Actors From England

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

"The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burnt on the water."

"Were Shakespeare around to write a play about our times, perhaps his opening line to the Plutocracy would be "Get thee to the Oligarchy. Blend yourselves together and thou shalt rule invincible forever after.""

"'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'"

"The best thing I could say in honour of Shakespeare, the man, is that he believed in Brutus and cast not a shadow of suspicion on the kind of virtue which Brutus represents! It is to him that Shakespeare consecrated his best tragedy—it is at present still called by a wrong name,—to him and to the most terrible essence of lofty morality. Independence of soul!—that is the question at issue! No sacrifice can be too great there: one must be able to sacrifice to it even one's dearest friend, though he be also the grandest of men, the ornament of the world, the genius without peer,—if one really loves freedom as the freedom of great souls, and if this freedom be threatened by him:—it is thus that Shakespeare must have felt! The elevation in which he places Cæsar is the most exquisite honour he could confer upon Brutus; it is thus only that he lifts into vastness the inner problem of his hero, and similarly the strength of soul which could cut this knot!—And was it actually political freedom that impelled the poet to sympathy with Brutus,—and made him the accomplice of Brutus? Or was political freedom merely a symbol for something inexpressible? Do we perhaps stand before some sombre event or adventure of the poet's own soul, which has remained unknown, and of which he only cared to speak symbolically? What is all Hamlet-melancholy in comparison with the melancholy of Brutus!—and perhaps Shakespeare also knew this, as he knew the other, by experience! Perhaps he also had his dark hour and his bad angel, just as Brutus had them!—But whatever similarities and secret relationships of that kind there may have been, Shakespeare cast himself on the ground and felt unworthy and alien in presence of the aspect and virtue of Brutus:—he has inscribed the testimony thereof in the tragedy itself. He has twice brought in a poet in it, and twice heaped upon him such an impatient and extreme contempt, that it sounds like a cry,—like the cry of self-contempt. Brutus, even Brutus loses patience when the poet appears, self-important, pathetic, and obtrusive, as poets usually are,—persons who seem to abound in the possibilities of greatness, even moral greatness, and nevertheless rarely attain even to ordinary uprightness in the philosophy of practice and of life. "He may know the times, but I know his temper,—away with the jigging fool!"—shouts Brutus. We may translate this back into the soul of the poet that composed it."

"Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he's full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakspeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel, Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespeare's person."

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

"And so sepulchr'd, in such pomp dost lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die."

"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."

"On this planet the reputation of Shakespeare is secure. When life is discovered elsewhere in the universe and some interplanetary traveler brings to this new world the fruits of our terrestrial culture, who can imagine anything but that among the first books carried to the curious strangers will be a Bible and the works of WIlliam Shakespeare."

"Cry 'Havoc!,' and let slip the dogs of war."

"For some reason, I really enjoyed the histories and tragedies of Shakespeare not the comedies. Today, I marvel at the fact that we never questioned Shakespeare's deification of the ruling class, or his marginalization of the masses either as gullible crowds or as jesters. We had enough intelligence to do so, but we were, ideologically, under the captivity of colonial educational propaganda."

"Some of Shakspeare's plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful. Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the soliloquy in Hamlet commencing "O, my offence is rank surpasses that commencing "To be, or not to be." But pardon this small attempt at criticism."

"Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps."

"This vision comes to me when I unfold The volume of the Poet paramount, Whom all the muses loved, not one alone;— Into his hands they put the lyre of gold, And, crowned with sacred laurel at their fount, Placed him as Musagetes on their throne."

"Beware the ides of March."

"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."

"I spoke of women teaching women's literature courses who said that they could not teach Black women's poetry because it was so totally outside of their experience. That's bullshit because you teach Shakespeare and, God knows, that's outside of your experience. But you have to have learned to enter the work. You must delve into it and see what it tells you about yourself."

"Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never."

"Of all English literature I was exposed to, Shakespeare's tragedies moved most. I could recite soliloquies by Macbeth, Hamlet, Portia, Shylock, King Lear, Cordelia with great feeling. I think it was the music of the lines, the sound of the words, that excited me."

"We have watched kings falling in country after country, and it is likely that the works of Shakespeare have themselves done much to preserve our own intuition and understanding of royalty."

