A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Quotes

“Shakespeare’s way out of the dilemma of writing plays as pleasing at court as they were at the public theater was counterintuitive. Rather than searching for the lowest common denominator, he decided instead to write increasingly complicated plays that dispensed with easy pleasures and made both sets of playgoers work harder than they had ever worked before. It’s not something that he could have imagined doing five years earlier (when he lacked the authority, and London audiences the sophistication, to manage this). And this challenge to the status quo is probably not something that would have gone down well at the Curtain in 1599. But Shakespeare had a clear sense of what veteran playgoers were capable of and saw past their cries for old favorites and the stereotypes that branded them as shallow “groundlings.” He committed himself not only to writing great plays for the Globe but also to nurturing an audience comfortable with their increased complexity. Even before the Theatre was dismantled he must have been excitedly thinking ahead, realizing how crucial his first few plays at the Globe would be. It was a gamble, and there was the possibility that he might overreach and lose both popular and courtly audiences.”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“     First, my fear; then, my curtsy; last my speech. My fear is your displeasure; my curtsy, my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardons.”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present, Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold. The most convincing way of showing this was to ask playgoers to keep both plays in mind at once, to experience a new Hamlet while memories of the old one, ghostlike, still lingered. Audiences at the Globe soon found themselves, like Hamlet, straddling worlds and struggling to reconcile past and present.”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“Shakespeare’s greatness and his personality illuminated, we need only look at the trail of sparks—still visible in the surviving versions—that flew in the heat of revising Hamlet. To see this is also to acknowledge that the Hamlet Shakespeare left us was, in the play’s own words, “a thing a little soiled with working” (2.1.40).”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“best poets are both made and born: that all great writing had to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that “second heat,” their labored revision. In these knotty lines Jonson also hints at the physical toll this process exacts, for when Shakespeare would “turn” his writing, he would turn “himself with it.” Writing, even for Shakespeare, was a battering experience. Shakespeare’s greatness, Jonson tells us, was a result not just of exceptional talent but also of a quarter century of relentless, driving effort. If we want to see”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses’ anvil; turn the same, (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn, For a good poet’s made as well as born. And such wert thou. Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare well enough not to underestimate him as a writer, also knew that part of his greatness was bound up in his gift for second thoughts. Jonson’s praise of Shakespeare’s craft in the First Folio, largely overlooked today, is worth recalling: he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“isn’t just the words he chose but how he used them that make the language of Hamlet so challenging. Shakespeare clearly wanted audiences to work hard, and one of the ways he made them do so was by employing an odd verbal trick called hendiadys. Though the term may be strange, examples of it—“law and order,” “house and home,” or the Shakespearean “sound and fury”—are familiar enough. Hendiadys literally means “one by means of two,” a single idea conveyed through a pairing of nouns linked by “and.” When conjoined in this way, the nouns begin to oscillate, seeming to qualify each other as much as the term each individually modifies. Whether he is exclaiming “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” (1.4.39), declaring that actors are “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.524), speaking of “the book and volume of my brain” (1.5.103), or complaining of “a fantasy and trick of fame” (4.4.61), Hamlet often speaks in this way. The more you think about hendiadys, the more they induce a kind of mental vertigo. Take for example Hamlet’s description of “the book and volume of my brain.” It’s easy to get the gist of what he’s saying, and the phrase would pass unremarked in the course of a performance. But does he mean “book-like volume” of my mind? Or “big book of my mind”? Part of the problem here is that the words bleed into each other—“volume” of course is another word for “book” but also means “space.” The destabilizing effect of how these words play off each other is slightly and temporarily unnerving”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets 'are both made and born'. That all great writing has to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that 'second heat', their laboured revision.”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599

“WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

“Shakespeare didn’t conceive of his tragedy in Aristotelian terms—that is, as a tragedy of the fall of a flawed great man—but rather as a collision of deeply held and irreconcilable principles, embodied in characters who are destroyed when these principles collide.”
― James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare