James Shapiro Quotes & Sayings

#1. Genius may be a necessary precondition for creating a masterpiece but it's never a sufficient one.

#2. 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

#3. he will equivocate at the gallows; but he will be hanged without equivocation.

James Shapiro

#4. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

James Shapiro

#5. And my poor fool is hanged. No, no life. / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more. / Never, never, never. Pray you, undo / This button. Thank you, sir. O, O, O, O!

James Shapiro

#6. 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

#7. Is his benevolent art meant to distract us from Prospero's absolutist exercise of authority over his subjects?

James Shapiro

#8. 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

#9. Antony and Cleopatra: "what love, what accomplishments, what repetitions of natural affections passed between them is not for vulgar minds to imagine, none but so great hearts know them.

James Shapiro