William Shakespeare Revisited

By means of intriguing and iconic lines

Prospero: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep

Ariel to Prospero: All hail, great master, grave sir, hail! I come to answer thy best pleasure Be it to fly To swim To dive into the fire To ride on the curled clouds To thy strong bidding task Ariel, and all his quality

Caliban: Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

Kent: Fellow, I know thee. Oswald: What dost thou know me for? Kent: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liveered, action-taking, whoreson glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch

Lear expresses to Cordelia: You do me wrong to take me out o’th’grave. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead

macbeth

Macbeth: Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more

I grant him bloody, Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name

False face must hide what false heart doth know

Lady Macbeth: Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O

The innocent sleep; Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleep of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast

othello

Pish! Noses, ears, and lips. Is’t possible? — Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!

the merchant of venice

One half of me is yours, the other half yours, Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, And so all yours

henry iv part two

Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down! Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown

romeo & Juliet

Prologue, Chorus: Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona (where we lay our scene), From ancient grudge break to new mutiny …

Juliet: O serpent heart, hid with a flow’ring face! Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave? Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical! Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despisèd substance of divinest show! Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st, A damnèd saint, an honourable villain!

Nurse: Now by my maidenhead at twelve year old, I bade her come. What lamb! What, ladybird! God forbid, where’s this girl? What, Juliet!

king john

Heaven take my soul and England take my Bones!

Constance: Do, child, go to grandam, child. Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig. There’s a good grandam

the comedy of errors

Dr Pinch: A hungry, lean-faced villain, A mere anatomy, a mountebank, A threadbare juggler and a fortune-teller, A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, A living dead man

as you like it

Touchstone: Therefore, you clown, abandon – which is in vulgar ‚leave‘ – the society – which in the boorish is ‚company‘ – of this female – which in the common is ‚woman‘; which together is ‚abandon the society of this female‘, or clown, thou perishest, or, to thy better understanding, diest; or, to wit, I will kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage. I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado, or in steel; I will bandy with thee in faction; I will o’er-run thee with policy; I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players … Last Scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

pericles prince of tyre

Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness

richard ii

This royal throne of kings, This sceptred isle, This earth of majesty,this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, this precious stone set in the silver sea, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm against the envy of less happier lands …

hamlet

Oh, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of the dear murdered, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion!

Horatio: So you shall hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts. Of accidential judgements, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And in this upshot, purposes mistook Fallen on th’inventors heads

julius caesar

Cassius: Shakespeare’s plays are now performed in states unborn and accents yet unknown to Elisabethan and Jacobean England

richard iii

Clarence’s dream: O Lord! Methought what pain it was to drown! What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears! What sights of ugly death within mine eyes! Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks; A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon; Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearls Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, All scattered in the bottom of the sea. Some lay in dead men’s skulls and in the holes Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept, As ‚twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems, That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by