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William Shakespeare

English playwright and poet (1564–1616)

William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.

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...
~ Jaques in As You Like It
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Cassius, Act I, scene ii.
See also:
Hamlet
King Lear
Romeo and Juliet
and more works on Wikiquote.

Quotes

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But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
~ Prospero in The Tempest
 
Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light. ~ The Rape of Lucrece
 
Blese be the man that spares these stones
And curst be he that moves my bones
  • What cannot be eschewed must be embraced
    • "The Merry Wives of Windsor", Act 5
  • Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
    To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.
    • The Rape of Lucrece.
  • That deep torture may be called a hell,
    When more is felt than one hath power to tell.
    • The Rape of Lucrece.
  • On a day — alack the day! —
    Love, whose month is ever May,
    Spied a blossom passing fair
    Playing in the wanton air
    • Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, II. Not to be confused with The Sonnets; this poem is not a sonnet
  • Crabbed age and youth cannot live together:
    Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care
    • The Passionate Pilgrim: A Madrigal; there is some doubt about the authorship of this.
  • Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare
    To digg the dust encloased heare
    Blese be the man that spares these stones
    And curst be he that moves my bones
    • Shakespeare's epitaph


Richard III (1592–3)

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Main article: Richard III (play)
  • Now is the winter of our discontent
    Made glorious summer by this sun of York.
    • Richard, Act I, scene i.
  • Off with his head!
    • Richard, Act III, scene iv.
  • A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
    • Richard, Act V, scene iv.

Romeo and Juliet (1595)

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Main article: Romeo and Juliet
  • What light through yonder window breaks?
    • Romeo, Act II, scene ii.
  • What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
    By any other name would smell as sweet.
    • Juliet, Act II, scene ii.
  • O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
    • Juliet, Act II, scene ii.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)

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Main article: A Midsummer Night's Dream
  • The course of true love never did run smooth.
    • Lysander, Act I, scene i.
  • Lord, what fools these mortals be!
    • Puck, Act III, scene ii.
  • Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
    And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.
    • Helena, Act I, scene i.

The Merchant of Venice (1596–7)

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Main article: The Merchant of Venice
  • 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.
    • Portia, Act I, scene ii.
  • 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?
    • Shylock, Act III, scene i.

Henry IV, Part 1 (1597-8)

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Main article: Henry IV, Part 1
  • The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.
    • Falstaff, Act V, scene iv.

Henry IV, Part 2 (1597-8)

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Main article: Henry IV, Part 2
  • A man can die but once.
    • Feeble, Act III, scene ii.
  • Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
    • King Henry, Act III, scene i.

Much Ado About Nothing (1598)

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Main article: Much Ado About Nothing
  • As merry as the day is long.
    • Beatrice, Act II, scene i.
  • Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
    Men were deceivers ever;
    One foot in sea, and one on shore,
    To one thing constant never.
    • Balthazar, Act II, scene iii.
  • Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.
    • Hero, Act III, scene i.

Julius Caesar (1599)

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Main article: Julius Caesar (play)
  • Beware the ides of March.
    • Soothsayer, Act I, scene ii.
  • 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.
    • Cassius, Act I, scene ii.
  • Cowards die many times before their deaths;
    The valiant never taste of death but once.
    • Caesar, Act II, scene ii.
  • Cry 'Havoc!,' and let slip the dogs of war.
    • Antony, Act III, scene i.
  • 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.
    • Antony, Act III, scene ii.

As You Like It (1599–1600)

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Main article: As You Like It
  • 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.
    • Jaques, Act II, scene vii.
  • 'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'
    • Touchstone, Act V, scene i

Hamlet (1600–1)

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Main article: Hamlet
  • Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
    For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
    And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
    This above all: to thine ownself be true.
    And it must follow, as the night the day,
    Thou canst not then be false to any man.
    • Polonius, Act I, scene iii.
  • Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
    • Polonius, Act I, scene iii.
  • The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
    That ever I was born to set it right!
    • Hamlet, Act I, scene v.
  • There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
    • Hamlet, Act II, scene ii.
  • 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!
    • Hamlet, Act II, scene ii.
  • To be or not to be, that is the question.
    • Hamlet, Act III, scene i.

