Post Your William Shakespeare Observations

Self | April 23, 2016 | PJ-Comix

[PJ-Comix]

Exactly 400 years ago on this day, William Shakespeare passed this mortal coil. His effect on the English language was YUUUUUGE. Therefore I am asking for general observations on The Bard.

p.s. PLEASE DON'T post conspiracy theories about how the true author of the Shakespeare plays was really somebody else. That stuff is old AND annoying. It was SHAKESPEARE who wrote it.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

I tend to pick up local accents whenever I am in a place for more then a few days.

Legacy of a youth spent globe hopping.

I went back to visit Kenya for a few weeks and when I got back stateside my best friend who picked me up at the airport kept look at me strangely. After about five minutes she said, "Why are you talking like Margaret Thatcher?"

Oops.

It took a couple of days to wear off.

[FlyingEagle]

Hoods make not monks

[disndat]

Why is it that I can only spot errors AFTER I hit post?

I do the same thing. I think it has something to do with this:

For emaxlpe, it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm.

S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.

I know what I want to type, but on a later review it is wrong. I think I automatically read what I type as being correct. But in the process of hitting post and then re-reading it I have shifted gears from automatic to neutral. Or something like that.

[Salamander]

LOL!

That would be a handy talent...especially if you’re trying to purchase necessities.

Such as “fyil-um”.

:)

[Crucial]

Google makes Shakespeare look like a person of color on its search page. Maybe liberals should quit stealing white cultural accomplishments.

[colorado tanker]

I still say the best three works written in the English language were all written during the English Renaissance: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost and the King James Bible.

[Albion Wilde]

Sonnet 116 (mis-numbered in the 1609 Quarto, above)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

[Albion Wilde]

[Albion Wilde]

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”

My first thought, as well. But my first post to the thread was a love sonnet.

All take care not to let your love sonnets end up in the hands of lawyers.

[onyx]

I love the original.

Thank you very much, dearest Peter Libra!

You are a treasure!

God bless and keep you.

(((Peter Libra)))

[firebrand]

Plagiarized from Ecclesiastes.

[firebrand]

And the idea of Midsummer Night's Dream was stolen by Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove.

[Mercat]

The Merchant of Venice probably my favorite play. It is better to watch them or at least listen to them than to read them. I haven’t read a Shakespeare play in decades but I love to watch them. The early BBC versions are good and have a lot of people who later became famous. For example Alan Rickman (Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet) and Derek Jacobi (Hamlet). I think that Ian McKellan got his start with the Royal Shakespearian Theater. There’s an amazing video of him doing MacBeth’s lament for his deceased wife.

But back to the Merchant of Venice - I read a long piece by Joseph Pearce that made the case that it was in no way an attack on Jews but on usury. But Shylock is an amazing character.

[Bernard Marx]

My observation is that Shakespeare was a very shrewd observer of life. Think about this passage from "Hamlet":

KING CLAUDIUS Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

HAMLET At supper.

KING CLAUDIUS At supper! where?

HAMLET Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.

KING CLAUDIUS Alas, alas!

HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

KING CLAUDIUS What dost you mean by this?

HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

[stanne]

Brilliant

It’s Cole Porter

From another version of Taming of the Shrew, “Kiss Me Kate”

[stanne]

Anyone who doesn’t get Hillary doesn’t read enough Shakespeare

To put nothing past her is normal

[Political Junkie Too]

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery- go!

-PJ

[Rockpile]

Now that was a post worth reading. Thanks for all that typing :<}

[PapaBear3625]

Maybe S learned it all from the Bible. And used it to his own ends.

More likely the other way. The King James Bible was written in the period 1604-1611. Shakespeare's plays started being performed in London around 1592, so it's more likely that Shakespeare served as an example to the KJV writers.

[PapaBear3625]

I am in my 60s and just saw my first Shakespeare play last weekend at Chapman University. It was The Merchant of Venice.

BBC has his plays on youtube. here's MacBeth