James Shapiro > Quotes

“It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher).”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

“We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development — part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" — has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so — and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few — have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

“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.”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“Biographers like to attribute the turns in Shakespeare’s career to his psychological state (so he must have been in and out of love when writing comedies and sonnets, depressed when he wrote tragedies, and in mourning when he wrote Hamlet). Surely what he was feeling must have deeply informed what he wrote; the problem is that we have no idea what he was feeling at any point during the quarter century that he was writing—other than by, in circular fashion, extrapolating this from his works.”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present, Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold. The most convincing way of showing this was to ask playgoers to keep both plays in mind at once, to experience a new Hamlet while memories of the old one, ghostlike, still lingered. Audiences at the Globe soon found themselves, like Hamlet, straddling worlds and struggling to reconcile past and present.”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety” (Antony, 2.2.245–46).”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man?”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

“I am a man more sinned against than sinning” (Lear, 9.60).”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“     First, my fear; then, my curtsy; last my speech. My fear is your displeasure; my curtsy, my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardons.”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child” (Lear, 4.279–80).”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“No bishop, no king”; he might have added, “No devil, no divine right.”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Soothsayer’s warning to Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, “If thou dost play with him at any game, / Thou art sure to lose” (2.3.26–27),”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Antony and Cleopatra: “what love, what accomplishments, what repetitions of natural affections passed between them is not for vulgar minds to imagine, none but so great hearts know them.”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Steevens was unforgiving. He recognised that Shakespeare scholarship stood at a crossroads, foresaw that once Malone pried open this Pandora’s box it could never be shut again.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses’ anvil; turn the same, (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn, For a good poet’s made as well as born. And such wert thou. Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“Henslowe’s Diary contained almost everything we now know about the staging of plays in Shakespeare’s day:”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“One thing remains certain: as long as anxieties about racial, national, sexual, and religious difference continue to haunt the way we imagine ourselves and respond to others, Shakespeare's words will remain 'not of an age, but for all time.”
― James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews

“White’s intervention persuaded Putnam’s to renege on its agreement with Delia Bacon. Before the three unpublished and now rejected instalments made it safely back to her, they were lost.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“if one goes through Francis Meres’s list of the best English dramatists in 1598 one quickly discovers that commonplace books and early drafts of published plays don’t survive for any of these popular Elizabethan playwrights.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Malone helped institutionalise a methodology that would prove crucial to those who would subsequently deny Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Malone chose to fuse life and works through extended notes that appeared at the bottom of each page of text.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Bacon wanted to reach a similar conclusion without doing the painstaking philological analysis at the heart of this critical endeavour. She was content to insist, rather than demonstrate, that Shakespeare was as much a myth as Homer or Jesus.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare’s works as autobiographical.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“now felt”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“in late sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon, where malting was the town’s principal industry, anybody with a bit of spare change and a barn was storing as much grain as possible.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?