Shakespeare Invented Quotes

...the representation of human character and personality remains always the supreme literary value, whether in drama, lyric or narrative. I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I’d train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, “Ce n’étais pas moi!” What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboard down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.

According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire.

They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue." Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that have dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object: can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide on man, And make imaginary puissance; Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth; For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass: for the which supply, Admit me Chorus to this history; Who prologue-like your humble patience pray, Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist.

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.

Put plainly, there is a natural moral law, existing in reality, i.e., not invented by man, which transcends and trumps our desires. Something is right or wrong, whether we like it or not.

The "child" was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up - that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

Fortunately there are wars. And rationing is one of the grandest inventions of man. You stamp paper with figures and you feed stomachs on numbers.

There was an advertisement in the newspaper for a teaching position in a school with the worst reputation in town, with the sort of class that no qualified teacher with all the parts of her brain correctly screwed together would voluntarily face. It was attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder before attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder had been invented. “There’s no hope for these boys and girls,” the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. “This is not education, this is storage.” Maybe Sonja understood how it felt to be described as such. The vacant position attracted only one applicant, and she got those boys and girls to read Shakespeare.

Those palates who, not yet two summers younger, must have inventions to delight the taste, would now be glad of bread, and beg for it.

Not tonight, good Iago. I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking. I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment.

Fair, kind and true' is all my argument, 'Fair, kind, and true' varying to other words; And in this change is my invention spent, Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords. 'Fair, kind, and true,' have often lived alone, Which three till now never kept seat in one.

The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT." Richard Bausch

Now, I did know a certain young lady of the 'romantic' generation of not so long ago who, after being mysteriously in love for several years with a certain gentleman whom she could have married at any time without the least difficulty, suddenly broke off their relationship, inventing for herself all manner of insurmountable obstacles, and one stormy night plunged from a high, precipitous cliff into a fairly deep and fast-flowing river, where she perished from her own caprice solely through her attempt to imitate Shakespeare's Ophelia, for, had the precipice, which she had long before singled out and been compulsively drawn to, been less picturesque, and had there been only a prosaically flat bank in its stead, perhaps there would have been no suicide at all.

The bookseller handed me the book and winked. "Have a good look at it, little dumpling. I don't want you coming back to me saying I've switched it, eh?" "I trust you," I said. "Stuff and nonsense. The last guy who said that to me (a tourist who was convinced that Hemingway had invented the fabada stew during the San Fermín bull run) bought a copy of Hamlet signed by Shakespeare in ballpoint, imagine that. So keep your eyes peeled. In the book business, you can't even trust the index.

Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?

Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue." Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue. "But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system." I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?" "It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around." I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting...

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did. All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale.

Let not my love be called idolatry, Nor my beloved as an idol show, Since all alike my songs and praises be To one, of one, still such, and ever so. Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence; Therefore my verse to constancy confined, One thing expressing, leaves out difference. Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument, Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words; And in this change is my invention spent, Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords. Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone, Which three till now, never kept seat in one.

As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. …

Why can’t you just get over it? It’s all in the past.’ These two statements often run together. Apparently, history is not there to be learned from, rather it’s a large boulder to be gotten over. It’s fascinating, because in the hundreds of workshops I’ve taught on Shakespeare no one has ever told me to get over his writing because it’s, you know, from the, erm, past. I’m still waiting for people to get over Plato, or Da Vinci or Bertrand Russell, or indeed the entirety of recorded history, but it seems they just won’t. It is especially odd in a nation where much of the population is apparently proud of Britain’s empire that critics of one of its most obvious legacies should be asked to get over it, the very same thing from the past that they are proud of. But anyway, let’s imagine for a second that humanity did indeed ‘get over’ - which in this case means forget - the past. Well, we’d have to learn to walk and talk and cook and hunt and plant crops all over again, we’d have to undo all of human invention and start from . . . when? What period exactly is it we are allowed to start our memory from? Those that tell us to get over the past never seem to specify, but I’m eager to learn. In reality, of course, they just don’t want to have any conversations that they find uncomfortable.

Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.

What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of "Yellow Submarine," which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'etre, which is a French expression that I know.

The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?” and others of similarly inventive cast.

I am fooling around not doing anything, which probably means that this is a creative period, although of course you don’t know until afterward. I think that it is very important to be idle. I mean, they always say that Shakespeare was idle between plays. I am not comparing myself to Shakespeare, but people who keep themselves busy all of the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle.

Richard III's monologue is not unlike Adolf Hitler's speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939, in its utter lack of self-deception. The lack of self-deception is striking because most of us invent plausible reasons for doing something we know is wrong. Milton describes such rationalization in Paradise Lost in Eve, both before she eats the fruit of the forbidden tree and afterwards, when she justifies inducing Adam to eat: So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life. (Pl, IX. 832-33) Eve makes this profession of love for Adam at the moment when she is, in effect, planning to kill him.

Come, how wouldst thou praise me? IAGO I am about it; but indeed my invention Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze; It plucks out brains and all: but my Muse labours, And thus she is deliver'd. If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit, The one's for use, the other useth it. DESDEMONA Well praised! How if she be black and witty? IAGO If she be black, and thereto have a wit, She'll find a white that shall her blackness fit. DESDEMONA Worse and worse. EMILIA How if fair and foolish? IAGO She never yet was foolish that was fair; For even her folly help'd her to an heir. DESDEMONA These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i' the alehouse. What miserable praise hast thou for her that's foul and foolish? IAGO There's none so foul and foolish thereunto, But does foul pranks which fair and wise ones do.

Shakespeare’s Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins with the exhortation “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.

It occurred to me some years ago, that the picture of Richard the Third, as drawn by historians, was a character formed by prejudice and invention. I did not take Shakespeare's tragedy for a genuine representation, but I did take the story of that reign for a tragedy of imagination.

What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books have had their day-the theaters have had their day-the temple of religion has had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all these in the great heaven , and save more from Hell, than all the churches and chapels in New York-besides making money at the same time" "Shakespeare is the great genius of the drama, Scott of the novel, Milton and Byron of the poem, and I mean to be the genius of the newspaper press." James Gordon Bennett, editor ot he New York Herald in 1841

Never seeking true or high things, caring only for appearances, and, therefore, for inventions, he had left his imagination all undeveloped, and when it represented his own inner condition to him, had repressed it until it was nearly destroyed, and what remained of it was set on fire of hell.

You’re totally wrong!” Rakoff cried. He explained that the rule against split infinitives was just a bizarre invention by some pedants in the late nineteenth century to have English mimic Latin, in which infinitives are one word. All the great authors—Shakespeare! Faulkner!—split the infinitive.

I knew a young lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favourite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place.

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.

Leonardo cant be explained. Or Newton, or Shakespeare. Or endless others. Well. Probably not endless. But at least we know their names. But unless you're willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little iceage of fifteenth century Italy and sawed and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for seven years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then–knowing this perfect thing–took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin.

Up until the end of the 16th century, even global trading outfits like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources that none could accomplish in isolation. But then, on the September 24, 1599, in a half-timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, something momentous happened. A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. Once could own a piece of the company without being involved of it, indeed without even telling anyone. The first global joint-stock company was thus born, undoubtly Tudor England’s most revolutionary invention. Its name? The East India Company.

As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide. The famous Latin phrase ‘Et tu, Brute?’ (‘You too, Brutus?’) is an invention of Shakespeare’s.

tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Shakespeare’s Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins with the exhortation “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.” For Steve Jobs, the ascent to the brightest heaven of invention begins with a tale of two sets of parents, and of

What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of crisis, of futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities; as a confrontation of human time with other orders, and the disastrous attempt to impose limited designs upon the time of the world. What emerges from Hamlet is--after much futile, illusory action--the need of patience and readiness. The 'bloody period' of Othello is the end of a life ruined by unseasonable curiosity. The millennial ending of Macbeth, the broken apocalypse of Lear, are false endings, human periods in an eternal world. They are researches into death in an age too late for apocalypse, too critical for prophecy; an age more aware that its fictions are themselves models of the human design on the world. But it was still an age which felt the human need for ends consonant with the past, the kind of end Othello tries to achieve by his final speech; complete, concordant. As usual, Shakespeare allows him his tock; but he will not pretend that the clock does not go forward. The human perpetuity which Spenser set against our imagery of the end is represented here also by the kingly announcements of Malcolm, the election of Fortinbras, the bleak resolution of Edgar. In apocalypse there are two orders of time, and the earthly runs to a stop; the cry of woe to the inhabitants of the earth means the end of their time; henceforth 'time shall be no more.' In tragedy the cry of woe does not end succession; the great crises and ends of human life do not stop time. And if we want them to serve our needs as we stand in the middest we must give them patterns, understood relations as Macbeth calls them, that defy time. The concords of past, present, and future towards which the soul extends itself are out of time, and belong to the duration which was invented for angels when it seemed difficult to deny that the world in which men suffer their ends is dissonant in being eternal. To close that great gap we use fictions of complementarity. They may now be novels or philosophical poems, as they once were tragedies, and before that, angels. What the gap looked like in more modern times, and how more modern men have closed it, is the preoccupation of the second half of this series.

For a queen who loved words as much as Elizabeth, Shakespeare’s plays were a stimulating delight. The playwright made up thousands of new words, more than 1,700 of which are still in common usage. They include: ‘bedroom’, ‘moonbeam’, ‘hobnob’, ‘lacklustre’ and ‘submerge’. His genius for inventing pithy phrases such as ‘all of a sudden’, ‘a foregone conclusion’ and ‘dead as a doornail’ also greatly enriched the language not just of the court, but of all levels of society. Repeating words and phrases heard in the latest Shakespeare comedy or tragedy began as an in-joke for those who had attended, but rapidly spread into common parlance.

The point is, you are most you, at your best, when you create the roles that make you feel most alive: witty, lyrical, speculative, loving, but also, and here’s the rub, cynical, sarcastic, angry, muddled, sad—for negative states can be just as vital as positive ones. Fullness is the goal, myriad-mindedness (a happy phrase Coleridge conjured to describe Shakespeare): to be as varied and capacious as the cosmos. With this bigness, containing the most sublime and the low at once, you can hope that generosity will win out over the meanness, that you will foster the democratic, merciful embrace of what is as well as what ought to be. The best actor, Hamlet asserts, uses all gently.

Albert Einstein, considered the most influential person of the 20th century, was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. His parents thought he was retarded. He spoke haltingly until age nine. He was advised by a teacher to drop out of grade school: “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.” Isaac Newton, the scientist who invented modern-day physics, did poorly in math. Patricia Polacco, a prolific children’s author and illustrator, didn’t learn to read until she was 14. Henry Ford, who developed the famous Model-T car and started Ford Motor Company, barely made it through high school. Lucille Ball, famous comedian and star of I Love Lucy, was once dismissed from drama school for being too quiet and shy. Pablo Picasso, one of the great artists of all time, was pulled out of school at age 10 because he was doing so poorly. A tutor hired by Pablo’s father gave up on Pablo. Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the world’s great composers. His music teacher once said of him, “As a composer, he is hopeless.” Wernher von Braun, the world-renowned mathematician, flunked ninth-grade algebra. Agatha Christie, the world’s best-known mystery writer and all-time bestselling author other than William Shakespeare of any genre, struggled to learn to read because of dyslexia. Winston Churchill, famous English prime minister, failed the sixth grade.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6

Recognition that even the Bible presents an idealized David - and that the Bible is the only written source of information we have about David’s life - has led some scholars in the past few decades to claim that David never existed at all. They argue that the biblical David is not the idealization of a real historical figure, but is rather an invention out of whole cloth, a projection into the past by later kings who wanted to legitimate their lineage and status and who created a legendary founding figure against whom to compare themselves. Yet this is akin to claiming that England’s Henry V never existed if we had no source of information other than Shakespeare’s idealized good king. To a certain extent, these scholars have bought the spin of the Bible just as fully as those who, like Matthew Henry, call David a saint. It is, in fact, the very existence of the biblical spin that argues in favor of David’s existence. There is no need to spin a story that has no basis in reality. If the fundamental aim of spin is to say “it may seem that the event happened one way, but it really happened another way,” then there has to have been an actual event in the first place.

I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.

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.

