Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

at Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy.

Falstaff something roughly similar—a gentleman sinking into mire—but darker and deeper: a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted.

A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit,” quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night,

Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.

Jaques’ vision in the same comedy of “the whining schoolboy with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school

Can honour set-to a leg?” Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.

No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound?

What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”?

What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?

He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.

I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life” (5.3.57–58).

Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment.

book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, Infidelity, and Atheism in England. These evils were dark signs that the world was nearing its end, Harris argued, and that Satan was frantically struggling to make a last demonic triumph.

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,

affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?

If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.

Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee,

No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No.