Poems are difficult to silence.
Stephen Greenblatt
The heads on the pikes may have spoken to him on the day he entered London - and he may well have heeded their warning.
warning day london
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.. Animated, accessible prose and.. Resonant panorama of Elizabethan England.
shakespeare world prose england
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
life art renaissance
A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.
life death beauty art creation loving attention mad dirty pleasure matter knight reflections skin renaissance embrace
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
art world poet find easy renaissance short
There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.
force extinction time world living problem enterprise knowledge loss ancient end head renaissance fragile books shelves
I began with the desire to speak with the dead.
history shakespeare education desire knowledge historians
poetry silence poems censorship suppression
The quintessential emblem of religion? And the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core? Is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.
religion sacrifice
I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!
life
It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
life art
My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.
life work
But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.
truth
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