The Year of Lear Quotes

“I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child” (Lear, 4.279–80).”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety” (Antony, 2.2.245–46).”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“I am a man more sinned against than sinning” (Lear, 9.60).”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Soothsayer’s warning to Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, “If thou dost play with him at any game, / Thou art sure to lose” (2.3.26–27),”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“No bishop, no king”; he might have added, “No devil, no divine right.”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Biographers like to attribute the turns in Shakespeare’s career to his psychological state (so he must have been in and out of love when writing comedies and sonnets, depressed when he wrote tragedies, and in mourning when he wrote Hamlet). Surely what he was feeling must have deeply informed what he wrote; the problem is that we have no idea what he was feeling at any point during the quarter century that he was writing—other than by, in circular fashion, extrapolating this from his works.”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“now felt”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Genius may be a necessary precondition for creating a masterpiece but it’s never a sufficient one.”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Albany had declared that “All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deservings” (24.297–99).”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest have borne most. We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (24.318–21)”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Lear wills his own death: “Break, heart, I prithee break”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“And my poor fool is hanged. No, no life. / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more. / Never, never, never. Pray you, undo / This button. Thank you, sir. O, O, O, O!”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Sonnet 55 that “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme” [1–2]).”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Antony and Cleopatra: “what love, what accomplishments, what repetitions of natural affections passed between them is not for vulgar minds to imagine, none but so great hearts know them.”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“you there was, or might be, such a man / As this I dreamt of?”—he can only answer like a Roman, “Gentle madam, no,”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“he will equivocate at the gallows; but he will be hanged without equivocation.”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“Is his benevolent art meant to distract us from Prospero’s absolutist exercise of authority over his subjects?”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport”
― James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606