The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

Sometimes what-if fantasies are useful. Imagine that the entirety of Western civilisation’s coding for computer systems or prints of all films ever made or all copies of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Qur’an were encrypted and held on one tablet device. And if that tablet was lost, stolen, burnt or corrupted, then our knowledge, use and understanding of that content, those words and ideas, would be gone for ever – only, perhaps, lingering in the minds of a very few men of memory whose job it had been to keep ideas alive. This little thought-experiment can help us to comprehend the totemic power of manuscripts. This is the great weight of responsibility for the past, the present and the future that the manuscripts of Constantinople carried. Much of our global cultural heritage – philosophies, dramas, epic poems – survive only because they were preserved in the city’s libraries and scriptoria. Just as Alexandria and Pergamon too had amassed vast libraries, Constantinople understood that a physical accumulation of knowledge worked as a lode-stone – drawing in respect, talent and sheer awe. These texts contained both the possibilities and the fact of empire and had a quasi-magical status. This was a time when the written word was considered so potent – and so precious – that documents were thought to be objects with spiritual significance. (...) It was in Constantinople that the book review was invented. Scholars seem to have had access to books within a proto-lending-library system, and there were substantial libraries within the city walls. Thanks to Constantinople, we have the oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad, Aeschylus’ dramas Agamemnon and Eumenides, and the works of Sophocles and Pindar. Fascinating scholia in the margins correct and improve: plucking work from the page ‘useful for the reader . . . not just the learned’, as one Byzantine scholar put it. These were texts that were turned into manuals for contemporary living.

Of course he wept at the funeral and knew how colossal this thing was that, without warning, had been taken away. When the minister read, along with the biblical stuff, a selection from Julius Caesar out of his father's cherished volume of Shakespeare's plays —the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel —the son felt his father's majesty as never before: the grandeur of both his rise and his fall, the grandeur that, as a college freshman away for barely a month from the tiny enclosure of his East Orange home, Coleman had begun faintly to discern for what it was. "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come." The word "valiant," as the preacher intoned it, stripped away Coleman's manly effort at sober, stoical self-control and laid bare a child's longing for that man closest to him that he'd never see again, the mammoth, secretly suffering father who talked so easily, so sweepingly, who with just his powers of speech had inadvertently taught Coleman to want to be stupendous. Coleman wept with the most fundamental and copious of all emotions, reduced helplessly to everything he could not bear. As an adolescent complaining about his father to his friends, he would characterize him with far more scorn than he felt or had the capacity to feel—pretending to an impersonal way of judging his own father was one more method he'd devised to invent and claim impregnability. But to be no longer circumscribed and defined by his father was like finding that all the clocks wherever he looked had stopped, and all the watches, and that there was no way of knowing what time it was. Down to the day he arrived in Washington and entered Howard, it was, like it or not, his father who had been making up Coleman's story for him; now he would have to make it up himself, and the prospect was terrifying.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.

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.

But then, I once knew a young lady still of the last “romantic” generation who, after several years of enigmatic love for a certain gentleman, whom, by the way, she could have married quite easily at any moment, ended up, after inventing all sorts of insurmountable obstacles, by throwing herself on a stormy night into a rather deep and swift river from a high bank somewhat resembling a cliff, and perished there decidedly by her own caprice, only because she wanted to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Even then, if the cliff, chosen and cherished from long ago, had not been so picturesque, if it had been merely a flat, prosaic bank, the suicide might not have taken place at all. This is a true fact, and one can assume that in our Russian life of the past two or three generations there have been not a few similar facts.

