“I wound up with Othello, Lear and Macbeth and one is inclined to be silent about them–they are so stupendous. Othello is disagreeable to me because his villain comes down front and tells you he is a villain and what nasty things he means to do, and chance favors him unfairly, but the talk is so tremendous that you forgive that. As to Shakespeare generally, apart from the superlative passages, as I believe I said the other day, he can talk better than Richard II or Macbeth or any of the rest of them, and he gives you his talk without too much regard to whose mouth he uses. It is a transcendent echo of life rather than life. How far is our pleasure in his language a matter of education and convention like that in the language of the Bible or the French delight in snoring tirades in Alexandrine verse which gives me no pleasure at all?”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1922)