Twelfth Night (1601)

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Main article: Twelfth Night
  • If music be the food of love, play on.
    • Orsino, Act I, scene i.
  • Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
    • Malvolio, Act II, scene v.

Othello (1603–4)

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Main article: Othello
  • Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving.
    • Iago, Act II, scene iii.
  • Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well.
    • Othello, Act V, scene ii.

Timon of Athens (1605)

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Main article: Timon of Athens
  • We have seen better days.
    • Flavius, Act IV, scene ii.

King Lear (1605–6)

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Main article: King Lear
  • Nothing can come of nothing.
    • Lear, Act I, scene i.
  • How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
    To have a thankless child!
    • Lear, Act I, scene iv.
  • I am a man,
    More sinn'd against than sinning.
    • Lear, Act III, scene ii.

Antony and Cleopatra (1606)

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Main article: Antony and Cleopatra
  • The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
    Burnt on the water.
    • Enobarbus, Act II, scene ii.

Macbeth (1606)

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Main article: Macbeth
  • Come what come may,
    Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
    • Macbeth, Act I, scene iii.
  • Is this a dagger which I see before me,
    The handle toward my hand?
    • Macbeth, Act II, scene i.
  • Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.
    • Macbeth, Act V, scene v.
  • All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
    • Macbeth, Act V, scene i.

Sonnets (1609)

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Main article: The Sonnets
  • Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
    Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
    Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
    And summer's lease hath all too short a date
    • XVIII
  • So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
    • XVIII
  • Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments.
    • CXVI

Cymbeline (1610)

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Main article: Cymbeline
  • Golden lads and girls all must,
    As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
    • Guiderius, Act IV, scene ii.

The Tempest (1611)

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Main article: The Tempest
  • Full fathom five thy father lies;
    Of his bones are coral made;
    Those are pearls that were his eyes;
    Nothing of him that doth fade,
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange.
    • Ariel, Act I, scene ii.
  • Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.
    • Trinculo, Act II, scene ii.
  • We are such stuff
    As dreams are made on; and our little life
    Is rounded with a sleep.
    • Prospero, Act IV, scene i.


Misattributed

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  • Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. The saying goes you live by the sword you shall die by the sword...It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.
    • This statement by an unknown author has also been wrongly attributed to Julius Caesar, as well as to Shakespeare's play on his assassination and its aftermath, but there are no records of it prior to late 2000. It has been debunked at Snopes.com
  • Nothing is more common than the wish to be remarkable.
    • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), ch. XII : Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Misattributed to Shakespeare in Criminal Minds ("L.D.S.K." - season 1, episode 6).
  • Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.
    • Derived from A Midsummer Night's Dream on p. 269, Aphorisms from Shakespeare (1812), Capel Lofft, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, a book which rewrites in aphoristic form Shakespeare quotations, in this case the exchange between Hermia and Theseus: "I would my father look'd but with my eyes", "Rather your eyes must with his judgment look".
  • However wickedness outstrips men, it has no wings to fly from God.
    • Derived from a longer quote in Henry V, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 283.
  • He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.
    • Truly from Seneca the Younger, in De Ira, Book III, Chapter V:
      Aut potentior te aut inbecillior laesit: si inbecillior, parce illi, si potentior, tibi.
  • The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
    • Not by Shakespeare, but from Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations, a 1993 self-help book by David S. Viscott.[1]
  • There is plenty of time to sleep in the grave.

Quotes about Shakespeare

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Shakespear's Magick could not copy'd be,
Within that Circle none durst walk but he. ~ John Dryden
 
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good. ~ Robert Graves
 
Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it. ~ John Keats
Alphabetised by author
  • when you look for the motivations you always go to the basic instincts, to the basic emotions, the basic things that have moved humankind always. That's what all writers write about, ultimately. What did Shakespeare write about? Jealousy, love, sex, power, greed, the same stuff that soap operas and the Bible are made of. It's always the same.
  • Can you imagine if somebody told him in the 16th century, 'Listen, you're going to inspire a black girl in the 20th century in Arkansas, who will be a mute"?
  • Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.
  • Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves. Subsequently, he may teach us how to accept change, in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change. Hamlet is death's ambassador to us, perhaps one of the few ambassadors ever sent out by death who does not lie to us about our inevitable relationship with that undiscovered country. The relationship is altogether solitary, despite all of tradition's obscene attempts to socialize it.
  • I love that moment in Joyce when his friend, the painter, asks him the desert-island question about which of the two greatest Western writers to keep: "I should like to answer Dante, but I would have to take the Englishman, because he is richer!" He is, it's the truth. He is richer than Homer, which is astonishing. Everybody in The Divine Comedy, except Dante the Pilgrim, has achieved their final form. But Shakespeare is change. In that sense, he always remains an Ovidian poet, and in the same sense, anti-Platonic.
  • History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: "I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself." The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one."
  • Shakespeare is a bard of mass destruction.
  • Shakespeare's drama, where ideal women walk
    in worship, and the baser sort find sympathy.
  • If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilized discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.
  • Know the same favour which the former knew,
    A shrine for Shakspeare—worthy him and you?
    Yes—it shall be—the magic of that name
    Defies the scythe of time, the torch of flame.
    • Lord Byron, Address spoken at the opening of Drury Lane Theatre, (10 October 1812), The Works of Lord Byron. Complete in One Volume (1837)
  • Shakespeare's name, you may depend upon it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into dramatic shape... That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny; but this was all.
    • Lord Byron, letter to James Hogg (24 March 1814), as quoted in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 221.
  • My object has been to dramatise, like the Greeks (a modest phrase), striking passages of history, as they did of history and mythology. You will find all this very unlike Shakspeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of writers.
    • Lord Byron, letter to John Murray (14 July 1821), The Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters and Journals (1847)
  • Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English: never have had any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakespeare!
    • Thomas Carlyle, "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History" (1841), Lecture 3. The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakespeare.
  • The first play I ever saw was a Shakespeare play... The great rolling emotion somehow comes through. So it was personal. But I think also if you're English and English literature is the thing, you can't help it. In Shakespeare the more I read the more I see the amount of things that come from Shakespeare or come via Shakespeare to the English cannot be exaggerated, and you find it everywhere, it's like the air you breathe. And so one's categories of character are so much the ones that Shakespeare created.
    • Lord David Cecil, quoted in Tristram Powell, 'A Television Interview', in David Cecil: A Portrait by his Friends (1990), p. 163
  • The souls most fed with Shakespeare's flame
    Still sat unconquered in a ring,
    Remembering him like anything.
  • The greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare.
    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), Chapter XV. Borrowed from a Greek monk who applied it to a Patriarch of Constantinople.
  • He is of no age — nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.
  • He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher.
  • The true description of us is the complex, ever-changing pattern of interactions of billions of them [neurons]... The abbreviated and approximate shorthand that we employ every day to describe human behavior is a smudged caricature of our true selves. "What a piece of work is a man!" said Shakespeare. Had he been living today he might have given us the poetry we so sorely need to celebrate all these remarkable discoveries.
    • Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)
  • I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
    • Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I (1860), as quoted in Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations (2005), p. 253.
  • 'I'm always ill after Shakespeare,' said Mrs Wititterly. 'I scarcely exist the next day; I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakespeare is such a delicious creature.'
  • But Shakespear's Magick could not copy'd be,
    Within that Circle none durst walk but he.
  • To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look'd inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the poets.
    • John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), "Shakespeare and Ben Jonson Compared".
  • If I would compare him [Jonson] with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit.
    • John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), "Shakespeare and Ben Jonson Compared".
  • Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing. I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.
    • John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), "Shakespeare and Ben Jonson Compared".
  • I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
  • Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.