Children displaced from their families, unconnected to their teachers, and not yet mature enough to relate to one another as separate beings, automatically regroup to satisfy their instinctive drive for attachment. The culture of the group is either invented or borrowed from the peer culture at large. It does not take children very long to know what tribe they belong to, what the rules are, whom they can talk to, and whom they must keep at a distance. Despite our attempts to teach our children respect for individual differences and to instill in them a sense of belonging to a cohesive civilization, we are fragmenting at an alarming rate into tribal chaos. Our very own children are leading the way. The time we as parents and educators spend trying to teach our children social tolerance, acceptance, and etiquette would be much better invested in cultivating a connection with them. Children nurtured in traditional hierarchies of attachment are not nearly as susceptible to the spontaneous forces of tribalization. The social values we wish to inculcate can be transmitted only across existing lines of attachment. The culture created by peer orientation does not mix well with other cultures. Because peer orientation exists unto itself, so does the culture it creates. It operates much more like a cult than a culture. Immature beings who embrace the culture generated by peer orientation become cut off from people of other cultures. Peer-oriented youth actually glory in excluding traditional values and historical connections. People from differing cultures that have been transmitted vertically retain the capacity to relate to one another respectfully, even if in practice that capacity is often overwhelmed by the historical or political conflicts in which human beings become caught up. Beneath the particular cultural expressions they can mutually recognize the universality of human values and cherish the richness of diversity. Peer-oriented kids are, however, inclined to hang out with one another exclusively. They set themselves apart from those not like them. As our peer-oriented children reach adolescence, many parents find themselves feeling as if their very own children are barely recognizable with their tribal music, clothing, language, rituals, and body decorations. “Tattooing and piercing, once shocking, are now merely generational signposts in a culture that constantly redraws the line between acceptable and disallowed behavior,” a Canadian journalist pointed out in 2003. Many of our children are growing up bereft of the universal culture that produced the timeless creations of humankind: The Bhagavad Gita; the writings of Rumi and Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes and Faulkner, or of the best and most innovative of living authors; the music of Beethoven and Mahler; or even the great translations of the Bible. They know only what is current and popular, appreciate only what they can share with their peers. True universality in the positive sense of mutual respect, curiosity, and shared human values does not require a globalized culture created by peer-orientation. It requires psychological maturity — a maturity that cannot result from didactic education, only from healthy development. Only adults can help children grow up in this way. And only in healthy relationships with adult mentors — parents, teachers, elders, artistic, musical and intellectual creators — can children receive their birthright, the universal and age-honored cultural legacy of humankind. Only in such relationships can they fully develop their own capacities for free and individual and fresh cultural expression.

Aztec peasants, Babylonian shepherds, Athenian stonemasons, and Carolingian merchants spoke different languages,2 wore different clothing, and prayed to different deities, but they all ate the same amount of food, lived the same number of years, traveled no farther—or faster—from their homes, and buried just as many of their children. Because while they made a lot more children—worldwide population grew a hundredfold between 5000 BCE and 1600 CE, from 5 to 500 million—they didn’t make much of anything else. The best estimates for human productivity (a necessarily vague number) calculate annual per capita GDP, expressed in constant 1990 U.S. dollars, fluctuating between $400 and $550 for seven thousand years. The worldwide per capita GDP in 800 BCE3—$543—is virtually identical to the number in 1600. The average person of William Shakespeare’s time lived no better than his counterpart in Homer’s.

When words were carved in stone, we got the Ten Commandments. When we had to make our own ink and chase a goose around the yard to get a quill (and before the Infite Monkey Theorem was developed), we got William Shakespeare . When the fountain pen was invented, we got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, we got Jack Kerouac. And with the Internet we get - the President of the United States on Twitter

Sontag, Susan (1967). "What's Happening to America? (A Symposium)". Partisan Review. 34 (1): 57–58. The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone –its ideologies and inventions –which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.

for he knew it was no usual name, but had been invented by himself for his own child to signify seaborn:

the thoughts that were no longer repressed—in the history of the past and the Utopian speculation on the future; in noble theology, capable statesmanship, and science at once brilliant and profound; in the voyage of discovery, and the change of the swan-like merchantman into a very fire-drake of war for the defence of the threatened shores; in the first brave speech of the Puritan in Elizabeth's Parliament, the first murmurs of the voice of liberty, soon to thunder throughout the land; in the naturalizing of foreign genius by translation, and the invention, or at least adoption, of a new and transcendent rhythm; in the song, in the epic, in the drama.

Most readers will be familiar with the name of Oberon as the king of fairyland.  William Shakespeare is responsible for this, but he borrowed the name; he did not invent it.  It derives from the early to mid-thirteenth century French romance Huon of Bordeaux.  In that story Oberon/Auberon appears as a magical fairy king- as well as being a dwarf who’s the height of a three-year-old child as the result of an enchantment. A dwarfish fairy king was not a unique notion: the same is true of the fairy king in the English romance of King Herla).  Auberon is a French name, an affectionate diminutive form of Aubert, which in turn is derived the Frankish/Germanic name Alberic (to which we may compare the Anglo-Saxon Aelfric) and which means no more than 'elf rule.'  In other words, this is not really a name at all, it's just a job title- 'King of the Elves.

