Jill

“The anti-Stratfordians hold that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays—it was another fellow of the same name, or of a different name. In this they invert the megalomaniacal equation and make themselves not the elect, but the superior of the elect. Barred from composing Shakespeare’s plays by a regrettable temporal accident, they, in the fantasy of most every editor, accept the mantle of primum mobile, consign the (falsely named) creator to oblivion, and turn to the adulation of the crowd for their deed of discovery and insight—so much more thoughtful and intellectual than the necessarily sloppy work of the writer.”
― David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

“The problem play is a melodrama cleansed of invention.”
― David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

“it is the function of a poet to relate not things that have happened, but things that may happen,”
― Aristotle, Poetics: with the Tractatus Coislinianus, reconstruction of Poetics II, and the fragments of the On Poets

“a poet must be a composer of plots rather than of verses,”
― Aristotle, Poetics: with the Tractatus Coislinianus, reconstruction of Poetics II, and the fragments of the On Poets