William Shakespeare came from a modest start, but finished life living in a(n)     1       house in Stratford-upon-Avon, with a coat of arms and a series of business investments to his name.

So was William Shakespeare a businessman, as well as a writer?

Researchers have uncovered information from historical documents that point to Shakespeare being a greedy businessman, anxious to grab every penny whose practices caused     2    in his lifetime.

The academics believe that many of Shakespeare’s doubtful business dealings have been     3     by people’s romantic view of him as a creative genius who made his money through acting and writing plays. The idea that Shakespeare gave the world such wonderful narratives, language and entertainment makes it uncomfortable to even     4     that he was simply motivated by his own thirst for financial interest.

Shakespeare was a grain businessman almost for his life time.   He bought and stored grain and then sold it on to his neighbors at high prices.

In the late 16th and early 17th Century a bad weather gripped England. The cold and rain resulted in poor harvests and     5     severe lack of food. Referred to as the ‘Little Ice Age’, the period was the time when thousands of people     6     for survival.   At that time, Shakespeare was under investigation for tax evasion(逃避) and later charged with storing grain when food was     7    .

One could argue that he did not do this without a conscience and that perhaps this is demonstrated in the way he portrayed one of his famous character Shylock in his play the Merchant of Venice.   Many people claim Shylock personifies Shakespeare’s own self-hatred, who is eventually     8     for his greed as a money lender and all that he owns is seized from him. Perhaps with the     9     pursuing Shakespeare for his evil dealings during Little Ice Age, Shylock’s tragic fate was a real fear for Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s     10     funeral monument at Holy Trinity Church was a bag of grain which implied that he prided himself on his role as a grain businessman as well as on his writing. It was not until the 18th century that the bag of grain was replaced by a pillow.

When did globalization begin? Many scholars say it started with Columbus’s voyage to the New World in 1492. Yet people traveled to nearby and faraway places long before his voyage,    1    their ideas, products, and customs along the way. The Silk Road is perhaps the most well-known early example. As globalization developed, new technologies played a    2    role in the Silk Road trade. Advances in transportation led to the building of roads connecting the major empires of the day, and increased    3    production meant more food could be transported. Along with all kinds of products, ideas such as Buddhist beliefs and the secrets of paper-making also    4    through trading.

Unquestionably, these types of exchanges were accelerated (加速) in the Age of Exploration, when European explorers were    5    new sea routes to Asia. Again, technology played an important role in the maritime (海上的) trade routes that flourished between the old and the newly discovered    6    .

The web of globalization    7    to spread out through the Age of Revolution, when ideas about liberty and equality spread like fire from America to France to Latin America and beyond. It rode the waves of industrialization, colonization, and war through the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries, powered by the    8    of factories, railways, steamboats, cars, and planes.

With the Information Age, globalization went into overdrive. The    9    in computer and communications technology launched a new global era and redefined what it meant to be “connected.”

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery was preparing the wall text in 2014 to accompany an image of the boxer Mayweather Jr. During the process, the Washington museum decided to note that Mr. Mayweather had been“charged with domestic violence on several occasions,”receiving“punishments ranging from community service to jail time.”

Such context is common for     1     subjects in art, but far less so for artists themselves. Men like Picasso or Schiele were known for mistreating women, but their works hang in     2     museums without any asterisks（星号）.

Now, museums around the world are     3     with the implications of a decision, by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, to     4     postpone a Chuck Close exhibition because of     5     of sexual harassment（骚扰）involving potential portrait models that have involved the artist in controversy. Mr. Cloze has called the allegations“lies”and said he is“being severely criticized.”

The     6     has raised difficult questions about what to do with the paintings and photographs of Mr. close—held by museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London and the Pompidou in Paris, as well as by high-spending collectors—and whether the work of other artists accused of questionable     7     needs to be revisited.

It is a provocative（引起争论的）moment for the art world, as the public debate about     8     creative output from personal behavior moves from popular culture into the realm of major visual artists from different eras and the institutions that have long collected and exhibited their pieces.

“We’re very used to having to defend people in the collection, but it’s always been for the sitter”rather than the artist, said Kim Sajet, director of the Portrait Gallery, which has a large body of Mr. Close’s work.“Now we have to think to ourselves,‘Do we need to do that about Chuck Close?’”

“You can’t talk about portraiture in America without talking about Chuck Close,”she added.“There are lots of amazing artists who have been less than admirable people.”

Whatever museums     9     decide to do about Mr. Close, some say they can no longer afford to simply present art without     10     the issues that surround the artist—that institutions must play a more active role in educating the public about the human beings behind the work.

The Sculptor Speaks

Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the ability to respond to form in three dimensions(维度). That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most difficult of all arts; certainly it is more difficult than the arts which involve     1     of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions. Many more people are ‘form-blind’ than color-blind. Children learning to see, first distinguishes only two-dimensional shape; it cannot judge distances, depths. Later, for their personal safety and practical needs, they have to develop partly by     2     of touch, the ability to judge roughly three-dimensional distances. But after they     3     the requirements of practical necessity, most people go no further. Though they may     4     considerable accuracy in the perception(知觉，感知) of flat form, they do not make the further intellectual and emotional effort needed to     5     form in its full spatial existence.

This is what the sculptor must do. He must     6     continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head—he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely in the hollow of his hand. He     7     visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like, he will have to     8     himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; and he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air.

And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as     9    , not as description or reminiscence(回忆，联想). He must, for example, see an egg as a simple single solid shape, quite apart from its significance as food, or from the     10     idea that it will become a bird. And so with solids such as a shell, a nut, a plum, a pear, a tadpole, a mushroom, a mountain peak, a kidney, a carrot, a tree-trunk, a bird, a bud, a lark, a ladybird, a bulrush, a bone. From these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms of combinations of several forms.