    • T. S. Eliot, "Dante" (1929), from Selected Essays (1932).
  • What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
  • England's genius filled all measure
    Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
    Gave to the mind its emperor,
    And life was larger than before:
    Nor sequent centuries could hit
    Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
    The men who lived with him became
    Poets, for the air was fame.
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Solution," lines 35–42, Poems (1918), p. 222. These lines are inscribed above the fireplace in the old reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.
  • The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century.
  • Ultimately, Anthony Burgess's emphasis on the multiplicity of meanings latent in the text of Shakespeare's life foregrounds his own appropriation of Shakespeare … Clearly this is not an inconsistency on Burgess's part but a deliberate pointer at the inevitability of appropriating any given text, particularly that most irresistible one of Shakespeare's life.
  • Do you know how they are going to decide the Shakespeare-Bacon dispute? They are going to dig up Shakespeare and dig up Bacon; they are going to set their coffins side by side, and they are going to get Tree to recite Hamlet to them. And the one who turns in his coffin will be the author of the play.
    • W. S. Gilbert, letter quoted in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 426.
  • 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.
  • The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
    • Robert Graves, in The Observer, "Sayings of the Week", (6 December 1964).
  • Far from the sun and summer-gale,
    In thy green lap was Nature's Darling laid.
    • Thomas Gray, The Progress of Poesy (1754), lines 83-84.
  • For there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.
  • This figure that thou here seest put,
    It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
    Wherein the graver had a strife
    With Nature, to out-do the life:
    O could he but have drawn his wit
    As well in brass, as he has hit
    His face; the print would then surpass
    All that was ever writ in brass:
    But since he cannot, reader, look
    Not on his picture, but his book.
    • Ben Jonson, on the Portrait of Shakespeare, from Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623), "To the Reader", as quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999), p. 420.
  • Soul of the Age!
    The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
    My Shakespeare...
    Thou art a monument, without a tomb,
    And art alive still while thy book doth live,
    And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
    • Ben Jonson, To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare (1623)
  • He was not of an age, but for all time!
    • Ben Jonson, To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare (1623)
  • I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand".
    • Ben Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (1640)
  • There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.
    • Ben Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (1640)
  • He was honest, and of an open and free nature[, and] had an excellent fantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions.
    • Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter (1641), p. 98
  • He that tries to recommend him by select Quotations, will succeed like the Pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his House to Sale, carried a Brick in his Pocket as a Specimen.
    • Samuel Johnson, The plays of William Shakespeare, Vol. I (1765), Preface.
  • Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and Ludicrous characters and they sometimes produce sorrow and sometimes laughter.
    That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.
    • Samuel Johnson, The plays of William Shakespeare, Vol. I (1765), Preface.
  • Yet it must be at last confessed, that as we owe every thing to him [Shakespeare], he owes something to us; that, if much of his praise is paid by perception and judgment, much is likewise given by custom and veneration. We fix our eyes upon his graces, and turn them from his deformities, and endure in him what we should in another loath or despise.
    • Samuel Johnson, The plays of William Shakespeare, Vol. I (1765), Preface.
  • I never quite despair and I read Shakspeare — indeed I shall I think never read any other Book much [...] I am very near Agreeing with Hazlit that Shakspeare is enough for us.
    • John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon (11 May 1817).
  • He has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing.
    • John Keats, in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (22 November 1817).
  • 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.
    • John Keats, in a letter to George and Tom Keats ([21/27?] December 1817).
  • Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.
    • John Keats, in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats (19 February 1819)
  • 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.
  • England must be true to herself: that is the burden of Shakespeare's unsentimental patriotism.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'Saint George for England', The Olive and The Sword: A Study of England's Shakespeare (1944), p. 14
  • 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.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'Saint George for England', The Olive and The Sword: A Study of England's Shakespeare (1944), pp. 18-19
  • 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.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'Crack of Doom', The Olive and The Sword: A Study of England's Shakespeare (1944), p. 68
  • Shakespeare, at the youth of Great Britain's imperial history, is necessarily fascinated by the accomplished imperialism of ancient Rome. He feels England now as inheriting the great destiny of Rome... You can feel Shakespeare's sense of Rome's supremacy beside the new strength of Britain; which strength, however, must pay due honour to that Roman greatness which is its prototype. The meaning is clearer if we return to the Soothsayer's vision: he saw the Roman eagle as dissolving into the sunbeams of Britain.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'Maiden Phoenix', The Olive and The Sword: A Study of England's Shakespeare (1944), pp. 71, 75
