Saturday, September 19, 2009

re-confirming my love for will.

"If this stuff is not, in truth, infinitely amusing, it still can generate chuckles after four hundred years, and it would have served to lighten the burden of an exceedingly long school day. But it is certainly not the glimpse of a lost vocation. Ben Jonson wrote scholarly footnotes to his Roman plays and his classicizing masques; Shakespeare laughed and scribbled obscenities."

excerpt from Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World.

3 comments:

  1. There are so many theories about Shakespeare. Whoever he was, whatever he was, I think he was a genius and I'm a huge fan.

    Jai

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  2. Amusement is a primal drive in humans, I think; Ben Johnson has formulated a splendid quote about this which I come to think about time to time;

    “Drink today, and drown all sorrow; You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow; Best, while you have it, use your breath; There is no drinking after death"

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  3. Great blog,

    As I mentioned above, I found you on Ande's Faun. Oh yes, I do enjoy Will as well. Though I tend to tolerate tightly filled gasbag scholars, as long as I can take Ande's advice there!

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