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21 " Schmucker draws a sharp distinction between Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the poet, in what would soon be a favourite gambit of those who doubted his authorship: "
― , Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
22 " By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn’t support–his knowledge of falconry for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands or the ways that the ruling class behaved–should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays. "
23 " Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeare’s works through events in his life. "
24 " Malone chose to fuse life and works through extended notes that appeared at the bottom of each page of text. "
25 " What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote. "
26 " literary biographies, the genre didn’t come into its own until the eighteenth century, spurred by an intense interest in life writing, "
27 " the opening lines of ‘Sonnet 93’ in 1780, which set the direction of Shakespeare biography–and debates over authorship–on a new and irreversible course. "
28 " Steevens was unforgiving. He recognised that Shakespeare scholarship stood at a crossroads, foresaw that once Malone pried open this Pandora’s box it could never be shut again. "
29 " Every author who writes on a variety of topics will have sometimes occasion to describe what he has himself felt. "
30 " The unprofitable game of profiling what could or couldn’t be true of Shakespeare’s character, based on what his characters said or did, had begun. "
31 " With Malone’s decision to parse the plays for evidence of what an author thought or felt, literary biography had crossed a Rubicon. "
32 " Malone’s biographical note to ‘Sonnet 93’ thus introduced yet another centrepiece of modern Shakespearean biography: the tendency to confuse the biographical with the autobiographical, as writers projected onto a largely blank Shakespearean slate their own personalities and preoccupations. "