Contested Will Quotes

“We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development — part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" — has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so — and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few — have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

“It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher).”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

“[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man?”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

“Her reading left Keller increasingly disappointed by the way that biographers had deified Shakespeare,”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life–rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined–was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“By the early twentieth century, autobiography was fast establishing itself as a major form of imaginative writing,”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“what led Twain to this conclusion: a conviction that great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“A great deal was riding on this argument for Twain, for if the man from Stratford had indeed written the plays, Twain’s mostly deeply held beliefs about the nature of fiction and on how major writers drew on personal experience would be wrong.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Mark Twain’s memory had become capricious and his vivid imagination did not always supply his story with details of crystal accuracy.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Smith elaborated on this a year later in a book, Bacon and Shakespeare, which claimed, among other things, that the plays were meant to be read, not staged;”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“White’s intervention persuaded Putnam’s to renege on its agreement with Delia Bacon. Before the three unpublished and now rejected instalments made it safely back to her, they were lost.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“the first American Shakespeare expert, Richard Grant White,”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Bacon wanted to reach a similar conclusion without doing the painstaking philological analysis at the heart of this critical endeavour. She was content to insist, rather than demonstrate, that Shakespeare was as much a myth as Homer or Jesus.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“[…] Yankee Lady, sent by Emerson, who has discovered that the ‘Man Shakespear’ is a Myth, and did not write those plays that bear his name, which were on the contrary written by a ‘Secret Associate’ (names unknown): she has actually come to England for the purposes of examining that, and if possible, proving it … Ach Gott!”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“She did meet with Thomas Carlyle, who shrieked,”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Delia Bacon never found corroborative evidence for her theory”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“The framework within which she imagined the world of the English Renaissance, also typical of her day, was limited to monarchs, courtiers and writers.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“It’s no small irony that anyone investigating the development of Delia Bacon’s ideas confronts much the same problems as Shakespeare’s biographers.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Schmucker draws a sharp distinction between Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the poet, in what would soon be a favourite gambit of those who doubted his authorship:”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“biographical information needs to be understood within its immediate context, not through the bias of another cultural moment.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“in late sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon, where malting was the town’s principal industry, anybody with a bit of spare change and a barn was storing as much grain as possible.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Henslowe’s Diary contained almost everything we now know about the staging of plays in Shakespeare’s day:”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“what started with the Sonnets migrated to the plays, though the claim that Shakespeare was speaking for himself through his dramatic characters was more difficult to sustain.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Over-identification on the part of Shakespeare’s biographers had mutated into an over-identification on the part of his readers.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Shakespeare’s sonnets give us no access to his personal history.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare’s works as autobiographical.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“Shakespeare had no Boswell–but neither did Marlowe, Jonson, Webster or any other contemporary dramatist.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“The memorials best befitting Shakespeare’s stature and accomplishments were in fact created and preserved by those who honoured his legacy: a monument and a gravestone in Stratford’s church; and, seven years after his death, a lavish collection of his plays, prefaced by commendatory verses and his portrait. At the time, no English playwright had ever been posthumously honoured with such a collection.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“if one goes through Francis Meres’s list of the best English dramatists in 1598 one quickly discovers that commonplace books and early drafts of published plays don’t survive for any of these popular Elizabethan playwrights.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

“the damage done by Malone was far greater and longer-lasting. He was the first Shakespearean to believe that his hard-earned expertise gave him the right, which he and many scholars have since tried to deny to others, to search Shakespeare’s plays for clues to his personal life.”
― James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ?