It’s a great feeling to be dealing with material which is better than yourself. That you know that you can never live up to. Orson Welles
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance. James Joyce
Reinvented the human. Harold Bloom, James Joyce, Ulysses
Our myriad minded Shakespeare. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biography
Shakespeare ... is of no age – nor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.
John Milton, L’Allegro
What needs my Shakespeare for his honour’d bones,
The labour of an age in piled stones,
Or that his hallow’d relics should be hid
Under a star-y-pointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name? John Milton, Epitaph on Shakespeare
And so sepulchered in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. ibid.
Shakespeare (whom you and ev’ry play-house ill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight,
And grow immortal in his own despite. Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace
There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world; oh, eyes sublime
With tears and laughter for all time! Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), A Vision of Poets
With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart once more!
Did Shakespeare?
If so, the less Shakespeare he! Robert Browning (1812-1899), House
The souls most fed with Shakespeare’s flame
Still sat unconquered in a ring
Remembering him like anything. G K Chesterton, The Shakespeare Memorial
To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn’d; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the poets. John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy: Shakespeare and Ben Jonson Compared
Shakespeare … is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other. John Dryden
It is sometimes suspected that the enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s works shown by some students is a fiction or a fashion. It is not so. The justification of that enthusiastic admiration is in the fact that every increase of knowledge and deepening of wisdom in the critic or the student do but show still greater knowledge and deeper wisdom in the great poet. When, too, it is found that his judgment is equal to his genius, and that his industry is on a par with his inspiration, it becomes impossible to wonder or to admire too much. George Dawson (1821-1876), Shakespeare and other lectures
Was there ever such stuff as great part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you? – what? – Is there not sad stuff? What? – what? George III
I am the owner of the sphere
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Absorbing Soul
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit. Ralph Waldo Emerson
When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, ‘Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such lovely language. D H Lawrence
He that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant to Heracles, who, when he offered his house for sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen. Samuel Johnson, Plays of William Shakespeare
Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition ... That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. ibid.
A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are the traveler; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire. ibid.
We fix our eyes upon his graces, and turn them from his deformities, and endure in him what we should in another loathe or despise. ibid.
He is as a mountain, whose majesty and multitudinous beauty, meaning, and magnitude and impress, must be gotten by slow processes in journeying about it through many days. Who sits under its pines at noon, lies beside its streams for rest, walks under its lengthening shadows as under a cloud, and has listened to the voices of its water falls, thrilling the night and calling to the spacious firmament as if with intent to be heard ‘very far off’, has thus learned the mountain, vast of girth, kingly in altitude, perpetual in sovereignty. We study a world’s circumference by segments; nor let us suppose we can do other by this cosmopolitan Shakespeare. He, so far as touches our earth horizon, is ubiquitous. Looking at him sum-totally, we feel his mass, and say we have looked upon majesty. William A Quayle (1860-1925), Some Words on Loving Shakespeare
We shall never overestimate Shakespeare, because we can not. Some men and things lie beyond the danger of hyperbole. No exaggeration is possible concerning them, seeing they transcend all dreams. Space can not be conceived by the most luxuriant imagination, holding, as it does, all worlds, and capable of holding another universe besides, and with room to spare. Clearly, we can not overestimate space. Thought and vocabulary become bankrupt when they attempt this bewildering deed. Genius is as immeasurable as space. Shakespeare can not be measured. We can not go about him, since life fails, leaving the journey not quite well begun. Yet may we attempt what can not be performed, because each attempt makes us worthy, and we are measured, not by what we achieve, but by what we attempt. ibid.
In Shakespeare the birds sing, the bushes are clothed with green, hearts love, souls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes, forests and multitudes speak, the vast eternal dream hovers over all. Sap and blood, all forms of the multiple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions, diamonds and pearls, dung-hills and charnelhouses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of comers and goers, all, all are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare. Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare
Well! It is now public, and you will stand for your privileges we know: to read, and to censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a book, the stationer says. John Heming and Henry Condell, joint editors of first portfolio preface 1623
Who, as he was a happy imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot. ibid.
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good – in spite of all the people who say he is very good. Robert Graves, 1895-1985
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart. William Wordsworth, Miscellaneous Sonnets
I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare. T S Eliot, 1888-1965, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca