Time & Perspective Quote by Howard Nemerov

Shakespeare as the original prestige-TV showrunner: endlessly recycling a small stack of plots, but changing the lighting, the tempo, the masks. Howard Nemerov, a poet with a poet's allergy to inflated reverence, punctures the museum-glass aura around the Bard without diminishing him. The barb is gentle but real: what we call Shakespearean "range" is also an elaborate form of repetition, a virtuoso remix culture centuries before the term.

The intent isn't to accuse Shakespeare of laziness. It's to expose how craft can make sameness feel like discovery. "So many guises" is the key phrase: Shakespeare's genius lies in the costume department - in shifting genre, voice, and moral weather so that a familiar engine (jealousy detonates a marriage; ambition eats its host; mistaken identity unspools desire) arrives disguised as a new creature. Nemerov is pointing at technique: the way language, psychology, and theatrical structure can alchemize stock narratives into something that feels uncannily specific.

The subtext lands on us, too. The "long time before you notice" is a wry admission about audiences and readers: we want to be fooled, and great art collaborates in that wish. We don't just miss the repetition; we pay for it.

Context matters: Nemerov wrote in a 20th-century literary world suspicious of canon-worship and newly fluent in ideas about archetypes, mythic patterns, and intertextuality. His line bridges the classroom and the green room: Shakespeare isn't sacred because he invented everything; he's sacred because he keeps re-inventing the same things until they look like fate.