The Arden Shakespeare, meanwhile, puts The Taming of the Shrew first, while the Riverside Shakespeare places the first part of Henry VI first. Hardly any two lists are the same. - P95
To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first. - P98
Above all, plays before Shakespeare’s day were traditionally governed by what were known as ‘the Unities’ – the three principles of dramatic presentation derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, which demanded that dramas should take place in one day, in one place, and have a single plot. Shakespeare was happy enough to observe this restriction when it suited him (as in The Comedy of Errors), but he could never have written Hamlet or Macbeth or any of his other greatest works if he had felt strictly bound by it. - P101
Shakespeare’s genius was not really to do with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering – things that aren’t taught in school. - P107
In plays written during his most productive and inventive period – Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear – neologisms occur at the fairly astonishing rate of one every two and a half lines. Hamlet alone gave audiences six hundred words that, according to all other evidence, they had never heard before. - P113
Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others (including countless). - P113
His real gift was as a phrasemaker. ‘Shakespeare’s language,’ says Stanley Wells, ‘has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language.’ - P113
If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception – a clearly remarkable proportion. - P114
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