The Meaning of Shakespeare

“For my part, I believe that we are nearer the beginning than the end of our understanding of Shakespeare’s genius.”

“To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and technician, we a living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it. … We want facts for the practical use we can make of them. We want the tree for its lumber, not, as Thoreau did, to make an appointment with it as a friend.”

““We were saying the other night,” a college girl wrote to her mother, “that we probably know the members of our Shakespeare class, deep down, far better than we shall know any class again. You just can’t discuss Shakespeare without putting a window in your very soul.””

““We who dwell on Earth can do nothing of ourselves,” says William Blake; “everything is conducted by Spirits, no less than Digestion or Sleep.” But we can draw nearer such spirits when we sense their presence. “No production of the highest kind,” says Goethe, “no remarkable discovery, no great thought that bears fruit and has results, is in the power of anyone; but such things are elevated above all earthly control.” Yet we can take advantage of a wind that we a powerless to create.”

“Who can doubt that in just this condition of complete mental tranquility (this “soul of state”) Shakespeare has himself gazed into the spring of his own imagination and found gold at its bottom—into the world around him and found the future in its cradle, the “future in the instant” as Lady Macbeth calls it?”

“Shakespeare saw that the prolongation of innocence—of “infancy” as the biologists say—is the key to mature strength.”

“[Shakespeare] condenses his idea of complete regeneration, through the mouth of Posthumus in Cymbeline, into the words, “To shame the guise of the world, I will begin/ The fashion, less without and more within,” and his remedy for the conquest of Death itself, in the poem that comes closer than anything else in his works to being an expression of his own religious creed, the 146th sonnet, is: “Within be fed, without be rich no more.””

“Shakespeare, like Dante before him and Milton after him, knew where the stars are, knew that heaven and hell, and even earth, are located within the human soul.”

“Is it not folly to suppose that Capulet and Lady Capulet were spiritually transformed by Juliet’s death? As for Montague, the statue of her in pure gold that he promised to erect in Verona is proof in itself how incapable he was of understanding her spirit and how that spirit alone, and not monuments of gold, can bring an end to feuds.”

“Cynics are fond of saying that if Romeo and Juliet have lived their love would not have “lasted.” Of course it wouldn’t—in the cynic’s sense. You can no more ask such a love to last than you can ask April to last, or an apple blossom. Yet April and apple blossoms do last and have results that bear no resemblance to what they came from—results such as apples and October—and so does such love.”

“Which is better, the truth without worldly possessions and position, or worldly possessions and position without the truth?”

“Psychology goes deeper than politics and a knowledge of man himself must precede any fruitful consideration of the institutions he has created.”

“[Henry IV’s] life became a continuous embodiment of the strange law whereby we come to resemble what we fear. The basis of that law is plain. What we are afraid of we keep in mind. What we keep in mind, we grow like unto.”

““Stop to think”! One may determine the orbit of the moon, or make an atomic bomb, by stopping to think, but when since the beginning of time did one man ever get at the secret of another by means of the intellect? It is all right to stop to think after we have taken a character to our hearts, but to do so before we have is fatal.”

“Life was given for something greater than glory or than the gain that can be gotten out of it.”

“Now [Hal] pretends to be his father and banishes Falstaff. A little later he will become like his father and will banish him. Now he plays king. Then he will be king. Beware of what you play—it will come true.”

“In what do love and friendship consist if not in a perpetual acceptance of the angels and rejection of the devils that we discover in everyone with whom we are brought into intimate contact?”

“Practically all teachers have their good points, and even teachers of genius have their weaknesses. It is the art of the pupil to profit by the good points, to let himself be taken captive by genius, and to overlook or reject the weaknesses.”

“The true pupil perpetuates the genius of his teacher not by adopting his ideas or imitating his conduct but by carrying on and living out his spirit under the peculiar conditions of his own life.”

“The poet was beginning to perceive that history has no significance until it is seen as comedy—and tragedy. Imagination was beginning to assert its mastery of fact.”

““I won’t count this year” is not a whit sounder than “I won’t count this drink.” Life counts every minute.”

“Where faith in the fact can help create the fact, says William James, it would be an insane logic that would deny our right to put our trust in it.”

“Wisdom is to be found in residents neither of the country nor of the city but in those rather who “hither thither fare” between the two.”

“There is generally an Emersonian sentence that comes as close to summing up a Shakespearean play as anything so brief a sentence can: “A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love can teach in a day.””

“Love bestows on those who embrace it the experience and wisdom of the race, compared with the knowledge schools and foreign lands can offer at the worst a mere counterfeit and at the best a mere beginning.”

“It is an infallible rule after reading a play of Shakespeare’s: read it once more and deeper.”

“As mythology shows, how can a being of a higher order enter a lower world except in disguise?”

“The greatest poetry has always depicted the world as a little candle of nobility threatened by an immense barbarism, a flickering candle surrounded by infinite night.”

““Here it is,” [the poet] seems to say, as perhaps God did when he made the world, “take it, and see what you can make of it.” And different men make very different things.”

“A critical reader who sees through the device [that is, dreams first presented as being real] deprives himself of the very experience he would understand. Intellectuals cannot read. A child lost in a story in the model of right first reading. The more ingenuous we are the first time the better. But not the second and third times. Then the critical intellect should being to check the imagination—or check on it rather.”