Mrs Oberthier's Site - Shakespeare Quotes

In the course of a quarter century, Shakespeare wrote some thirty-eight plays. Taken individually, several of them are among the world's finest written works; taken collectively, they establish Shakespeare as the foremost literary talent of his own Elizabethan Age and, even more impressively, as a genius whose creative achievement has never been surpassed in any age.

Shakespeare had a vocabulary of some 30,000 words, many of them making their first appearance with his writings, such as: Accommodation, dislocate, obscene, reliance, and submerged, to name a few. Quotes from his plays are innumerable and deeply imbedded into our everyday life, such as: fast and loose, truth will out, refuse to budge an inch, fair play, high time, flesh and blood, and many, many, many more. Not to mention his incredible stories and amazing characters. He's the Boss. He's the Man.

Parish records establish that William Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April, 1564. In Anglican custom, baptisms were customarily three days after a child's birth. Most reckon that the "Bard of Avon" was born on 23 April 1564. This is Shakespeare's official birthday in England, and, it is also the traditional birth date of St. George, the patron saint of England.

There is a period in Shakespeare's life of some seven years (1585 to 1592) from which we have absolutely no primary source materials about him. We do know that in November of 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway (a woman eight years his senior), and that she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna. Two years after that, the Shakespeares had twins: Hamnet and Judith. peculation has it that Shakespeare was not happy in his marriage, and that this may have played a role in his decision to move to London's theater scene. In fact, during the late 1580s and early 1590s, Shakespeare traveled back and forth between London and Stratford-on-Avon, but by this time, the momentum of Shakespeare's life was toward his career and away from family, hearth, and home.

Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died in 1596, just as the rise of Shakespeare's success, popularity, and fame began to accelerate. He undoubtedly returned to Stratford for Hamnet's funeral. This tragic event may have prompted him to spend more time with his wife and daughters. In 1597, Shakespeare purchased a Tudor Mansion in his hometown known as the "New Place". Between 1597 and 1611, Shakespeare apparently spent most of his time in London during the theatrical season, but was active in Stratford as well, particularly as an investor in grain dealings. He also purchased real estate in the countryside and London. In 1613, he purchased Blackfriar's Gatehouse in London. In 1612, four years before his death, Shakespeare went into semi-retirement at the relatively young age of forty-eight.

He died on (or about) 23 April 1616, of unknown causes. However, the exact date and the precise cause of Shakespeare's death are unknown. One local tradition asserts that he died on 23 April 1616, of a chill caught after a night of drinking with fellow playwrights Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton. Shakespeare was, in fact, buried three days later, exactly 52 years after his baptism.

William Shakespeare's family lineage came to an end two generations after his death. His two daughters followed different paths in their father's eyes. His older daughter, Susanna, married a prominent local doctor, John Hall, in 1607 and there are indications that a close friendship developed between Hall and his renowned father-in-law. Susanna gave Shakespeare his only grandchild, Elizabeth Hall in 1608. Elizabeth inherited the "family estate". Elizabeth was married a second time after the death of her husband. She had no children of her own.

Shakespeare's other daughter, Judith married Thomas Quiney, a tavern owner and reputed "rake". Quiney reportedly was given to pre-marital and extramarital affairs and the fathering of illegitimate children. He fathered three legitimate sons by Judith, all of whom died young.

Quotes

How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat! Dead! --Hamlet III:4
The first thing we do let's kill all the lawyers. --II Henry VI, IV:2
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition.
By that sin fell the angels.
--Henry VIII, III:2
Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger...
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot!
Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,
Cry, "God for Harry! England and Saint George!"
--Henry V, III:1
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at sometime are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings...
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed
That he is grown so great?
--Julius Caesar, I:2
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous...
Would he were fatter! But I fear him not.
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius...
I rather tell thee what is to be feared
Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.
--Julius Caesar, I:2
Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge...
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war...
--Julius Caesar, III:1
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones...
You all did love him once, not without cause;
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!
--Julius Caesar, III:2
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
--Macbeth, IV:1
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by and idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
--Macbeth, V:5
O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength,
But it is tyrannous to use it like a giant...
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder.
Nothing but thunder. Merciful heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulfurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarle'd oak
Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
--Measure for Measure, II:2
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
--The Merchant of Venice, I:3
Signor Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my money and my usances.
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For suff'rance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is my own.
--The Merchant of Venice, I:3
If you prick us do we not bleed? I
f you tickle us do we not laugh?
If you poison us do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
--The Merchant of Venice, III:1
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But either it was different in the blood -
Or else misgrafted in respect of years -
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends -
Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And, ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!',
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
--A Midsummer Night's Dream, I:1
How poor are they that ha' not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
Thou know'st we work by wit and not by witchcraft,
And wit depends on dilatory time.
--Othello, II:3
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash...
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
--Othello, III:3
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse they name,
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet...
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy...
What's Montague? It is not hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man.
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
--Romeo and Juliet, II:2
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise fair sun, and kill the envious moon.
--Romeo and Juliet, II:2
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all to short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
--Sonnet 18
Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great,
some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
--Twelfth Night, II:5

1564	Birth, Baptism & Early Years
1582	Marriage to Anne Hathaway (8 years his senior)
1583	Birth of 1st daughter, Susanna
1585	Birth of twins, Hamnet & Judith
1586-1592	The Lost Years
1596	Death of Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son
1594-1616	Writings & Final Years
1608	Birth of 1st grandchild, Elizabeth Hall
1616	Death