shakespeare

"THE RAGING ROCKS AND SHIVERING SHOCKS SHALL BREAK THE LOCKS OF PRISON GATES!! And Phoebus' car shall shine from far and make and mar… THE FOOLISH FIGHTS."

"But stay, O spite! But mark, poor knight! What dreadful dole is here! Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O fainting fox! O dear! Thy mantle good, What, stained with blood? Approach, ye Furies fell! O Fates, come, come, Cut thread and thrum. I’ll crush, conclude, OR QUELL."

"Cloud-kissing Ilion."

"His beard, all silver white, Wagg'd up and down."

"No man inveigh against the wither’d flower, But chide rough winter that the flower hath kill’d."

"Why should the private pleasure of some one Become the public plague of many moe? Let sin, alone committed, light alone Upon his head that hath transgressèd so; Let guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe; For one’s offence why should so many fall, To plague a private sin in general?"

"And that deep torture may be called a hell, When more is felt than one hath power to tell."

"The two poems of Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject,—not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shows the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is laboured, up-hill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them as if his mastery over them were doubted. The images, which are often striking, are generally applied to things which they are the least like: so that they do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon it, like splendid patchwork, or remain quite distinct from it, like detached substances, painted and varnished over. A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it. The speakers are like persons who have both leisure and inclination to make riddles on their own situation, and to twist and turn every object or incident into acrostics and anagrams. Everything is spun out into allegory; and a digression is always preferred to the main story. Sentiment is built up upon plays of words; the hero or heroine feels, not from the impulse of passion, but from the force of dialectics. There is besides, a strange attempt to substitute the language of painting for that of poetry, to make us see their feelings in the faces of the persons; and again, consistently with this, in the description of the picture in Tarquin and Lucrece, those circumstances are chiefly insisted on, which it would be impossible to convey except by words. The invocation to Opportunity in the Tarquin and Lucrece is full of thoughts and images, but at the same time it is overloaded by them."

"What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have devoted yours."

"The aim of all is but to nurse the life With honour, wealth, and ease, in waning age; And in this aim there is such thwarting strife, That one for all, or all for one we gage; As life for honour in fell battles’ rage; Honour for wealth; and oft that wealth doth cost The death of all, and all together lost."

"Into the chamber wickedly he stalks And gazeth on her yet unstainèd bed."

"Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no words; Sometime ’tis mad and too much talk affords."

"Love thrives not in the heart that shadows dreadeth."

"Beauty itself doth of itself persuade The eyes of men without an orator."

"And my true eyes have never practis’d how To cloak offences with a cunning brow."

"O Opportunity! thy guilt is great, ’Tis thou that execut’st the traitor’s treason; Thou sett’st the wolf where he the lamb may get; Whoever plots the sin, thou point’st the season; ’Tis thou that spurn’st at right, at law, at reason; And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him, Sits Sin to seize the souls that wander by him.Thou mak’st the vestal violate her oath; Thou blow’st the fire when temperance is thaw’d; Thou smother’st honesty, thou murder’st troth; Thou foul abettor! thou notorious bawd! Thou plantest scandal and displacest laud: Thou ravisher, thou traitor, thou false thief, Thy honey turns to gall, thy joy to grief!Thy secret pleasure turns to open shame, Thy private feasting to a public fast, Thy smoothing titles to a ragged name, Thy sugar’d tongue to bitter wormwood taste: Thy violent vanities can never last. How comes it, then, vile Opportunity, Being so bad, such numbers seek for thee?When wilt thou be the humble suppliant’s friend, And bring him where his suit may be obtain’d? When wilt thou sort an hour great strifes to end? Or free that soul which wretchedness hath chain’d? Give physic to the sick, ease to the pain’d? The poor, lame, blind, halt, creep, cry out for thee; But they ne’er meet with Opportunity.The patient dies while the physician sleeps; The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds; Justice is feasting while the widow weeps; Advice is sporting while infection breeds: Thou grant’st no time for charitable deeds: Wrath, envy, treason, rape, and murder’s rages, Thy heinous hours wait on them as their pages.When Truth and Virtue have to do with thee, A thousand crosses keep them from thy aid: They buy thy help; but Sin ne’er gives a fee, He gratis comes; and thou art well appaid As well to hear as grant what he hath said."

"Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under, Cozening the pillow of a lawful kiss; Who, therefore angry, seems to part in sunder, Swelling on either side to want his bliss; Between whose hills her head entombed is; Where like a virtuous monument she lies, To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes."

"Time’s glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light, To stamp the seal of time in aged things, To wake the morn and sentinel the night, To wrong the wronger till he render right, To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours, And smear with dust their glittering golden towers;To fill with worm-holes stately monuments, To feed oblivion with decay of things, To blot old books and alter their contents, To pluck the quills from ancient ravens’ wings, To dry the old oak’s sap and cherish springs, To spoil antiquities of hammer’d steel, And turn the giddy round of Fortune’s wheel;To show the beldam daughters of her daughter, To make the child a man, the man a child, To slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter, To tame the unicorn and lion wild, To mock the subtle, in themselves beguil’d, To cheer the ploughman with increaseful crops, And waste huge stones with little water-drops."

"Pure Chastity is rifled of her store, And Lust, the thief, far poorer than before."

"What win I if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to get a toy?"

"Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud? Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests? Or toads infect fair founts with venom mud? Or tyrant folly lurk in gentle breasts? Or kings be breakers of their own behests? But no perfection is so absolute, That some impurity doth not pollute."

"Let fair humanity abhor the deed That spots and stains love's modest snow-white weed."

"This is no dusky Malvolio with wand and cap of office, but a Nigerian maiden in her ornate, though scanty, wedding finery."

"[W]e feel a regard for Malvolio, and sympathize with his gravity, his smiles, his cross-garters, his yellow stockings, and imprisonment in the stocks."

"Truly, madam, he holds Belzebub at the staves's end as well as a man in his case may do: has here writ a letter to you; I should have given't you to-day morning, but as a madman's epistles are no gospels, so it skills not much when they are delivered."

"Who after this will say that Shakespeare's genius was only fitted for comedy? Yet after reading other parts of this play, and particularly the garden-scene where Malvolio picks up the letter, if we were to say that his genius for comedy was less than his genius for tragedy, it would perhaps only prove that our own taste in such matters is more saturnine than mercurial. [...] The letter and his comments on it are equally good. If poor Malvolio's treatment afterwards is a little hard, poetical justice is done in the uneasiness which Olivia suffers on account of her mistaken attachment to Cesario, as her insensibility to the violence of the Duke's passion is atoned for by the discovery of Viola's concealed love of him."

"Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"

"Why you have given me such clear lights of favour, Bade me come smiling and cross-garter'd to you, To put on yellow stockings and to frown Upon Sir Toby and the lighter people; And, acting this in an obedient hope, Why have you suffer'd me to be imprison'd, Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest, And made the most notorious geck and gull That e'er invention play'd on? tell me why."

"I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you."

"If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourself into stitches, follow me. Yond gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian, that means to be saved by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He's in yellow stockings."

"Fry's Malvolio is a dessicated [sic] mandarin who makes a fool of himself because he mistakenly thinks he has a chance of love, more than of social advancement."

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

"Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?"

"This is my lady's hand these be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's."

"Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do you make an ale-house of my lady’s house, that you squeak out your coziers’ catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?"

"Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite."

"Put thyself into the trick of singularity."

"I think we do know the sweet Roman hand."

"Feste: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl? Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird."

"It was like reading fairy tales, an intimate experience not surpassed by my later reading of the original plays."

"My Tales are to be published in separate story-books. I mean in single stories, like the children's little shilling books. I cannot send you them in manuscript, because they are all in the Godwins' hands; but one will be published very soon, and then you shall have it all in print. ... Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet; you would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night's Dream; or rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it."

"I cannot tell exactly when I began Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare"; but I know that I read them at first with a child's understanding and a child's wonder."

"Often, after a hard day's teaching, my father used to have his breakfast in bed next morning, when we children were allowed to scramble up to the counterpane and lie around him to see what new book he had bought for us, and listen to his description and explanation of it. Never can I forget the boundless joy and interest with which I heard him tell about the contents of two volumes he had just brought home, as he showed me the printed pictures in them. They were an early edition of 'Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare.' And what a vast world of new ideas and new delights that opened to me! a world in which I have ever since much dwelt, and always with supreme pleasure and admiration."

"[Mary] says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes you should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin's bookseller twenty of Shakespeare's plays, to be made into children's tales. Six are already done by her; to wit, The Tempest, A Winter's Tale, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cymbeline. The Merchant of Venice is in forwardness. I have done Othello and Macbeth, and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people, besides money. It is to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally I think you'd think."

"It has been wished to make these Tales easy reading for very young children... For young ladies too, it has been the intention chiefly to write... it is hoped they will find that the [original] in this way will be much better relished and understood from their having some notion of the general story from one of these imperfect abridgments..."

"...it was the only way in which could be given to them a few hints and little foretastes of the great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years, when they come to the rich treasures from which these small and valueless coins are extracted."

"What these Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers' wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages are full."

"Mary is just stuck fast in All's Well that Ends Well. She complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boys' clothes. She begins to think Shakespeare must have wanted imagination! I, to encourage her (for she often faints in the prosecution of her great work), flatter her with telling how well such and such a play is done. But she is stuck fast, and I have been obliged to promise to assist her."

"The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote: therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided."

"If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue."