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“... name may try to bring the Irish Oonagh into the unity of the English Church). Spenser belonged, as Shakespeare did, to the period in which William Camden was at work providing etymologies for many names, and that is part of the reason he was so alive to the resources and buried senses of nomenclature. Writers in the 19th and ...”

“... Pope. Keats would read himself into style through a much more unstable and challenging model – Shakespeare. The process is fairly familiar, but R.S. White, the author of two excellent books on Shakespearean romance and tragedy, has examined it in detail and come up with a host of fresh examples and insights. His book makes a good complement to John ...”

“... about whose life we know very little emerges by this measure as the undisputed Top British Person: William Shakespeare (1564-1616, ‘playwright and poet’) is allotted more than 30,000 words, a length achieved only by devoting a large proportion of them to various aspects of his literary after-life – about which, of course, we know a good deal ...”

“... suggestions to smooth out idiosyncrasies – prompting some to suppose that an invisible genius (Shakespeare? Francis Bacon?) was ventriloquising those owlish dons and clerics. Instead of pursuing such mare’s nests, we should note that behind all the earlier English Bibles (which Norton rather mischievously styles ‘drafts’ of the KJB) there loomed a ...”

“... the rider to which was that it would make no sense to talk about the ‘great heart’ of Shakespeare. So much the worse for Beethoven, might be the sentiment of a non-philosopher who did not share Wittgenstein’s passion for music. But his point has its ramifications. Like Tolstoy, whose didactic tales he revered as the best that mere literature ...”

“... of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked on his own biography of the sculptor William Wetmore Story in a spirit of pure cynicism. Duty and piety required it, and he would supply the goods accordingly. The modern biographer is apt to construct a persona for his reader in a much more pretentious spirit. Instead of the ‘felt life’ with ...”

“... to engage it in a resourceful rather than a dilatory manner, as Granville-Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare do. A preface should mean business, but it is not a reduction of its text to bite size. Usually, the works of dead authors get prefaces written by scholars. Imagine the hyena explaining to the jackal the finer qualities of what it is about to ...”

“... The academics were accused – falsely, I believe – of wanting to undermine the teaching of Shakespeare. A few months earlier, the Education Secretary John Patten sent back an official report on English in schools with the comment that 15-year-olds perhaps ought to be made to study the ‘great tradition of the novel’. There have been solemn ...”

“... can be entertaining and even heartwarming there must surely be a sense of loss. That’s why the Shakespeare collection is not likely to be thought one of his major works. His fondness for a good row, and for working out difficult puzzles, give the book much interest, and the whole thing is manifestly a product of his great veneration for ...”

“... at 8 rue Dupuytren, in what had been a laundry. With the help of $3000 from Beach’s mother, Shakespeare and Co opened in 1919. In the window were editions of Shakespeare (of course), Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and copies of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (Monnier’s favourite English-language ...”

“... work poems, such as Yeats’s were almost without exception, and the headlong tradition in which Shakespeare (who ‘never blotted a line’) and Keats are pre-eminent. It is not a question of merit, nor of density, but of pace. If you read attempts by 19th-century English poets (Byron is something of an exception) to write poetic drama, and compare their ...”

“... of smiling violence, clearly there must be a place in it for the original ‘Mousetrap’ itself, Shakespeare’s tragedy of court life. Indeed, as the work of the most formally inventive of all literary geniuses, Hamlet could even be called – particularly since its presumed Kydian predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised ...”

“... some rushes.’Arden belongs to a time when scripts were often collaborative. The 2016 New Oxford Shakespeare argues that it was in part written by the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death ...”

“... naval officer striated with pride, it came to seem, if reports are true, like a life sentence. William Shawcross, in his expertly genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet ...”

“... actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many ...”