Cervantes and Shakespeare almost certainly never met, but the closer you look at the pages they left behind, the more echoes you hear. The first, and to my mind the most valuable, shared idea is the belief that a work of literature doesn’t have to be simply comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political/historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time. They are both protean, shape-shifting writers, and they are both self-conscious, modern in a way that most of the modern masters would recognize, the one creating plays that are highly aware of their theatricality, of
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