Playwrights From England

"All that glisters is not gold."

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

"If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces."

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

"The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life."

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind."

"Beware the ides of March."

"A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

"What light through yonder window breaks?"

"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York."

"O God! methinks, it were a happy life, To be no better than a homely swain; To sit upon a hill, as I do now, To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, Thereby to see the minutes how they run: How many make the hour full complete, How many hours bring about the day, How many days will finish up the year, How many years a mortal man may live."

"Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither."

"The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on."

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet."

"Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

"The fox barks not, when he would steal the lamb."

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

"Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill."

"O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?"

"To me, Shakespeare lives if we keep performing his plays. He dies, when we stop performing them."

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once."

"The occasionally expressed popular belief that Shakespeare must have helped prepare the translation of the Bible completed for King James in 1610 is based solely on the circumstances that a few famous passages from the translation and from Shakespeare's tragedies are the only specimens of Jacobian English most people ever hear. Rudyard Kipling, however, composed a whimsical short story, Proofs of Holy Writ, in which one of the translators consults Shakespeare and Jonson, and in 1970, Anthony Burgess pointed out that in the King James Bible the 46th word of the 46th psalm, translated in Shakespeare's 46th year, is "shake", while the 46th word from the end (if one cheats by leaving out the last cadential word "", is "spear"."

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones."

"Over the past two centuries, there has hardly been an author, certainly in the English-speaking world, who has commanded greater reverence than Shakespeare. … There is only one text in the English language that carries comparable prestige to the works of Shakespeare: the Bible, in particular in its most renowned version, the King James Bible, otherwise known as the Authorized Version, of 1611. … In view of the persistent juxtaposition of these two Anglophone cultural icons … it is hardly surprising that they also feature together in a number of fictions of Shakespeare's life, in the form of the fantasy of the Bard as co-translator of the Authorized Version. The originator of this motif seems to have been Rudyard Kipling. In his story "Proofs of Holy Writ," Kipling imagines Shakespeare in the process of revising parts of the Authorized Version with the help of Ben Jonson."

"Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends."

"She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd; She is a woman, therefore to be won."

"Scorn not the Sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart."

"Burgess's Shakespeare is not a patient empire builder or visionary, but rather an unhappy man caught in an unenviable position, at the midlife crisis age of forty-six. … Burgess's point may well be that literary quality is not always recognized during one's lifetime … due to an ill-advised display of his wit in the presence of the king, Shakespeare is currently out of favor. … Particularly ingenious in Burgess's story is the way Shakepeare even hides his name in the text of the psalm. As he is forty-six years of age, he chooses Psalm 46; he counts to the forty-sixth word, replaces it by "shake"' then he starts at the end, counts forty-six words backwards (leaving out of the account the cadential "'"), and changes that word into "speare." The surprising thing is, that the evidence shoring up this highly unlikely scenario is in itself authentic: in Psalm 46 AV, the forty-sixth word really is "shake", the forty-sixth word from the end (not counting "selah") being spear. Although Burgess's Shakespeare revises the psalm for wholly selfish ends, out of defiance and sinful pride, he does not thereby lose our sympathy. Unlike Kiping's self-confident sahib, he is not a superman that can lead nations; rather, in his everyday struggle with political realities, an unhappy marriage, and uncomprehending neighbors, he is a modern antihero whom we cannot begrudge his one moment of triumph. … For Burgess, art is the result of suffering between the hammer of what is and the anvil of what should be. He projects that vision on Shakespeare, whose drive for self-realization, impeded by his surroundings, finds an outlet in this act of creativity."

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge."

"When great poets sing, Into the night new constellations spring, With music in the air that dulls the craft Of rhetoric. So when Shakespeare sang or laughed The world with long, sweet Alpine echoes thrilled Voiceless to scholars' tongues no muse had filled With melody divine."

"Now you who rhyme, and I who rhyme, Have not we sworn it, many a time, That we no more our verse would scrawl, For Shakespeare he had said it all!"

"Voltaire and Shakespeare! He was all The other feigned to be. The flippant Frenchman speaks: I weep; And Shakespeare weeps with me."

"Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie A little nearer Spenser, to make room For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb."

""With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart," once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

"If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators."

"Off with his head!"

"If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of."

"Shakespeare is a savage with sparks of genius which shine in a horrible night."

"The poet of England, he gave to the love of country, to patriotism as nowadays we call it, a voice which never shall be stilled. His histories are, and will ever be, the epic of our race."

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

"This was Shakespeare's form; Who walked in every path of human life, Felt every passion; and to all mankind Doth now, will ever, that experience yield Which his own genius only could acquire."

"Knowing the theory of anything is contrasted with know-how in all the arts...Beethoven..Michelangelo..Shakespeare, all great exponents of know-how, probably knew how to manipulate their instruments to achieve the desired results long before they knew the theory of their art. Perhaps some of them never bothered to learn the theory. On the other hand, there are many who know the theory better than these, but who lack know-how....Although we acquire the skill of understanding words by experience, so that we know the correlations between them and things, between words and other words, and between words and feelings and actions, we do not do it by inductive reasoning. Nor must we think that we do it by deductive reasoning... In the main, words are cues rather than clues."

"Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge."

"It is a wise father that knows his own child."

"Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting Quill Commandeth Mirth or Passion, was but Will."

"Why Shakespeare lends itself so well to film is because he wrote movies."

"As divinest Shakespeare's might Fills Avon and the world with light, Like omniscient power, which he Imaged 'mid mortality."

"A man can die but once."

"We not only open the classics to re-create the past; we also use them to calibrate the present. Look at Shakespeare. I dream of doing a Restless Shakespeare; in fact, the name of this series is already a mission statement. There is arguably no more reprinted author in the English language. Do we need another Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and The Tempest? No doubt we do. He is a kaleidoscope that fluctuates depending on who is looking through it. There is the Elizabethan Shakespeare, the Victorian, the modern, the postmodern, the postcolonial, and so on. And there is also a restless Shakespeare, capable of conveying the perspective of a world always in transit and reorganized at all times—and at all costs—by outsiders. That’s the Shakespeare I’m after, one that lives in English but becomes an emblem of a world without a center."

"The English stage might be considered equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose. The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius, in its turn, is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into existence. Such was the case with Shakspeare. Had he received an education more extensive, and possessed a taste refined by the classical models, it is probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient Drama, might have mistaken the form for the essence, and subscribed to those rules which had produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately for the full exertion of a genius, as comprehensive and versatile, as intense and powerful, Shakspeare had no access to any models of which the commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the path which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him; but he moved in it with the grace and majestic step of a being of a superior order; and vindicated for ever the British theatre from a pedantic restriction to classical rule. Nothing went before Shakspeare which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character of a national Drama; and certainly no one will succeed him, capable of establishing, by mere authority, a form more restricted than that which Shakspeare used."