The Genius of Shakespeare
Starre of Poets
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Excerpted from A Whirld of Words: A Reader's Commonplace Dictionary. Find the LINK to the Introduction below.
Shakespeare
yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygres heart wrapt in a players hyde, supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and, beeing an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey
Robert Greene, A Groatsworth of Wit (Acheson 1920) p. 112
Starre of Poets; a Moniment, without a tombe; not of an age, but for all time!
Ben Jonson (Kermode 1965) p. 34
the tale went round London – reported by one of the young lawyers addicted to the theater – that a woman fell for Burbage and at the theater gave him an assignation to come to her that night under the name of Richard III, but Shakespeare overheard it and got free from the theater beforehand, gained admittance and was 'at his game’ ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III
(Rowse 1988) p. 114
he was a handsome, well-shaped man: very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit
John Aubrey (Rowse 1988) p. 87
Shakespeare was naturally learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there
John Dryden (DeMaria 1986) p. 124
Shakespeare had the largest and most comprehensive soul. When he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too
John Dryden (Kermode 1965) p. 43
idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman
(Gibbon 1984) p. 103
Scorn not to the Sonnet, Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours, with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart
(Wordsworth 1992) p. 61
the greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare
(Coleridge 1975) p. 175
Shakespear (almost alone) seems to have been a man of genius, raised above the definition of genius. His genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing every object from the exact point of view in which others would see it. He was the Proteus of human intellect
(Hazlitt 1908) p. 42
the striking peculiarity of Shakespear's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds – so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. Shakespear had more magnanimity than any other poet
(Hazlitt 1982) p. 273
the striking peculiarity of Shakespeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds. He has magic power over words: they come winged at his bidding; and seem to know their places
(Hazlitt 1991) p. 324, 333
I am very near Agreeing with Hazlitt that Shakespeare is enough for us; he has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing; Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it
(Keats 2001) p. 356, 368, 456
I am very near agreeing with Hazlitt that Shakespeare is enough for us; a man's life of any worth is a continual allegory –Shakespeare led a life of allegory, his works are the comments on it
(Bate 1963) p. 157, 204
wrote the text of modern life
Emerson (Bloom 2002) p. 342
this wild riot of color, this medley of utter delicacy, grossness, and artifice, with a secret sense of familiarity and love
(Nietzsche 1955) p. 149
the greatest authority on the heart of man
Verdi (Rowse 1988) p. 238
Shakespeare! loveliest of souls,
Peerless in radiance, in joy
(Arnold 1965) p. 313
Shakespeare’s conception of the sublime and tragic is altogether aristocratic. Shakespeare mixes the sublime and the low, the tragic and the comic in an inexhaustible abundance of proportions. Shakespeare’s dramatic economy is prodigally lavish; it bears witness to his delight in rendering the most varied phenomena of life, and this delight in turn is inspired by the concept that the cosmos is everywhere interdependent, so that every chord of human destiny arouses a multitude of voices to parallel or contrary motion. He embraces reality but he transcends it
(Auerbach 2013) p. 315, 317, 323, 327
Samuel Harsnett wrote a work on Jesuit exorcisms, one of the few contemporary books we can prove that Shakespeare read
(Wills 1995) p. 100
This miracle ...
That in black ink my love may still shine bright
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 65 (Wiman 2018) p. 107
his principal trade – the expression of love, and there no man has been lovelier; his love of creation was unsurpassed except by his own creations; as he loved, so he has been loved and ever will be
[JS]
LINK to the Introduction to A Whirld of Words: A Reader's Commonplace Dictionary.
WORKS CITED
Acheson, Arthur (1920), Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 (London: Bernard Quaritch) [iv], 261.
Arnold, Matthew (1965), Matthew Arnold's Poems (New York: Dutton) xx, 538.
Auerbach, Erich (2013), Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press) xxxii, 579.
Bate, Walter Jackson (1963), John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) xvii, 732.
Bloom, Harold (2002), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (London: Fourth Estate) xviii, 814.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1975), Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (New York: Dutton) xxvi, 303.
DeMaria, Robert (1986), Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) xii, 303.
Gibbon, Edward (1984), Memoirs of My Life (New York: Penguin Books) 238.
Hazlitt, William (1908), Table Talk; or, Original Essays (New York: E.P. Dutton) ix, 337.
--- (1982), Selected Writings (Penguin Classics; New York: Penguin Books) 509.
--- (1991), Selected Writings (The World's Classics; New York: Oxford University Press) xlvi, 423.
Keats, John (2001), John Keats: The Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press) xxxvi, 667.
Kermode, Frank (1965), Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism (New York: Avon Books) 571.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1955), Beyond Good and Evil (Chicago: Henry Regnery) xiii, 241.
Rowse, A. L. (1988), Shakespeare the Man (New York: St. Martin's Press) xii, 253, 16 p. of pl.
Wills, Garry (1995), Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth (New York: Oxford University Press) ix, 223.
Wiman, Christian (2018), He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 118.
Wordsworth, William (1992), Favorite Poems (New York: Dover Publications) 68.