I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.
Fear no more the heat o' the sun,Nor the furious winter's rages;
O mother, mother!What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,The gods look down, and this unnatural sceneThey laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!You have won a happy victory to Rome;But, for your son...
He kills her in her own humor.
The ability for anyone in our generation to self-amuse has sadly been bred out of our species.
For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.
Yet but three come one more.Two of both kinds make up four.Ere she comes curst and sad.Cupid is a knavish lad.Thus to make poor females mad.
To die, to sleep - To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub,For in this sleep of death what dreams may come...
Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of t...
They lie deadly that tell you have good faces.
These violent delights have violent endsAnd in their triump die, like fire and powderWhich, as they kiss, consume
Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.
For I am born to tame you, Kate,And bring you from a wild Kate to a KateComfortable as other household Kates.
A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard's seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant's cli...
Although the absurdity of the demagogue’s rhetoric was blatantly obvious, the laughter it elicited did not for a minute diminish its menace. Cade and his followers will not slink away because the trad...
We number nothing that we spend for you;Our duty is so rich, so infinite,That we may do it still without accompt.Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,That we, like savages, may worship it.
[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening o...
For this new-married man approaching here,Whose salt imagination yet hath wrong'dYour well defended honour, you must pardonFor Mariana's sake: but as he adjudged your brother,--Being criminal, in doub...
It seems only fair, Matthew continued. A bit of karma, if you will. He twirled the stake again. Shall we see how long you scream?Are you ever going to shut up? I snapped, fear and irritation filling m...
Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.