20 Shakespeare Quotations To Celebrate The Birth of a Master

Posted on April 23, 2011 by hirohurl

Shakespeare quotes may very well be some of the most deeply moving and thought-provoking quotes of all time. If all you know about Shakespeare quotes is “To be or not to be,” then you’re definitely missing out on some of the greatest Shakespeare quotes of all time.

Since April 23rd is his birthday, here are 20 Shakespeare quotes that you’re sure to enjoy to celebrate.

1. “This above all: to thine own self be true.” ~ Hamlet

2. “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.” ~ As You Like It

3. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” ~ Romeo and Juliet

4. “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” ~ Julius Ceasar

5. “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. ~ Hamlet

6. “Alas, poor world, what treasure hast thou lost!” ~ Venus & Adonis

7. “There’s small choice in rotten apples.” ~ The Taming of the Shrew

8. “Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell — ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them.” ~ The Tempest

9. “I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say he made a good end.” ~ Hamlet

10. “The miserable have no other medicine but only hope.” ~ Measure for Measure

11. “True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.” ~ King Richard

12. “Whether ’tis better 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?” ~ Hamlet

13. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.” ~ Hamlet

14. “Things without all remedy should be without regard. What’s done is done.” ~ Macbeth

15. “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” ~ Richard III

16. “By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon, or dive into the bottom of the deep, where fathom-line could never touch the ground, and pluck up drowned honour by the locks.” ~ Henry IV

17. If you prick us, do we not bleed? If 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

18. “Here comes a pair of very strange beasts, which in all tongues are called fools.” ~ As You Like It

19. “Be great in act, as you have been in thought. Let not the world see fear and sad distrust govern the motion of a kingly eye. Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire.” ~ King John

20. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” ~ Hamlet

Humor, depth, pain and joy — all of these are captured in Shakespeare’s writings. As Hamlet told Horatio, there are more things in heaven and earth than he could dream of, and there is more depth to Shakespear quotes than many of us will ever realize. Happy Birthday to a master!

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For more famous Shakespeare quotes, check out the popular famous quotes section of Famous-Quotes-And-Quotations.com, a website that specializes in ‘Top 10′ lists of quotations in dozens of categories.

http://www.famous-quotes-and-quotations.com/shakespeare-quotes.html

Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com

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Posted in As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry IV, Julius Ceasar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Romeo and Juiliet, Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Venus and Adonis | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Professor Gordon Campbell Celebrates the 400th Anniversary of the King James Version of the English Bible

Posted on March 23, 2011 by hirohurl

2011 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible and Professor Gordon Campbell, who teaches Renaissance Literature at the University of Leicester, is giving a series of lectures on the King James Version in Great Britain, Ireland, the United States and Canada, as well as in France and Belgium.




The Oxford University Press has published a luxury limited edition of the 1611 King James Bible to mark the anniversary of the translation. This edition is bound in leather, with gilt edging, a ribbon marker, gift presentation plate and protective maroon cloth slipcase.

The original typeface was Gothic, and difficult for us to read today so OUP have reset the text in Roman type. They have reproduced the original “word for word and letter for letter” including all the typing errors of the original publication, upside-down letters and and all.

OUP have also kept the pictorial letters that open each chapter of the Bible. Many contain classical allusions and make connections between other parts of the Bible that are lost in modern editions.

The contents of the 1611 Bible included 74 pages of preliminaries, such as genealogies running from Adam to Christ, maps of the Holy Land, ways of calculating Easter, perpetual calendars and so on.

The Apocrypha is also included. It was only dropped from Bibles by the British and Foreign Bible Society in the nineteenth century.

Professor Campbell explains that the printing of the King James Bible achieved a very high standard but, even so, it contains about 350 errors including the repetition of a complete line in the book of Ruth. A list of the errors is included in this 400th anniversary edition.

The King James Bible was, as it says on the title page, “appointed to be read in churches” in other words, it was a Bible that was translated to be read aloud in churches, cathedrals and private households where the head of the house would read it during family devotions.

“It is this that accounts for the rhythms of the Authorised Version, the King James version, it accounts for its grammar, it accounts for its punctuation. It’s meant to be read aloud.”

Gordon Campbell

A page from the OUP's Quatercentenary Edition of the KJV

Sources:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/people/gordoncampbell

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/research/kjv

http://www.historyextra.com/oup/how-authentic-authentic

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English Renaissance Podcast: Shakespeare’s Sonnet #4, Read by David Hurley

Posted on March 1, 2011 by hirohurl

IV.

Unthrifty loveliness why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which usèd, lives th’ executor to be.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet #4 by DavidHurley

Four questions are addressed to the young man in this sonnet. The key rhetorical features are anaphora and erotesis, combining to produce anaphoric erotesis in the first three of them.

Notice how the apparent openness of the first question is swiftly closed down by what follows; by a statement as to the nature of nature’s bounty, the “legacy” of beauty that has been bestowed upon the young man which, as it turns out, it is not so much a legacy as a loan, the terms of which the young man has violated by his onanistic refusal to “be free”.

Preliminary Clause(s)Interrogative Clause
Unthrifty loveliness,why dost thou spend Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
Then, beauteous niggard,why dost thou abuse The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless userer,why dost thou use So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?

