Twelfth Night: The William Shakespeare Thread

[Steve_uk]

As that time of year approaches when we finally take the Christmas decorations down and celebrate Epiphany it may be appropriate to think back to the greatest of all dramatists, namely William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England in 1564. I'm sure many of us have fond memories of studying his plays within the confines of the school environment and beyond. This thread is dedicated to anything Shakespeare related: it may be a quotation from one of his plays, a witty anecdote or simply an observation about the individual who contributed so much to the English language.


I will get the ball rolling as it were with:


"Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them."

[Steve_uk]

Here's one from The Merchant of Venice, which The Donald might do worse than take heed of:

All that glisters is not gold-

[Steve_uk]

Originally Posted by Alan Brady's Hair

Shakespeare eventually became an iconic symbol of England, but it wasn't like that in his own time. There's a very old play called "Guy, Earle of Warwick, " whose comic-relief character may mock Shakespeare for everything from pretentiousness to getting his girlfriend pregnant.

Well we'll pass that by. Was this alluded to in the film "Shakespeare in Love", something I have never watched?

To be or not to be: that is the question. Hamlet

[Steve_uk]

Originally Posted by Alan Brady's Hair

I haven't seen that, either. It wasn't uncommon for writers to snipe at each other. The recent Britcom, "Upstart Crow", is named after a similar passage, in a pamphlet, in which Shakespeare is accused of wholesale plagiarism.

Well he did dip into Plutarch's Lives from time to time, but wholesale plagiarism is too strong. Here's a quote from Polonius to Laertes, but I'd like to have given it to Bear Stearns:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

[Steve_uk]

Whether it is traditional or superstition to put the Christmas decorations away today reminds me of one of the Bard's most famous plays Macbeth, and a quotation from it:

Double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble

[Steve_uk]

I wonder what the Druids would have made of A Midsummer Night's Dream as they never left a written record of themselves, gathering at that 5000-year-old monument of Stonehenge for their religious rituals at the time of summer solstice, and maybe it would make a suitable backdrop for the staging of that play, which can be rather disturbing in its themes of dark romance and forbidden love though reassuringly heterosexual in character for dyed-in-the-wool conservatives as Hermia and Lysander struggle against her father's wishes. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...shire-48703632