Community Quote by Virginia Woolf

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or…

— Virginia Woolf

Poor Marlowe gets a rough deal for simply not being Shakespeare. But he was Bill's forerunner. It's hard to imagine one without the other.

— Paterson Joseph

“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" wrote Marlowe, the man Shakespeare feared for many years was the better writer, the man…

— Arthur Phillips

“He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in…

— Voltaire

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

— Harold Bloom

in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

— Mary Ruefle

“There are two main traditions of English writing: the one of perfect liberty, that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, completely outspoken, with a certain liking…

— Frank Harris

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers,…

— Virginia Woolf

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

— Virginia Woolf

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

— Stephen Greenblatt

“It is surely significant, for instance, that Romeo and Juliet was written at around the same time as The Merchant of Venice, a play…

— William Shakespeare

“Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state…

— Samuel Johnson