Quotes About Shakespeare

In breve, e come sempre, in Shakespeare un lettore attento può trovare sostegno per quasi qualsiasi posizione voglia prendere. (O come lo stesso Shakespeare ha scritto in una battuta citata spesso a sproposito: «Il diavolo può citare le Sacre Scritture per i propri fini».)

We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.

Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But

the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American landscape all the birds mentioned in the writings of Shakespeare.

Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?" and others of similarly inventive cast.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million—much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous, heavy

The marriage license itself is lost, but a separate document, the marriage bond, survives. On it Anne Hathaway is correctly identified. Shakespeare's name is rendered as "Shagspere"—the first of many arrestingly variable renderings.

We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare—Susanna in May 1583 and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in early February 1585—but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple's relationship—whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting.

In short, and as always, a devoted reader can find support for nearly any position he or she wishes in Shakespeare. (Or, as Shakespeare himself put it in a much misquoted line: The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.)

Among skilled craftsmen—a category that included John Shakespeare—some 60 percent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.

A Midsummer Night's Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behaviour. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.

It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare—at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children.

Più che per qualsiasi altro scrittore, in Shakespeare le parole sono separate dalla vita. Era un uomo così bravo a nascondere ciò che provava che non possiamo nemmeno essere sicuri che provasse qualcosa. Sappiamo che usava le parole con enorme efficacia, e possiamo ragionevolmente supporre che avesse dei sentimenti. Quello che non sappiamo, e che possiamo soltanto tirare a indovinare, è dove le due cose si intersecavano.

La casa natale di Shakespeare, se non altro, sfuggì destino preparatogli dall'impresario P.T. Barnum, che negli anni Quaranta dell'Ottocento ebbe l'idea di spedirla negli Stati Uniti, montarla su ruote e mandarla in perpetua tournée per il Paese - prospettiva talmente allarmante che in Gran Bretagna ci si affrettò a raccogliere fondi per salvarla e trasformarla in museo e santuario.

It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, "Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust," which takes on additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.

and do you know the difference, by the way, between village and hamlet? It's quite simple, really: One is a place where people live and the other is a play by Shakespeare)

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years' worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day—and, as this volume slimly attests, the number keeps growing.

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception—a clearly remarkable proportion.

All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.

When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man—whoever he was.

Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy's house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose.

Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: "Wllm Shaksp." It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper. Though it is only a deposition, it is also the only document in existence containing a transcript of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice.

He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before – unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than 309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English.