All 50 Uses of

Shakespeare

in

A Room of One's Own

…age of puberty among, Attractiveness of, Offered as sacrifice to, Small size of brain of, Profounder sub-consciousness of, Less hair on the body of, Mental, moral and physical inferiority of, Love of children of, Greater length of life of, Weaker muscles of, Strength of affections of, Vanity of, Higher education of, Shakespeare's opinion of, Lord Birkenhead's opinion of, Dean Inge's opinion of, La Bruyere's opinion of, Dr Johnson's opinion of, Mr Oscar Browning's opinion of, ….†
Chpt 2

Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves.†
Chpt 3

Yet even so,' Professor Trevelyan concludes, 'neither Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character.'†
Chpt 3

Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in personality and character.†
Chpt 3

At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare's work (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth.†
Chpt 3

It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.†
Chpt 3

Shakespeare himself went, very probably,—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic.†
Chpt 3

At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?†
Chpt 3

That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius.†
Chpt 3

That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius.†
Chpt 3

But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius.†
Chpt 3

But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius.†
Chpt 3

For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.†
Chpt 3

—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.†
Chpt 3

Here I opened the volume containing the Tragedies of Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

What was Shakespeare's state of mind, for instance, when he wrote LEAR and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA?†
Chpt 3

But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it.†
Chpt 3

Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare went through when he wrote LEAR, we do know what Carlyle went through when he wrote the FRENCH REVOLUTION; what Flaubert went through when he wrote MADAME BOVARY; what Keats was going through when he tried to write poetry against the coming death and the indifference of the world.†
Chpt 3

The woman composer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare's sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing.†
Chpt 3

And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.†
Chpt 3

For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare's state of mind.†
Chpt 3

For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare's state of mind.†
Chpt 3

The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare—compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton—is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us.†
Chpt 3

If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare.†
Chpt 3

If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.
Chpt 3 *

Shakespeare = English poet and dramatist frequently cited as the greatest writer in the English language (1564-1616)

The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing.†
Chpt 4

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.†
Chpt 4

That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.†
Chpt 4

That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.†
Chpt 4

That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.†
Chpt 4

That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.†
Chpt 4

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!†
Chpt 5

…imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare's words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop…†
Chpt 5

London was wholly indifferent, it appeared, to Shakespeare's plays.†
Chpt 6

In fact one goes back to Shakespeare's mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women.†
Chpt 6

In fact one goes back to Shakespeare's mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women.†
Chpt 6

Shakespeare's indecency uproots a thousand other things in one's mind, and is far from being dull.†
Chpt 6

But Shakespeare does it for pleasure; Mr A, as the nurses say, does it on purpose.†
Chpt 6

He is therefore impeded and inhibited and self-conscious as Shakespeare might have been if he too had known Miss Clough and Miss Davies.†
Chpt 6

One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge.†
Chpt 6

One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge.†
Chpt 6

The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization.†
Chpt 6

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet.†
Chpt 6

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Best Example Sentences
From Other Sources

Definition:

(Shakespeare as in: William Shakespeare)
English dramatist and poet frequently cited as the greatest writer in the English language and who wrote such works as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet (1564-1616)

editor's notes: Shakespeare is the most quoted person in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (5th ed. 1999). Commonly quoted passages include:

This above all: to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day;
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

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

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...

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.

O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

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

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep:

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

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

Shakespeare in A Room of One's Own

Shakespeare

in

A Room of One's Own