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but bear in mind what a great actor once advised: speak the thought, don’t just regurgitate the verse.
His writing leaves you space to inhabit each character and scope to interpret their words, synthesizing your life with theirs. Whoever plays Hamlet reinvents the part anew. This is why Shakespeare means something different to every generation, and why he is never out of place in any age.
She and her mother escaped. She did not and could not know, but thought it was Shakespeare’s words that jolted his humanity.
Shakespeare’s words sit neatly around a calendar, with the passing of time as one of his most common themes. After all, as he put it, ‘Time’s the king of men; / he’s both their parent, and he is their grave, / and gives them what he will, not what they crave’. Seasons feature strongly too.
‘daffodils, / That come before the swallow dares, and take / The winds of March with beauty’.
Shakespeare’s new-fangled words include, well, ‘new-fangled’ as well as ‘bedazzled’, ‘birth-place’, ‘cold-blooded’, ‘cold-hearted’, ‘eyeball’, ‘fortune-teller’, ‘puppy-dog’, ‘shooting star’, ‘unreal’ and ‘well-read’ to name but a few.
Phrases attributed to him include ‘Blinking idiot’, ‘Brave new world’, ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’, ‘In my heart of hearts’, ‘Jealousy is the green-eyed monster’, ‘Neither rhyme nor reason’, ‘Own flesh and blood’, ‘Too much of a good thing’ and ’What’s done is done’. Chances are you were quoting Shakespeare before you saw one of his plays, or opened this book.
As his distinguished friend Ben Jonson observed, Shakespeare was not just the ‘soul of the age’ and ‘the wonder of our stage’, he was, and Jonson could see this even then, ‘not of an age, but for all time’.
The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high fantastical.
The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.’
I’ll so offend, to make offense a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will.
Yet do thy worst, old Time, despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young.
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
O, it is excellent To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.
Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky, So glides he in the night from Venus’ eye.
14 January was traditionally the coldest day of the year.
frames the month as synonymous with the cold harshness of reality, contrasting with the whimsical dreams of a bountiful midsummer.
Out, alas! You’d be so lean that blasts of January Would blow you through and through.
