanct, weighed in by describing the Cobbe theory as “irrational.” But it didn’t matter what the experts said. This time the fix was in. Scholars no longer scored the fight, Google did. And because of this, the Cobbe’s debut, launched on Shakespeare’s birthday as part of a Stratford publicity stunt, proved a choreographed success that would redefine the playwright. A star is born: the prettiest Shakespeare of them all.

At the end of the day, I think it’s fair to wonder how Wells could be ninety percent certain of anything, but perhaps the professor knew more than he was letting on. After all, he’d studied the portrait’s underbelly test results. Why weren’t the rest of us allowed to see those test results? After a four-hundred-year parade of frauds, were we really being asked to take the word of Alec Cobbe that his family owned a priceless Shakespeare?

In 2002 a visitor to their gallery had to inform them that they owned a portrait of the 3rd Earl of Southampton. So why had the Cobbe family failed for centuries to recognize a portrait of their most celebrated ancestor? Well, they had a good excuse. They thought the sitter was a girl. Apparently the Cobbe clan wasn’t familiar with a sonnet penned about their famously effete ancestor, the one that began “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted.” God save art from the rich.

The portrait had been discovered in 1860 when Mr. William Oakes Hunt, the town clerk of Stratford, employed a visiting art expert named Simon Collins to examine a group of portraits long lodged inside the Hunt attic. These paintings were believed to have descended from the aristocratic Clopton family. Mr. Hunt recalled as a child using the portraits for archery practice, but by 1860 he’d become curious as to their value. When hired to appraise these attic portraits, Simon Collins had just finished the prestigious job of restoring Stratford’s world-famous funerary bust of Shakespeare that hovered like a putty-nosed wraith over the poet’s tomb in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. Posed with pen and paper while sporting the pickdevant-styled pointy beard and up-brushed mustache popular from 1570 to 1600, the bust has long been championed as one of the most authentic likenesses of the poet; nevertheless, back in 1793 a curator named Edmond Malone had decided to whitewash the entire bust, which until then had been unique in portraying Shakespeare wearing a blood-red jerkin beneath a black sleeveless jacket.

Although these V& A experts were correct in doubting me—it wasn’t Sir Charles Blount—I still remember being shaken when a curatorial assistant confided to me that the museum had no desire to identify the sitter because the miniature’s anonymity lent it mystery.

Harvard’s Leslie Hotson had written a book arguing that this miniature depicted William Shakespeare. Bear in mind, this was the same professor who had famously unearthed documents proving the playwright Christopher Marlowe to have been stabbed in the eye not by a stiffed barkeep or “lewd love” but by royal intelligencers.

The Droeshout engraving appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death inside the 1623 First Folio, a collection of his plays without which some of those masterpieces would have perished. In the folio’s opening page the playwright Ben Jonson, a friend and rival of Shakespeare’s, approved this engraving of the author inside a poem in which Jonson lamented that the engraver, a twenty-two-year-old artist named Martin Droeshout, had been unable to capture Shakespeare’s wit as well as he had his face. To my knowledge that face has not been complimented since.

This is one of the advantages to being a dilettante: the freedom to ask questions experts consider laughable. The dilettante works alone, a solitary figure, no colleagues to shock, no tenure at risk. Not only are we free to ask naive questions, there’s nobody around to tell us how things are supposed to be done. We make up new rules, rig together new methods, and in doing so sidestep familiar pitfalls. We might still lurch into a ditch, but it will be a ditch of our own making and not one already filled with dinted scholars.

Elizabethan portrait miniature. Usually oval in shape, these tiny paintings were designed to be worn on hats, doublets, or chains often as feudal badges of loyalty. Soldiers sent back miniature ambassadors of themselves to their wives or mistresses so as not to be forgotten (or God forbid cuckolded). Travelers presented them as gifts to hosts, and beauties shipped fetching miniatures of themselves to foreign lands in hopes of becoming royal brides. Elizabeth I once dispatched Hilliard to paint the Duke of Anjou—a man she would nickname her “frog”—to surmise whether he was pretty enough to marry. (Um, no.)

wondering why Nicholas Hilliard wasn’t more famous. That he painted most of his portraits the size of turkey eggs seemed to have disqualified him from the greatness we bestow on less gifted artists. This would have shocked Hilliard because during his prime, paintings “in little” were held to be among the most elevated of art forms. At the height of his powers, when he was the court painter to Elizabeth I—who famously told him to leave out the shadows—only nobles were deemed worthy of the liquefied silver leaf he anointed on the backs of playing cards with stoat-toothed tools and squirrel-hair brushes. He painted by turning a blind eye to blemish and transforming his sitters into ruffled gods and goddesses, all of which made Hilliard quite sought after at court.

because officially there were no Jews allowed in England during Shakespeare’s prime; however, a few loopholes existed in Elizabeth’s brutal anti-Semitic laws, the most noteworthy being her personal physician, Roderigo Lopez. It’s hard to imagine a more perilous job than being the Spanish and illegally Jewish physician to a so-called Virgin Queen in a day of race-baiting theater, but in this hate-filled arena Dr. Lopez lasted an astounding thirteen years before being found guilty, on scant evidence, of having attempted to poison his royal patient.

To date only two portraits in the Folger’s bard collection have ever been plumbed with X-rays.

The Flower portrait had been celebrated for decades, a true rock-star picture that had graced the pages of Life magazine before things went horribly wrong for this jack-in-the-box bard.

in the 1990s, at which point the picture vanished from sight. To this day it’s anyone’s guess where the Flower resides.

museums had just started creating virtual galleries online. These galleries often displayed portraits that had been hidden inside storehouses for decades or even centuries.

And there you have it, white rabbit syndrome: an aging scholar sets off Lear-like to confront his god. Forsaking reputation and a lifelong devotion to logic, down the rabbit hole they go.

Hammerschmidt-Hummel cried foul play, and it’s interesting to observe how the scholarly world reacted to a respected professor’s accusations against London’s vaulted curatorial world. Her evidence that the portrait had been switched continued to be ignored; instead, certain scholars went schoolyard on the professor. Professor Stanley Wells, as quoted in The Times, even described Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s claim as “disgraceful” and added that many books written on Shakespeare contained similar “lunatic theories.

Shakespeare’s pen was dipped in courtly scandals and his audience titteringly aware of who it was being pulled apart onstage. Nobody was safe from his satirical barbs, not Elizabeth’s hunchbacked secretary of state Robert Cecil, whose deformities were likely parodied in Richard III; not the powerful Lord Burghley, ruthlessly mocked in Hamlet as the Alzheimered Polonius; and not even the queen herself, who once snappishly complained of having been roasted in Richard II.

Meanwhile powerful noblemen controlled traveling companies of actors to distribute their own brand of propaganda. Inside this battle royale, freelance writers, vying for the sparse onetime payments given new plays, turned on each other like game cocks.

Titus Andronicus, a play that took the art of sex-crazed violence further than anyone ever dared, even Kit, and in doing so captivated the city. Titus became the most profitable play in the history of London and remained so throughout Shakespeare’s life. What’s better than a public execution? Hey, Titus promises you four executions, seven murders, buckets of gore, degradations galore, blatant racism, rampant dismemberments, incestuous cannibalism, and a rape scene unrivaled in theatric brutality in which a young woman’s husband is stabbed to death before her eyes after which she is repeatedly raped on top of his corpse after which her hands and tongue are lopped off with knives.