Lincoln's Study of Shakespeare

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Lincoln's reading of Shakespeare is the subject here, a side of the president that often gets less attention than his speeches and war leadership. He was known to read the plays closely and to recite passages from memory, and *Macbeth* and *Hamlet* were among his favorites. Many of his contemporaries remembered him quoting lines from the tragedies in conversation, and he sometimes read them aloud in the evenings. The picture places him in that private world of books, a reminder that the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address also drew heavily on the language of the stage.

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