Having closed down any opportunity for response or defence, the poet fires off two more rhetorical questions to complete the anaphoric sequence.

The young man is “unthrifty” in the sense that he wastes his stock of beauty upon himself. He is “niggardly” (note the noun/adjective inversion) in that he does not seek to invest it in winning a woman. He is “profitless” in that his investment will yield no profit or multiplication; he shall die childless.

(It is interesting to note that it is the borrower of nature’s beauty, the young gentleman, not Nature, the original “lender” personified in the opening quatrain, that is accused of the sin of “usury” together with the double sin of wastefulness-in-niggardliness.)

The “conclusion” that follows the third question is of course not an answer to the question, but rather the climax of the poet’s own line of reasoning and the emotional appeal of the first ten lines of the sonnet.

“The design of the erotesis or interrogation is to awaken attention to the subject of discourse, and is a mode of address admirably calculated to produce a powerful impression of the truth of a subject, as it challenges the impossibility of contradiction. Thus, ‘How long, Cataline,’ exclaims Cicero, ‘will you abuse our patience?’”
(David Williams, Composition, Literary and Rhetorical, Simplified, 1850)

Helen Vendler compares this sonnet to a “secularized homily” of “the reproach of the cleric to the sinner”1 and the final question, with it’s impatient “how then… what…”2 brings us to the “last judgement” of the tomb: will there be an acceptable “audit” (the Last Judgement as financial reckoning of the “traffic” of beauty…) or will beauty live in a new generation or will beauty die with the old gentleman?

David Hurley

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Notes

1 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 63.

2 Is the fourth question a case of Shakespearian anthimeria? He seems to have substituted “what” for “an” and reversed the order of the 12th line to strengthen its emotional and rhetorical impact at the expense of its grammatical coherence:

Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
Canst thou leave an acceptable audit?

Perhaps his first thought was something that didn’t quite scan:

Then what acceptable audit canst thou leave
When nature calls thee to be gone?

Posted in English Renaissance Podcast, Shakespeare, The Sonnets | Tagged | Leave a comment

English Renaissance Podcast: Shakespeare’s Sonnet #3, Read by David Hurley

Posted on February 22, 2011 by hirohurl

III.

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another,
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live remembered not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet #3 by DavidHurley

It is thought likely that Shakespeare read Thomas Wilson‘s Arte of Rhetoric, published in 1560. The work includes a translation of “An Epistle to perswade a yong Gentleman to mariage, deuised by Erasmus, in the behalfe of his freend.” In the epistle we find this reference to the conjugal act of begetting of children as a form of “tillage“:

If that man be punished, who little heedeth the maintenaunce of his Tillage, the which although it bee neuer so well mannered, yet it yeeldeth nothing els but Wheate, Barley, Beanes, and Peason: what punishment is he worthie to suffer, that refuseth to Plowe that land which being Tilled, yeeldeth children.

In the passage just quoted the implied proposition is that “If that man be punished” for neglecting to till his land then a husband should be punished for neglecting to get his wife with child, but the nature of the punishment is left unstated, “what punishment is he worthy to suffer[?]“.

In Shakespeare’s third sonnet, however, the proposition is delayed until after the introduction of the tillage trope and the “punishment” is clearly stated in the final couplet, “phrased almost as a death-curse” as Helen Vendler notes.

We can make a simplified table to compare the progression of the two arguments thus:

ERASMUS
SHAKESPEARE
If a man be punishedWho is the woman
who refuses to tillwho refuses to procreate?
what punishmentWho is the man
should a husband sufferwho refuses to procreate?
who refuses to procreateIf you refuse to procreate
?
you will die and be forgotten.

The choice for Erasmus’s young gentleman is “marriage” or “punishment” but for Shakespeare’s young gentleman the choice is between “life” and “death”.

By the way, you can use this link to download a free PDF file of Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique, courtesy of Renascence Editions.

David Hurley

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Zen & The Art Of Pyrrhonian Scepticism: Sarah Bakewell On Montaigne

Posted on February 21, 2011 by hirohurl

In a previous blog post I sought to explain how Michel de Montaigne‘s scepticism, far from being indicative of “atheism”, was in fact a mark of his orthodoxy. I have just noticed an article in the Guardian by Sarah Bakewell which argues a similar point. Bakewell writes:

Montaigne was a good Catholic. He was also a man who doubted almost everything: the most influential sceptic of his day.

Bakewell goes on to explain that,

When we hear the word “sceptic”, we probably think of someone who insists on proof, refuses to take anything on faith, and perhaps takes issue with organised religion. A modern sceptic may trust firmly in reason and direct observation. In Montaigne’s time, the lines were drawn differently: reason and observation were the very things a sceptic was most likely to be sceptical about, yet one could still be devout.

There then follows a nice introduction to Pyrrhonian scepticism, with a bit of Zen thrown in for good measure!

Montaigne, philosopher of life, part 3: Believer and doubter, by Sarah Bakewell

David Hurley

P. S. This is another excellent article on Montaigne in the same Guardian series:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/22/montaigne-macaques-saul-frampton

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