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

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

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 greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

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.