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Book: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
Quotes of Book: A Year in the Life of William
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  1. James Shapiro _ A Year in the Life of William

    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.
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  2. James Shapiro _ A Year in the Life of William

    WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles"
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  3. James Shapiro _ A Year in the Life of William

    Shakespeare's way out of the dilemma of writing plays as pleasing at court as they were at the public theater was counterintuitive. Rather than searching for the lowest common denominator, he decided instead to write increasingly complicated plays that dispensed with easy pleasures and made both sets of playgoers work harder than they had ever worked before. It's not something that he could have imagined doing five years earlier {when he lacked the authority, and London audiences the sophistication, to manage this}. And this challenge to the status quo is probably not something that would have gone down well at the Curtain in 1599. But Shakespeare had a clear sense of what veteran playgoers were capable of and saw past their cries for old favorites and the stereotypes that branded them as shallow "groundlings." He committed himself not only to writing great plays for the Globe but also to nurturing an audience comfortable with their increased complexity. Even before the Theatre was dismantled he must have been excitedly thinking ahead, realizing how crucial his first few plays at the Globe would be. It was a gamble, and there was the possibility that he might overreach and lose both popular and courtly audiences.
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  4. James Shapiro _ A Year in the Life of William

    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.
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  5. James Shapiro _ A Year in the Life of William

    By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present, Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold. The most convincing way of showing this was to ask playgoers to keep both plays in mind at once, to experience a new Hamlet while memories of the old one, ghostlike, still lingered. Audiences at the Globe soon found themselves, like Hamlet, straddling worlds and struggling to reconcile past and present.
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