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Shakespeare: The World as StageNot a single note or letter or page of manuscript survives. (Some authorities believe that a section of the play Sir Thomas More, which was never performed, is in ShakespeareБЂ™s hand, but that is far from certain.) We have no written description of him penned in his own lifetime. The first textual portrait-БЂњhe was a handsome, well-shapБЂ™t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth wittБЂ«-was written sixty-four years after his death by a man, John Aubrey, who was born ten years after that death. Shakespeare seems to have been the mildest of fellows, and yet the earliest written account we have of him is an attack on his character by a fellow artist. He appears to many biographers to have spurned his wife-famously he left her only his second-best bed in his will, and that as an apparent afterthought-and yet no one wrote more highly, more devotedly, more beamingly, of love and the twining of kindred souls. We are not sure how best to spell his name-but then neither, it appears, was he, for the name is never spelled the same way twice in the signatures that survive. (They read as БЂњWillm Shaksp,БЂ«БЂњWilliam Shakespe,БЂ«БЂњWm Shakspe,БЂ«БЂњWilliam Shakspere,БЂ«БЂњWillm Shakspere,БЂ«and БЂњWilliam Shakspeare.БЂ«Curiously one spelling he didnБЂ™t use was the one now universally attached to his name.) Nor can we be entirely confident how he pronounced his name ...» |
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