"A man can die but once."

"Always in Shakespeare royalty aspires to be a Christian power; it is, or symbolizes, Christ in power."

"Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's; Therefore on him no speech!"

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

"Shakespeare's drama, with its fanfares and ceremonial, abounds in kingly ritual; and his people speak, move, act royally. Villains or heroes, it is no matter; it all lies deeper than ethic. We have for long talked of the Crown as the link binding an empire of free communities: that is true, and it is a great conception, herald and pattern, it may be, of a yet greater."

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

"When we speak of the aim and Art observable in Shakespeare's works, we must not forget that Art belongs to Nature; that it is, so to speak, self-viewing, self-imitating, self-fashioning Nature. The Art of a well-developed genius is far different from the Artfulness of the Understanding, of the merely reasoning mind. Shakspeare was no calculator, no learned thinker; he was a mighty, many-gifted soul, whose feelings and works, like products of Nature, bear the stamp of the same spirit; and in which the last and deepest of observers will still find new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man. They are emblematic, have many meanings, are simple and inexhaustible, like products of Nature; and nothing more unsuitable could be said of them than that they are works of Art, in that narrow mechanical acceptation of the word."

"Æschylus is above all things the poet of righteousness. "But in any wise, I say unto thee, revere thou the altar of righteousness": this is the crowning admonition of his doctrine, as its crowning prospect is the reconciliation or atonement of the principle of retribution with the principle of redemption, of the powers of the mystery of darkness with the coeternal forces of the spirit of wisdom, of the lord of inspiration and of light. The doctrine of Shakespeare, where it is not vaguer, is darker in its implication of injustice, in its acceptance of accident, than the impression of the doctrine of Æschylus. Fate, irreversible and inscrutable, is the only force of which we feel the impact, of which we trace the sign, in the upshot of Othello or King Lear. The last step into the darkness remained to be taken by "the most tragic" of all English poets. With Shakespeare — and assuredly not with Æschylus — righteousness itself seems subject and subordinate to the masterdom of fate: but fate itself, in the tragic world of Webster, seems merely the servant or the synonym of chance."

"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?"

"The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays."

"As merry as the day is long."

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts."

"When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder That such trivial people should muse and thunder In such lovely language."

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!"

"Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."

"England must be true to herself: that is the burden of Shakespeare's unsentimental patriotism."

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

"Such evil is often in Shakespeare felt as inhuman and bestial; it is—or should be—un-English; and the central symbolism to which Shakespeare's English warriors regularly appeal before battle is Saint George, the dragon-vanquisher. In Henry VI Talbot in a speech of national daring boasts he will celebrate Saint George's feast in France, and in the civil warfare of the second and third parts both sides cry on God and Saint George before battle."

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

"The sense of place has to do with everything. One of the mottos that has given me a lot of help and inspiration is remembering that somewhere I think it's in The Tempest-Shakespeare said that one of the goals of the writer and the artist is to give to airy nothing local habitation and a name. The Tempest is a play about a place, about finding a Brave New World. And it's about human beings maybe getting another chance again and going off to an island where they could figure out what it means to start community, or find out what it is to love. So, that phrase-to give to airy nothing local habitation and a name. I've decided that what that means is that abstract ideas and values are nothing. They're invisible, they're not dramatic, and they're not interesting unless you can localize them, can give them physical manifestation, can write about an actual place. You have to ground your ideas. We have to embody ideas in our characters and act them out in life. Ideas about altruism or a vision about a Brave New World. In art, what I think he's saying is to write about an actual place, write flesh-and-blood people, give them all ideas and standards. And then see whether they can take the test of a physical place, see whether their ideas hold up as they try to live in real life."

"Shakespeare, after a long line of outwardly non-historical plays, plays not obviously concerned with England's destiny at all, yet each...closely concerned with the deepest and darkest issues raised by consideration of that destiny in his earlier work, after all this, Shakespeare writes, as his last play, Henry VIII. His bark has come to harbour. He returns to a national theme, set nearer his own day than any previous attempt, and deeply loads it with orthodox Christian feeling. Here the extravagances and profundities of the great sequence come, at last, to rest."

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

"He has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing."

"What light through yonder window breaks?"

"At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

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

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