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Page 204 Nor is Shakespeare any longer so important to writers intent upon legitimating themselves, certainly not as significant as he was to Browning. Consider two of the choice and master spirits of our stage, who have both won Pulitzer Prizes. Introducing his acclaimed trilogy of African American history plays, August Wilson quotes James Baldwin, Romaire Bearden, D.H.Lawrence, Pablo Picasso, and Bessie Smith; he imagines himself “sitting in the same chair as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Henrik Ibsen, Amiri Baraka, and Ed Bullins” (Wilson 1991:vii–xii). In a newspaper interview, Wilson claims that he has read The Merchant of Venice and seen Othello—and “that’s the extent of my Shakespeare” (Wilson 1990). David Mamet has published two collections of essays, in which he quotes more than forty different authorities, from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to the actor Richard Monette. His heroes, as writers, are Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton (Mamet 1989: 66–7), and Tennessee Williams, author of “the greatest dramatic poetry in the American language’’ (Mamet 1986:102). He most often quotes from Tolstoy, Stanislavski, and Thorstein Veblen. Mamet (once a college professor) has apparently read more Shakespeare than August Wilson, but he never treats Shakespeare as an artistic model. Hamlet is misquoted deliberately once; elsewhere, Hamlet is misquoted inadvertently, as are Henry V and Macbeth. “Cucullus non facit monachum” is attributed to “the Bard” and Twelfth Night (Mamet 1989:60); but the phrase was proverbial, and it also occurs in Measure for Measure. (Shakespeare repeats himself more often than you think: see Taylor 1995.) Stephen Jay Gould is, among scientists, of good knowledge, and literatured, and learned in the disciplines of the arts; his best-selling book, Wonderful Life (winner of a National Book Award), prettily and aptly quotes Robert Frost, Omar Khayyam, Stephen King, George Orwell, Alexander Pope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Kurt Vonnegut (Gould 1989:28, 43, 44, 45, 98, 130, 285–86, 291). Although Gould quotes Shakespeare four times (27, 60, 321), Shakespeare is not listed in his index, presumably because Gould’s indexer did not recognize the author of the unattributed quotations. The four Shakespeare quotations, moreover, are utterly predictable: two come from “the most famous soliloquy of all time” (which grows something stale by now), a third from another ward of the same Danish prison (Hamlet 1.3.59 ff.), and the fourth from The Tempest (or Aldous Huxley): “O brave—and improbable—new world, |
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