  • Shakespeare is steadily preparing a synthesis of religious mysticism with national purpose; and this synthesis is not actually accomplished in the King himself, but rather in the royal child, Elizabeth... [T]he massive play [Henry VIII] ends with the christening ceremony of the baby Elizabeth, over whom Cranmer speaks the final prophecy, Shakespeare's last word to the England he loved... Every tragic insight, every penetrating sting of satire, every deepest religious intuition, orthodox or otherwise, of the greater plays, every lyric love of England's natural sweetness, is subdued within this last, almost ritualistic, offering by Shakespeare of himself and his deepest poetic wisdom to Elizabeth and her successor James I... [S]urely here, if never elsewhere, we can feel that this prophecy is offered...to the essential sovereignty, the golden thread in England's story, that line of kings in Macbeth stretching out "to the crack of doom", handed down from his day to ours. Macbeth was recalled, and Cranmer's lines forecast, by the "emblems" used at Anne Bullen's coronation: holy oil, Edward the Confessor's crown, the rod and the "bird of peace"... The conclusion to Henry VIII is no mere record of an historic past, but rather the one comprehensive statement in our literature of that peace towards which the world labours and for which Great Britain fights.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'Maiden Phoenix', The Olive and The Sword: A Study of England's Shakespeare (1944), pp. 83, 85
  • Shakespeare has throughout sounded, as has no other great poet or dramatist on record, the note of royalty. His is a royal world. Shakespeare's royalistic thinking is, for the most part, patriotic, and his work from time to time spreads its wings in national prophecy. Royalty and England tend to involve each other, and these in turn involve strenuous themes of war and peace, order and disorder, conflicts of personal ambition and communal necessity, contrasts of tyranny and justice, the whole stamped by the chivalric symbol of Saint George and aspiring to Christian sanctions. This Shakespearian royalty, conceived in the reign of Elizabeth I, is not dead; it has lived since, within the story of Great Britain, and it is alive today, in the reign of Elizabeth II.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'The Shakespearian Royalty', The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism together with related essays and indexes to earlier volumes (1958), p. 13
  • 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.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'The Golden Thread', The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism together with related essays and indexes to earlier volumes (1958), p. 91
  • 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.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'A Royal Propaganda', The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism together with related essays and indexes to earlier volumes (1958), p. 274
  • Always in Shakespeare royalty aspires to be a Christian power; it is, or symbolizes, Christ in power.
    • G. Wilson Knight, 'A Royal Propaganda', The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism together with related essays and indexes to earlier volumes (1958), p. 278
  • Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's;
    Therefore on him no speech!
    • Walter Savage Landor, "To Robert Browning," published in The Morning Chronicle (22 November 1845); reprinted in The Works of Walter Savage Landor (1846), vol. II.
  • When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
    That such trivial people should muse and thunder
    In such lovely language.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • 1978 interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)
  • 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.
    • Louis Marder, in His Exits and his Entrances : The Story of Shakespeare's Reputation (1963), p. 362.
  • 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.
    • Herman Melville, Letter to Evert Augustus Duyckinck (24 February 1849); published in The Letters of Herman Melville (1960) edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, p. 77.
  • And so sepulchr'd, in such pomp dost lie,
    That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
  • 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.
    • Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in interview with Alfred Appel, Jr. (September 1966), printed in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8 (1967); republished in Nabokov's Strong Opinions (1973).
  • 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.
    • 1996 interview in Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee Edited by Bradley C. Edwards (2009)
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • Shakespeare — the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God.
    • Laurence Olivier, quoted in Kenneth Harris, "Sir Laurence Olivier," from Kenneth Harris Talking To... (1971).
  • EDMUND (sits down opposite his father - contemptuously). Yes, facts don't mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that's the only truth! (Derisively.) Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic, for example.
    TYRONE (stubbornly). So he was. The proof is in his plays.
  • Children are made to learn bits of Shakespeare by heart, with the result that ever after they associate him with pedantic boredom. If they could meet him in the flesh, full of jollity and ale, they would be astonished, and if they had never heard of him before they might be led by his jollity to see what he had written. But if at school they had been inoculated against him, they will never be able to enjoy him. [...] Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him.
  • Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare's characters. His language does not "make sense," especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretive cloud. Unfortunately, this fact is obscured by the encrustations of footnotes in modern texts, which imply to the poor cowed student that if only he knew what the savants do, all would be as clear as day. Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He suspends the traditional compass points of rhetoric, still quite firm in Marlowe, normally regarded as Shakespeare's main influence. Shakespeare's words have "aura." This he got from Spenser, not Marlowe.
    • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, p. 195.
  • Who can measure the worth of a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo or Beethoven in dollars and cents?
