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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: competition, one blue ribbon that always carries the highest critical
rank with it. To win, you must write the best book of your generation
on Shakespear. It is felt on all sides that to do this a certain
fastidious refinement, a delicacy of taste, a correctness of manner
and tone, and high academic distinction in addition to the
indispensable scholarship and literary reputation, are needed; and men
who pretend to these qualifications are constantly looked to with a
gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat.
Now if there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of everything
that this description implies; whose very existence is an insult to
the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice
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