All the quotes are from Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography
“He had a professional attitude towards reading, and probably never opened a book without hoping to extract something from it. In any case, Shakespeare always departed from his sources when he deemed it necessary to do so, elaborating them and pushing them further into romance and fantastic improbability.” (page 406)
“Contemporary Londoners believed that the plague came from planetary influences, blasting the air with fever.” (page 419)
Yeah, think it sounds fanciful? Ask a Capricorn or a Cancer about how Mars is treating them these days. Feh.
“Comedy and tragedy were equal parts of his art.” (page 431)
Art reflects life, huh?
“To watch King Lear is to appraoch the recognition that there is indeed no meaning to life and that there are limits to human understanding. So we lay down a heavy burden and are made humble. That is what Shakespearian tragedy accomplishes for us.” (page 447)
Why it works.
“Indeed the family is at the centre of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy; more than any other contemporary dramatist he is concerned with familial conflict.” (page 449)
Not that I’d ever write about my family. Nope.
“There is another aspect of his dramaturgy that generally goes unremarked. In modern drama the accepted context is one of naturalism, which certain playwrights then work up into formality or ritual. In the early seventeenth century the essential context was one of ritual and formality, to which Shakespeare might then add touches of realism or naturalism.” (page 449)
More than once, I’ve read the assertion that Shakespeare was the first of the modern authors.
“The hundreds of minor changes between two versions, compatible with a rewriting at speed by a dramatist absorbed in his work, also reveal the work of a thoroughly dramatic imagination, intent upon wholly theatrical effects. They prove beyond any doubt that Shakespeare was not averse to extensive revision and rewriting his material, when occasion demanded it. His was always a work in progress.” (page 450)
“It says something about the effect of the theatre and the permanence of theatrical memory that this doomed love between Antony and Cleopatra, together with the assassination of Julius Caesar, have become the two most famous episodes of Roman history.” (page 455)
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