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“... or ‘forgotten’ writers, and others, like the former US Education Secretary William Bennett, fatuously asserting the existence of a common culture based on great texts which were claimed to have the power to inculcate wisdom and virtue in all readers, as if anthologies like his were the product of an apolitical consensus among the ...”

“... only to have their achievement hijacked by a shrewd representative of Scandinavian carpet-baggers, William of Normandy. William’s Angevin successors then created a power of continent-wide importance, an Anglo-French polity that represented these islands’ best effort yet at European integration; but it had fallen apart ...”

“... in Group Sex Romp!’ – but one fact which makes the case worth pursuing is the involvement of Shakespeare’s former landlord Christopher Mountjoy. There is an obvious link: like the three goldworkers, Mountjoy was French. Also like them, he lived in the Cripplegate area (though his house was within the London city walls, on respectable Silver ...”

“... social, financial and domestic. A good deal of what can be assembled of these years comes from William Gissing’s touching letters to the older George; more so, possibly, than from George’s capacious letters of advice to the youngest brother, Algernon. William won prizes at school, but no scholarship, so he went to ...”

“... historicist or because it is new? Greenblatt’s new book brings together four essays centred on Shakespeare (three of them revised versions of articles in print), prefaced by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ...”

“... This Booke,’ Leonard Digges claimed in a preface to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ‘When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke/Fresh to all Ages.’ If we take the First Folio as our biggest bibliographical landmark, the history of early modern print looks like a journey towards material permanence: towards the production of books that had the power to endure through time, and to ‘redeeme’ their authors ‘from thy Herse ...”

“... writing his big book on Balzac. His work is studded with allusions to Homer, Sophocles, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and scores of other authors, though he was less enthralled by ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’ Edmund Spenser, an advocate of state terror in Ireland. One of his most ardent antagonists on the political left, the anarchist ...”

“... in his critical judgments of other writers; indeed, dismissing one familiar charge against Shakespeare’s plays – that they are neither tragedies nor comedies, but an uncertain combination of the two – he concluded that their mixed character faithfully reflects real, ‘sublunary’ life, and that ‘there is always an appeal open from criticism ...”

“... the muddiest fiasco since the flooding Avon put paid, just seventy years earlier, to Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee extravaganza at Stratford. In 1839 the 26-year-old Earl of Eglinton held at his Scottish estate a magnificent chivalric entertainment, complete with chain-mailed jousters on caparisoned horses, a court of noble women attending the Queen of ...”

“... of State also announced that 14-year-olds in England and Wales would be tested on one of three Shakespeare plays – Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later it emerged that all that most pupils will face is a test based on extracts of verse and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr ...”

“... Elizabeth’s court, like his patron Sir Christopher Hatton, and the ‘Catholic’ Anglicanism of William Laud and after; and if Elizabeth herself had not been so enraged by the Papist-Catholics’ kamikaze attack on her Church, her crown and her person, her own place in that sequence would be more apparent than it is. It is perfectly proper for Williams to ...”

“... the first English printed book) was The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published by William Caxton in 1477, which grouped a miscellany of moral sayings under authorial headings. Many of the ‘quotations’ gathered in this ramshackle way would have made their ‘authors’ wince: Homer is said to have written ‘A good man is bettir thanne alle ...”

“... candles, and there among the broken floor tiles and rusting cables the principal characters in Shakespeare’s play were laid out on biers as if dead. Once we had taken our places on a precarious-looking bank of benches at one side of the space, it turned out that these figures were not as dead as the young male corpse in black, set apart from the ...”

“... despite its dilapidated condition, and becomes a more mundane motive for murder than anything in Shakespeare. In this reconfigured, chronologically dislocated family drama – the time is well and truly out of joint – revenge isn’t a duty that can realistically be laid on Nutshell-Hamlet. Prevention is a closer possibility, though still a theoretical ...”

“... Maria’s scrupulousness here about an easy misuse of the term ‘Puritan’ would seem to be Shakespeare’s own. Although critics often permit themselves to describe the repressive Angelo in Measure for Measure as ‘puritanical’, no one in the comedy ever does so, nor is any connection implied between the ‘outward-sainted’ deputy and the party ...”