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

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig - is to understand the nature of the occasion.

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

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 Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.

Poems are difficult to silence.