All 11 Uses of
Shakespeare
in
A Sketch of the Past
- But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.†
*
- They were admitted to the back drawing room, where father sat like the Queen in Shakespeare — "here I and sorrow sit" —with the Virginia Creeper hanging a curtain of green over the window, so that the room was like a green cave.†
- Buzzy had once written a sonnet that had been taken for Shakespeare's, and liked to make little facetious jokes with young ladies — I remember Susan Lushington "didn't know which way to look", she said, when he chaffed her about a husband —"I seemed to be sitting on a tripod and looking into the future", Buzzy said, having archly used the word husband when it should have been father —Buzzy lived chiefly in Egypt, and Mrs Hills —Anna her name was —lived mostly alone at Corby.†
- He had consumed Shakespeare, somehow or other, by himself.†
- He had possessed himself of it, in his large clumsy way, and our first arguments, since I listened passively to the story of the Greeks on the stairs outside the water closet, outside the candle grease smelling landing, were about Shakespeare.†
- He would sweep down upon me, with his assertion that everything was in Shakespeare.†
- He made me feel his pride, it was like his pride in his friends, in Shakespeare—shuffling off Falstaff, he pointed out, without a sign of sympathy.†
- That large natural inhumanity in Shakespeare delighted him.†
- On the other hand, when Desdemona wakes again, he thought possibly Shakespeare was 'sentimental'.†
- And so I did not get from him any minute comments; but felt rather that Shakespeare was to him his other world; the place where hegot the measure of the daily world.†
- So we argued; about Shakespeare; about many many things; and often lost our tempers; but were attracted by some common admiration.†
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.