The Freudian map of the mind is Shakespeare's; Freud seems only to have prosified it. Or, to vary my point, a Shakespearean reading of Freud illuminates and overwhelms the text of Freud; a Freudian reading of Shakespeare reduces Shakespeare, or would if we could bear a reduction that crosses the line into absurdities of loss.

Those who resent all canons suffer from an elitist guilt founded upon the accurate enough realization that canons always do indirectly serve the social and political, and indeed the spiritual, concerns and aims of the wealthier classes of each generation of Western society. It seems clear that capital is necessary for the cultivation of aesthetic values.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

[Shakespeare] extensively informs the language we speak, his principal characters have become our mythology, and he, rather than his involuntary follower Freud, is our psychologist.

Western culture, if it is to survive its current self-hatred, must become only more Hamlet-like.  We have no equally powerful and influential image of human cognition pushed to its limits.

Elsinore's disease is anywhere's, anytime's.  Something is rotten in every state, and if your sensibility is like Hamlet's, then finally you will not tolerate it.

To feminist critics, Lear is a man more sinning than sinned against.  If you really cannot see Goneril and Regan as monsters of the deep, then it must be that your ideology constrains you to believe that all males are culpable, Shakespeare and Lear included.  But we are back in the School of Resentment criticism of Shakespeare, whether feminist, Marxist, or historicist (Foucault-inspired).

[Shakespeare] sensibly was afraid of mobs and of uprisings, yet he was afraid of authority also.

Our common fate is age, sickness, death, oblivion.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.  It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends.  Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.

[I]f, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how to read, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in which you simply drown.

[U]nfortunately what is called 'multiculturalism' in the United States never means Cervantes...It means fifth-rate work by people full of resentment, who happen to be women, or who happen to be Chicano or Puerto-Rican, or who happen to be African-American, and they are by no means the best writers who are African-American, or women, or so on. They are simply the most resentful and the most ideological. The function of an education is not to make people feel good about themselves, or to confirm their sense of division, of being in one group rather than another.

No one, before or since Shakespeare, made so many separate selves.

Only the Bible has a circumference that is everywhere, like Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare, as we like to forget, largely invented us; if you add the rest of the Canon, then Shakespeare and the Canon wholly invented us.

Immanent Falstaff and transcendent Hamlet are the two largest representations of consciousness in Shakespeare, and indeed in all of literature.

Hamlet, first and last, vies with king David and the Jesus of Mark as a charismatic-of-charismatics.

[N]o one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

If Hamlet and Don Quixote, between them, define the European self, then Captain Ahab and "Walt Whitman" (the persona, not the man) suggest a very different self from the European. Ahab is Shakespearean, Miltonic, even Byronic-Shelleyan, but his monomaniacal quest is his own, and reacts against the Emersonian self, just as Melville's beloved Hawthorne recoiled also. Whitman, a more positive Emersonian, affirms what the Sage of Concord called self-reliance, the authentic American religion rather than its Bushian parodies.

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