Poems Are Difficult To Silence.

A Comparably Capacious Embrace Of Beauty And Pleasure - An Embrace That Somehow Extends To Death As Well As Life, To Dissolution As Well As Creation - Characterizes Montaigne's Restless Reflections On Matter In Motion, Cervantes's Chronicle Of His Mad Knight, Michelangelo's Depiction Of Flayed Skin, Leonardo's Sketches Of Whirlpools, Caravaggio's Loving Attention To The Dirty Soles Of Christ's Feet.

The Exercise Of Reason Is Not Available Only To Specialists; It Is Accessible To Everyone.

I Believe That Nothing Comes Of Nothing, Even In Shakespeare. I Wanted To Know Where He Got The Matter He Was Working With And What He Did With That Matter.

It Is Not That Shakespeare's Art Is In Technicolor And Fancy, And That Real Life Is Black And White And Tedious. The Life That Shakespeare Was Living Was The Only Life He Had, And He Had To Use It To Create What He Was Doing.

Now A Protestant Confronting A Catholic Ghost Is Exactly Shakespeare's Way Of Grappling With What Was Not Simply A General Social Problem But One Lived Out In His Own Life.