None of Shakespeare's dramas has a professional playwright at the Globe Theatre as a protagonist, whereas we heirs of the Romantics often make the artist himself the center of his art.
"The strongest among us can resist those temptations, but rules (and editors) exist in part because we are heir to the normal frailties that comes with being human".
So we are heirs to the Great Separation only if we wish to be, if we make a conscious effort to separate basic principles of political legitimacy from divine revelation.
We are the heirs, we believe, of generations of martyrs - and that in a sense makes us morally pure.
"You know, we need 12 jurors for a verdict, eh? "Anybody want cigarettes?" Throwing a defendant into a lake seems barbaric to us, or blackly funny: we are heirs of the Enlightenment, after all; we are modern, thank God.
We can do justice in this life because we are heirs to the promise of God's grace and can affirm "from thy wrath, and from everlasting damnation, good Lord deliver us".
Restoration work started only four years ago.The guide, a spiky-haired 19-year-old called Sergio, takes visitors to the main square where he shows off a recently erected plaque that contains the conciliatory message: "We stretch out our hands to our Spanish brethren because we are heirs to the wisdom of the Indians and the gallantry of the Spaniards".
We are not prophets but we are their heirs and we are not bereft of guidance on these fateful issues".
We are heirs both to this progressive understanding of the child and to the Romantic vision.
"Praying here, we, the heirs of Vladimir's baptism, living in different states, inviolately preserve the spiritual unity bestowed by him upon us".
And we are heirs to a difficult, provoking, visionary art, which at the Met looks, often for all the wrong reasons, lustrously right.
