William Shakespeare
People note exceptional verbal wit, psychological depth, and emotional range of English playwright and poet William Shakespeare, who included such historical works as
Richard II
, comedies like
Much Ado about Nothing
, and such tragedies as
Hamlet
,
Othello
, and
King Lear
and also composed 154 sonnets before people published posthumously
First Folio
, which collected and contained edition of 36 plays in 1623.
He and Anne Hathaway, his wife, married in 1582.
Forest of Arden, a formerly very extensive wooded area, north of Stratford-upon-Avon of central England provided the setting for
As You Like It
of Shakespeare.
People widely regard William Shakespeare (baptized 26 April 1564) as the greatest writer in the language and the pre-eminent dramatist of the world. They often call him simply the national "bard of Avon." Surviving writings consist of 38 dramas, two long narratives, and several other books. People translate them into every major living language and performed them most often.
Anne bore him Susanna Shakespeare, and twins Hamnet Shakespeare and Judith Shakespeare. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company, later known as the King's Men.
Shakespeare wrote throughout the span of his life. He started writing in 1589 and afterward averaged 1.5 dramas a year. From 1590, Shakespeare produced most of his known literature. He early mainly raised genres to the peak of sophistication and artistry before 1601. Next, he wrote mainly Macbeth and similar dramas, considered some of the finest examples in the language, until 1608. In his last phase, he wrote also known romances and collaborated until 1613.
He apparently retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later on day of Saint George, his 52nd birthday. Few records of private life of Shakespeare survive with considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether he wrote all attributed literature.
People inscribed many books of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues issued all but two now recognized dramas of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, the great master of language and literature authentically wrote not all that people attribute.
People respected Shakespeare in his own day, but his reputation rose to its present heights not until the nineteenth century. The romantics in particular acclaimed genius of Shakespeare, and the Victorians hero-worshiped him with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry." In the 20th century, new movements in scholarship and performance repeatedly adopted and rediscovered his dramas. People consistently perform and reinterpret his highly popular dramas today in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
“Love is too young to know what conscience is, Yet who knows not conscience is born of love? Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss, Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove: For, thou betraying me, I do betray My nobler part to my gross body's treason; My soul doth tell my body that he may Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason, But rising at thy name doth point out thee, As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride, He is contented thy poor drudge to be, To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side. No want of conscience hold it that I call Her 'love,' for whose dear love I rise and fall.”
“If love be rough with you, be rough with love;Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.Give me a case to put my visage in:A visor for a visor! what care IWhat curious eye doth quote deformities?Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me.”
“love is blindand lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit”
“I wish my horse had the speed of your tongue.”
“God shall be my hope, my stay, my guide and lantern to my feet.”
“The will is infiniteand the execution confin'd,the desire is boundlessand the act a slaveto limit.”
“Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.”
“No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.”
“To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.”
“O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember, that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.”
“Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.”
“But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness.”
“And with a little pin bores through his castle wall and farewell king.”
“Frailty, thy name is woman!”
“A ministering angel shall my sister be.”
“Love is not love which alters it when alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O no! It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wandering bark whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out, even to the edge of doom.”
“To me, fair friend, you never can be old,For as you were when first your eye I ey'd, Such seems your beauty still.”
“More matter with less art.”
“As you all know, Security Is Mortals chiefest Enemy.”
“Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturnAnd broils roots out the work of masonry,Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till judgement that yourself arise,You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.”
“I dote on his very absence.”
“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;He thinks too much: such men are dangerous”
“Words, words, words.”
“Let not my love be called idolatry,Nor my beloved as an idol show,Since all alike my songs and praises beTo one, of one, still such, and ever so.Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,Still constant in a wondrous excellence;Therefore my verse to constancy confined,One thing expressing, leaves out difference.Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument,Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words;And in this change is my invention spent,Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone,Which three till now, never kept seat in one.”
“O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?O, stay and hear; your true love's coming,That can sing both high and low:Trip no further, pretty sweeting;Journeys end in lovers meeting,Every wise man's son doth know.What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;Present mirth hath present laughter;What's to come is still unsure:In delay there lies not plenty;Then, come kiss me, sweet and twenty,Youth's a stuff will not endure.”
“We, ignorant of ourselves,Beg often our own harms, which the wise powersDeny us for our good; so find we profitBy losing of our prayers.”
“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
“Truth is truth to the end of reckoning. ”
“Which can say more than this rich praise, that you alone are you?”
“The miserable have no other medicineBut only hope:I have hope to live, and am prepared to die.”
“The course of true love never did run smooth; But, either it was different in blood,O cross! too high to be enthrall’d to low. Or else misgraffed in respect of years, O spite! too old to be engag’d to young. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,O hell! to choose love by another’s eye.”
“I pray thee, cease thy counsel,Which falls into mine ears as profitlessAs water in a sieve: give not me counsel;Nor let no comforter delight mine earBut such a one whose wrongs do suit with mine:... for, brother, menCan counsel and speak comfort to that grief Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,Their counsel turns to passion, which beforeWould give preceptial medicine to rage,Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,Charm ache with air and agony with words.No, no; 'tis all men's office to speak patienceTo those that wring under the load of sorrow,But no man's virtue nor sufficiencyTo be so moral when he shall endureThe like himself. Therefore give me no counsel:My griefs cry louder than advertisement.”
“The prince of darkness is a gentleman!”
“None can be called deformed but the unkind.”
“Which dreams, indeed, are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.”
“Come, Lady, die to live.”
“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all unless you repute yourself such a loser.”
“it is not enough to speak, but to speak true”
“Therefore was I created with a stubborn outside, with an aspect of iron, that when I come to woo ladies, I fright them. But, in faith, Kate, the elder I wax, the better I shall appear. My comfort is that old age, that ill layer-up of beauty, can do no more spoil upon my face. Thou hast me, if thou hast me, at the worst, and thou shalt wear me, if thou wear me, better and better.”
“The readiness is all”
“And yet,to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.”
“Out of this nettle - danger - we pluck this flower - safety.”
“Oh what man may hide inside, tho angel on the outward side.”
“My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.”
“It hurts not the tongue to give fair words.”
“He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.”
“I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting”
“The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?”
“Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits devil, is angel yet in this, That to the use of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence; the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature.”
“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”