  • I sent for some dinner and there dined, Mrs. Margaret Pen being by, to whom I had spoke to go along with us to a play this afternoon, and then to the King's Theatre, where we saw 'Midsummer's Night's Dream', which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.
  • He is not so much an imitator, as an instrument, of nature; and 'tis not so just to say that he speaks from her as that she speaks through him.
  • had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker.
    • Alexander Pope, Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1725). Compare Addison on Homer: "there is scarce a speech or action in the Iliad, which the reader may not ascribe to the person who speaks or acts, without seeing his name at the head of it." in The Spectator, No. 273 (12 January 1711–12).
  • 'tis plain he had much reading at least, if they will not call it learning. Nor is it any great matter, if a man has knowledge, whether he has it from one language or from another.
  • The shape of the Globe gives words power, but you're the wordsmith! The one true genius; the only one clever enough to do it. … Trust yourself. When you're locked away in your room, the words just come, don't they, like magic. Words, the right sound, the right shape, the right rhythm, words that last forever. That's what you do, Will. You choose perfect words. Do it. Improvise!
  • He seems to have been sent essentially to take universal and equal grasp of the human nature; and to have been removed, therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or bias his thoughts. It was necessary that he should lean no way; that he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgment, the life of the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathize so completely with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts. He must be able to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or Shylock themselves feel for or in themselves; otherwise his own conscience and indignation would make him unjust to them; he would turn aside from something, miss some good, or overlook some essential palliation. He must be utterly without anger, utterly without purpose; for if a man has any serious purpose in life, that which runs counter to it, or is foreign to it, will be looked at frowningly or carelessly by him. Shakespere was forbidden of Heaven to have any plans. To do any good or get any good, in the common sense of good, was not to be within his permitted range of work. Not, for him, the founding of institutions, the preaching of doctrines, or the repression of abuses. Neither he, nor the sun, did on any morning that they rose together, receive charge from their Maker concerning such things. They were both of them to shine on the evil and good; both to behold unoffendedly all that was upon the earth, to burn unappalled upon the spears of kings, and undisdaining, upon the reeds of the river.
  • 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.
  • As divinest Shakespeare's might
    Fills Avon and the world with light,
    Like omniscient power, which he
    Imaged 'mid mortality.
    • Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Lines Written among the Euganean Hills," (1818), from The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839).
  • 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 two main Pillars of our Civilization,
    Jesus and Shakespeare said:
    "Nothing shall be impossible to Humans" (Jesus)
    "Impossibility is only seemingly impossible" (Shak.)
  • 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.
  • Why Shakespeare lends itself so well to film is because he wrote movies.
    • Julie Taymore, director of Titus, in interview with Columbia Film School students
  • Shakespeare is a savage with sparks of genius which shine in a horrible night.
    • Voltaire, quoted in The Academy and literature, Vol. 56 (1899), p. 676.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 700-02.
  • This Booke
    When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke
    Fresh to all Ages.
    • Commendatory Verses prefixed to the folio of Shakespeare (1623).
  • 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.
  • Others abide our question. Thou art free.
    We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
    Out-topping knowledge.
  • 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 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.
  • Voltaire and Shakespeare! He was all
    The other feigned to be.
    The flippant Frenchman speaks: I weep;
    And Shakespeare weeps with me.
  • 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!
  • 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.
  • Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting Quill
    Commandeth Mirth or Passion, was but Will.
  • The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakspere.
  • I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.
  • Then to the well-trod stage anon
    If Jonson's learned sock be on,
    Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
    Warble his native woodnotes wild.
  • What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones
    The labors of an age in piled stones?
    Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid
    Under a starre-y-pointing pyramid?
    Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
    What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
    Thou in our wonder and astonishment
    Hath built thyself a livelong monument.
    • John Milton, An Epitaph. Similar phrases in the entire epitaph are found in the epitaph on Sir Thomas Stanley, supposed to have been written by Shakespeare. Also, same ideas found in Crashaw.
  • Shakspeare (whom you and every playhouse bill
    Style the divine! the matchless! what you will),
    For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight,
    And grew immortal in his own despite.
  • Few of the university pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down. Aye, and Ben Jonson too. O that B. J. is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow, Shakespeare, hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.
    • The Return from Parnassus; or, The Scourge of Simony, Act IV, scene 3.
  • Shikspur, Shikspur! Who wrote it?
    No, I never read Shikspur.
    Then you have an immense pleasure to come.
    • James Townley High Life Below Stairs, Act II, scene 1 (Ed. 1759).
  • Scorn not the Sonnet. Critic, you have frowned,
    Mindless of its just honours; with this key
    Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