You have to be an optimist to believe in the Singularity,” she says, “and that’s harder than it seems. Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?” “Sounds like a Japanese game show.” Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you’re a science fiction writer.” Okay: “World government … no cancer … hover-boards.” “Go further. What’s the good future after that?” “Spaceships. Party on Mars.” “Further.” “Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.” “Further.” I pause a moment, then realize: “I can’t.” Kat shakes her head. “It’s really hard. And that’s, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.” I’m trying hard to imagine an average day in the year 3012. I can’t even come up with a half-decent scene. Will people live in buildings? Will they wear clothes? My imagination is almost physically straining. Fingers of thought are raking the space behind the cushions, looking for loose ideas, finding nothing. “Personally, I think the big change is going to be our brains,” Kat says, tapping just above her ear, which is pink and cute. “I think we’re going to find different ways to think, thanks to computers. You expect me to say that”—yes—“but it’s happened before. It’s not like we have the same brains as people a thousand years ago.” Wait: “Yes we do.” “We have the same hardware, but not the same software. Did you know that the concept of privacy is, like, totally recent? And so is the idea of romance, of course.” Yes, as a matter of fact, I think the idea of romance just occurred to me last night. (I don’t say that out loud.) “Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade,” she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. “Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.” Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue. “But I think the writers had their turn,” she says, “and now it’s programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system.” I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. “So what’s the next upgrade?” “It’s already happening,” she says. “There are all these things you can do, and it’s like you’re in more than one place at one time, and it’s totally normal. I mean, look around.” I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all leaning into phones showing them places that don’t exist and yet are somehow more interesting than the Gourmet Grotto. “And it’s not weird, it’s not science fiction at all, it’s…” She slows down a little and her eyes dim. I think she thinks she’s getting too intense. (How do I know that? Does my brain have an app for that?) Her cheeks are flushed and she looks great with all her blood right there at the surface of her skin. “Well,” she says finally, “it’s just that I think the Singularity is totally reasonable to imagine.

How could brilliant minds like Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Galileo have lived and died without ever detecting this basic fact of vision? One reason is because there are two eyes and the blind spots are in different, nonoverlapping locations; this means that with both eyes open you have full coverage of the scene. But more significantly, no one had noticed because the brain “fills in” the missing information from the blind spot. Notice what you see in the location of the dot when it’s in your blind spot. When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern. Your brain, with no information from that particular spot in visual space, fills in with the patterns around it. You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

Poetry, huh? Isn’t that what the very best writing is, in some way or another? Aristotle laid it out in his Poetics, poetic in itself. Dante, first and foremost a poet, invented a language for heaven’s sake. Then there’s Shakespeare, every bit the poet that he was dramatist.

William Shakespeare invented the name Jessica.

Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but which otherwise might never have been written down. It’s a bit like pretending William Shakespeare had somehow invented the English language.

The Victorians invented the Birthplace, as the scholar Julia Thomas writes, inventing in the process a Shakespearean tradition that still holds power today.

The relationship between an artist’s biography and his writing is always a difficult subject,” concedes Worden, “but there can be no other important writer since the invention of printing for whom we are unable to demonstrate any relationship at all.” Why didn’t Shakespeare bother to educate his children? His daughters couldn’t write. One signed with what Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, paleographer and director of the British Museum, called a “painfully formed signature, which was probably the most that she was capable of doing with the pen.” The other, he concluded, “could not write at all, for she signed with a mark.” How could a writer—any writer, let alone the greatest writer in the English language—be indifferent to the literacy of his children?

Philip Amato, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Wesley Emerson, Werner Erhard, Fernando Flores, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Goldstein, Martin Heidegger, Joan Holmes, Randy MacNamara, Jim Selman, William Shakespeare, and Constantine Stanislavsky.

