“... Perhaps it was inevitable that Shakespeare’s talent should have been understood in mythological terms from the outset. Even before he published Venus and Adonis (1593) his early plays had revealed an imagination profoundly shaped by Ovid’s tales of the interaction between gods and mortals, and, despite the growing prevalence among his audiences of a neoclassical taste for satirical urban realism, throughout his career he scripted scenes in which Hymen personally ratifies the ending of a comedy, or Hercules abandons Antony, or Jupiter descends on an eagle ...”

“... fabricated poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of extenuation in claiming that theirs were the follies of ambitious but misguided ...”

“... as many again as Johnson. In 1747, Johnson, disappointed in his hopes of producing the edition of Shakespeare for which he had issued ‘Proposals’ two years before, published the Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language. This proposed ‘to preserve a purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom’. He was later to modify this prescriptive ...”

“... whereupon its five-acre precinct became a prime piece of Tudor real estate. Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare and the Countess gives a remarkably detailed account of its residents in the 1590s, some of them very distinguished, and of their efforts to exclude one who would become more distinguished than any of them. Blackfriars is an area rich in Shakespearean ...”

“... publicised over the previous months, that his play was based on a hitherto unknown work by Shakespeare. ‘It is my good fortune to retrieve this remnant of his pen from obscurity,’ he says with studied modesty. He calls it ‘this orphan play’, and ‘this dear relick’. On the title page Double Falsehood is described as ‘A Play … Written ...”

“... of the lark for the nocturnal voice of the nightingale. In the multipolar, multivocal world of Shakespeare’s drama and poetry, binary oppositions rarely go uncomplicated, and he devotes a sonnet, 127, to the further destabilising of any easy notion that fair = white = day = beautiful while dark = black = night = ugly. According to the sonnet, that view ...”

“... Shakespeare scholarship in the mid 19th century, one gathers, was not only very competitive but also morally dangerous. It could threaten the virtue, even on occasion the sanity, of its practitioners, a diverse group united only by their lust for Shakespeareana and their unflaggingly competitive spirit. Enthusiastic, self-taught amateurs, they developed professional skills at a time when university professionals took little interest in vernacular scholarship ...”

“... for training young minds, hence the disquieting ambiguity of ‘discipline’, a word that in Shakespeare’s day could even denote the principal weapon of instruction: the whip. In his essay ‘Of the Institution and Education of Children’, Montaigne, who grew up speaking Latin as his first language, fondly remembered how he and his tutor, the Scottish ...”

“... Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that ‘Shakespeare’ is more than an individual writer: ‘it’ is an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social advancement and whose production on the stage and on television makes a powerful contribution to Britain’s invisible exports ...”

“... dictionaries – there is no obvious market for new issues of the complete works of George Ogle, William Oldisworth or Richardson Pack (all represented in EPFTD). Until Chadwyck-Healey, it was not clear that literary criticism could afford the panoply of advanced technology. Riding on the success of EPFTD Chadwyck-Healey has followed up with English Verse ...”

“... relevant is actually happening – and certainly not because it includes boring quantities of Shakespeare’s text. Many would agree with the general proposition that the best Shakespeare movies are not in English but in Japanese or Russian, the reason being that these works are treatments of the stories of Macbeth or ...”

“... In Fielding’s Journey from this World to the Next the author comes upon Shakespeare in Elysium, standing between the actors Betterton and Booth, who are disputing about the exact emphasis of a line from Othello. Shakespeare is very lofty about it all: ‘it is so long since I wrote the line, I have forgot my meaning,’ but if any of their conjectures is right, ‘it doth me very little honour ...”

“... the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure. How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, an amiably but inherently contentious book, is easier to dissent from than to put down. Lake has the bravest and most problematic of subjects. By ‘politics’ he means the politics of ...”

“... the implications it takes in Principles of Psychology, the massive first book by Henry’s brother William, regarded by R.W.B. Lewis and others as one of the singular achievements in American writing of the 19th century. Principles never systematically or for long directly addresses the issues of language and style. When it does do so, however, it is with an ...”

“... it is part Shakespearean soliloquy on semitism, part gleeful exercise in trash. Hanina, a.k.a. Shakespeare, a.k.a. Shylock, a.k.a. Salek Rugashov, a.k.a. Hananiah ben Hezekiah ben Gruen (all the characters have multiple aliases) was once the star of a Mossad execution squad, many of whose members now run a trendy Israeli advertising agency. This sitcom ...”