Psalm 46 rumours

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  • 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.

    • The 46th Psalm in the King James Version of The Holy Bible, which is sometimes cited as evidence that Shakespeare was involved in helping to refine this translation, and in his 46th year of life, hid his name within this version of the psalm, the 46th word from the start being "shake" and the 46th word from the end being spear, (not counting the commonly repeated instruction "Selah" as word of the psalm). This observation seems to have originated in Shakespeare (1970) by Anthony Burgess, and later used in his story "Will and Testament" in Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby (1984). Some have also noted peculiar numerical coincidences in the 10th line as well — which could produce "I William" — or I am Will. Others note that previous translations had used such words with similar placement as well.
  • 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 "selah", is "spear".
    • Michael Dobson, in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001) edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley W. Wells; further observations regarding these associations are discussed in:
  • 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.
    • Paul Franssen, on Kipling, in his 1934 short story, as the probable originator of the idea that Shakespeare had worked on the King James version of the Bible, in "The Bard, the Bible and the Desert Island" in ‪The Author as Character : Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature‬ (1999) edited by Paul Franssen and A. J. Hoenselaars, p. 106.
  • 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 "selah"), 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.
    • Paul Franssen, on the use Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess in "Will and Testament" in Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby (1984) in "The Bard, the Bible and the Desert Island" in ‪The Author as Character : Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature‬ (1999) edited by Paul Franssen and A. J. Hoenselaars, p. 111.
  • To me, Shakespeare lives if we keep performing his plays. He dies, when we stop performing them.

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Authority control: PND: 118613723 | LCCN: n/78/95332 | VIAF: 96994048 | WorldCat
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  1. ↑ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/16/purpose-gift/
  2. ↑ https://www.iidc.indiana.edu/pages/Genius-May-Be-an-Abnormality-Educating-Students-with-Aspergers-Syndrome-or-High-Functioning-Autism
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