Lastly, the vast number of existing animal species (about one million) and the small number of major classes (about fifty) and of major phyla or divisions (about ten), could be compared with the vast number of works of literature and the small number of basic themes or plots. All works of literature are variations on a limited number of leitmotivs, derived from man's archetypal experiences and conflicts, but adapted each time to a new environment-the costumes, conventions and language of the period. Not even Shakespeare could invent an original plot. Goethe quoted with approval the Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi, according to whom there are only thirty-six tragic situations. Goethe himself thought that there were probably even less; but their exact number is a well-kept secret among writers of fiction. A work of literature is constructed out of thematic holons-which, like homologue organs, need not even have a common ancestor.

If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far.... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself

— <>, en palabras de un visitante británico a Weimar, solo había ardido hasta la perfección en Homero, Cervantes, Shakespeare y ahora Goethe

A story within a book within a play. Shakespeare did it. So why not you?’ ‘It is a lovely and cleverly woven tale, very inventive and full of exciting action and surprises.’ - Tony Berry /Australian UK Journalist, Author

On 14 September 1869, one hundred years after his birth, Alexander von Humboldt’s centennial was celebrated across the world. There were parties in Europe, Africa and Australia as well as the Americas. In Melbourne and Adelaide people came together to listen to speeches in honour of Humboldt, as did groups in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. There were festivities in Moscow where Humboldt was called the ‘Shakespeare of sciences’, and in Alexandria in Egypt where guests partied under a sky illuminated with fireworks. The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill. In New York City the cobbled streets were lined with flags. City Hall was veiled in banners, and entire houses had vanished behind huge posters bearing Humboldt’s face. Even the ships sailing by, out on the Hudson River, were garlanded in colourful bunting. In the morning thousands of people followed ten music bands, marching from the Bowery and along Broadway to Central Park to honour a man ‘whose fame no nation can claim’ as the New York Times’s front page reported. By early afternoon, 25,000 onlookers had assembled in Central Park to listen to the speeches as a large bronze bust of Humboldt was unveiled. In the evening as darkness settled, a torchlight procession of 15,000 people set out along the streets, walking beneath colourful Chinese lanterns. Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all. Every speech across the world emphasized that Humboldt had seen an ‘inner correlation’ between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was ‘one of those wonders of the world’. His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was ‘in some sort bound up with the universe itself’. In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt and many other cities. The greatest German celebrations were in Berlin, Humboldt’s hometown, where despite torrential rain 80,000 people assembled. The authorities had ordered offices and all government agencies to close for the day. As the rain poured down and gusts chilled the air, the speeches and singing nonetheless continued for hours.

Latin texts and “tried on” various nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, inventing new ones along the way; in the process he would have acquired his vocabulary of some 25,000 words, more than twice the size of the one possessed by John Milton.

Karate Jesus: Karate Jesus. So, if God created the universe, and Jesus is a part of God, and Karate is part of the universe, then Jesus invented Karate! It’s Karate Jesus bruh!

Karate Jesus: Karate Jesus. So, if God created the universe, and Jesus is a part of God, and Karate is part of the universe, then Jesus invented Karate! It’s Karate Jesus bruh!

Sometimes, of a spring evening, Papa would hear that distant honking that always makes his scalp tingle, and we would all rush out to see the geese, in lines of hundreds, steer up from the southwest, turn over the barn as over a landmark, and head into the north. Or on autumn nights of sudden cold that set the ewes breeding in the orchard, Papa would call you out of the house to stand with him in the now celebrated pumpkin patch and watch the northern lights flicker in electric clouds on the horizon, mount, die down, fade and mount again till they filled the whole northern sky with ghostly light in motion. Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know—the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. More importantly, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them. Most important, you knew them with reverence and awe—that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and has been replaced by man’s monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain….. I have great silent thanks to God. For I knew that if, as children, you could thus feel in your souls the reverence and awe for life and the world, which is the ultimate meaning of Beethoven and Shakespeare, as a man and woman you could never be satisfied with less.

Shakespeare invented the Knock Knock joke, with the first one appearing in his play Macbeth. Here it is (and prepare yourself, it’s a cracker)... ‘Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ th’ name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty. Come in time, have napkins enough about you, here you’ll sweat for ‘t.

Did you know that the author William Shakespeare invented more than seventeen hundred words, including ‘assassination’ and ‘bump’?