William Shakespeare
1593
John Masefield, himself later Poet Laureate of England, approaches his subject with the reverence of one artist contemplating another. Written in 1911, this analytical biography situates Shakespeare within the vivid world of Elizabethan theatre, tracing the arc from Stratford-upon-Avon's glover's son to the dramatist who would reshape the English language. Masefield devotes considerable attention to the tantalizing gaps in the historical record, those lost years between the birth of the twins and the emergence of the young playwright in London, treating not as obstacles but as the very mystery that allows legend to flourish. He weaves together documented fact with the stories that had already crystallized by the early twentieth century: the deer poaching, the Globe Theatre, the sonnets to the Dark Lady and Fair Youth. What emerges is less a definitive life story than a meditation on how little we truly know of genius, and how much the gaps have become part of the mythology. Masefield's literary sensibility inflects every page, this is not dry scholarship but a poet's attempt to understand a poet, to trace the connections between a man's experience and the tragedies and comedies he left behind. For readers seeking to understand how earlier generations imagined Shakespeare, and how the legends took shape.
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“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.””
— John Masefield
“God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.””
— John Masefield
“Cuando la ciencia todavía soñaba, la poesía ya actuaba””
— John Masefield
“Like water, which heated to a hundred degrees will bear no increase of temperature, human thought attains in certain men its maximum intensity.””
— John Masefield
“Supreme art is the region of Equals. There is no primacy among masterpieces.””
— John Masefield
“Oui, partout, oui, toujours, oui, pour combattre les violences et les impostures, oui, pour réhabiliter les lapidés et les accablés, oui, pour conclure logiquement et marcher droit, oui, pour consoler, pour secourir, pour relever, pour encourager, pour enseigner, oui, pour panser en attendant qu'on guérisse, oui, pour transformer la charité en fraternité, l'aumône en assistance, la fainéantise en travail, l'oisiveté en utilité, la centralisation en famille, l'iniquité en justice, le bourgeois en citoyen, la populace en peuple, la canaille en nation, les nations en humanité, la guerre en amour, le préjugé en examen, les frontières en soudures, les limites en ouvertures, les ornières en rails, les sacristies en temples, l'instinct du mal en volonté du bien, la vie en droit, les rois en hommes, oui, pour ôter des religions l'enfer et des sociétés le bagne, oui, pour être frère du misérable, du serf, du fellah, du prolétaire, du déshérité, de l'exploité, du trahi, du vaincu, du vendu, de l'enchaîné, du sacrifié, de la prostituée, du forçat, de l'ignorant, du sauvage, de l'esclave, du nègre, du condamné et du damné, oui, nous sommes tes fils, Révolution !””
— John Masefield
“Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for beauty. The bright, beautiful creatures dash themselves against the bars of age’s forging, against law, custom, duty, and those inventions of cold blood which youth thinks cold and age knows to be wise.””
— John Masefield
