Happy Birthday Will Shakespeare!

 

William Shakespeare – circa April 23, 1564 – April 23, 1616

The Bodleian First Folio
A digital facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays

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Henry Crawford: “…But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an English-man’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where; one is intimate with him by instinct. – No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.” 

“No doubt, one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree,” said Edmund, “from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions; but this is totally distinct from giving his sense as you gave it. To know him in bits and scraps is common enough; to know him pretty thoroughly is, perhaps, not uncommon; but to read him well aloud is no everyday talent.” 

– Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. III

“His reading was capital…”
Mansfield Park, illus. CE Brock [Mollands]

c2014, Jane Austen in Vermont