Will in the World Quotes

“Falstaff something roughly similar—a gentleman sinking into mire—but darker and deeper: a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“at Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, Infidelity, and Atheism in England. These evils were dark signs that the world was nearing its end, Harris argued, and that Satan was frantically struggling to make a last demonic triumph.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit,” quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night,”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“King Lear. The tragedy is his greatest meditation on extreme old age; on the painful necessity of renouncing power; on the loss of house, land, authority, love, eyesight, and sanity itself.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life” (5.3.57–58).”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Can honour set-to a leg?” Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee,”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Jaques’ vision in the same comedy of “the whining schoolboy with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.56–58)”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.56–”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“The central preoccupations of almost all his plays are there in The Tempest:”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“The whole world plays the actor,” and for their sign they apparently had an image of Hercules bearing the world on his shoulders. They called their new playhouse the Globe.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Published in 1593, Venus and Adonis was the first of Shakespeare’s works to appear in print.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“This was the crucial moment in the development of the English language, the moment in which the deepest things, the things upon which the fate of the soul depended, were put into ordinary, familiar, everyday words. Two men above all others, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer, rose to the task. Without them, without the great English translation of the New Testament and the sonorous, deeply resonant Book of Common Prayer, it is difficult to imagine William Shakespeare.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“periphrasis”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare