present his characters as real people, neither fully good nor fully evil, but fully human. As he did with the people around him, Balzac studied these places in depth, traveling to remote locations and surveying notes that he had made on previous visits. "The artist of the Comédie Humaine," he wrote, "is half smothered by the historian. "Balzac has received high praise from critics as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Camille Paglia. It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death. The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes