Shakespeare Fever!

bleachededen · Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:42 pm

It being spring, the time of lovers and greenery and flowers and sun, it is also the time of sonnets and poetry (probably why April is National Poetry Month), and who better to embody the poetry of love and spring as well as the Bard?

In this thread, I invite everyone to share their favorite works of Shakespeare, from sonnets and "songs" within plays, to soliloquies and even scene excerpts (as much as will fit on BookTalk), or even links to your favorite plays online, in text or even video! Everybody is welcome to share the love, and I can't wait to see all the awesome Shakespeareness that this thread will soon contain!

So here we go, everybody, I'll start us off with a springtime favorite (which can also be found in the Top 500 Poems on page 20 somewhere, because posting there is what prompted me to start this thread). So without further ado...

It Was a Lover and His Lass
IT was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn-field did pass,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that life was but a flower
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

And, therefore, take the present time
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
For love is crown & grave'd with the prime
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

bleachededen · Thu Apr 15, 2010 1:34 am

Best. Speech. Ever.
(in my humble opinion)

from Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene iv

ROMEO: I dream'd a dream to-night.
MERCUTIO: And so did I.
ROMEO: Well, what was yours?
MERCUTIO: That dreamers often lie.
ROMEO: In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.
MERCUTIO: O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she--

ROMEO: Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk'st of nothing.
MERCUTIO: True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.
(just for fun, I'll close out the scene, because Romeo's foreboding is amazingly written and gives us a taste for the tragedy to come)
BENVOLIO: This wind, you talk of, blows us from ourselves;
Supper is done, and we shall come too late.
ROMEO: I fear, too early: for my mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels and expire the term
Of a despised life closed in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
But He, that hath the steerage of my course,
Direct my sail! On, lusty gentlemen.
BENVOLIO: Strike, drum.
Exeunt

***

Ah, my dear friend, Mercutio, I believe I shall post more from you before the week is out.

Even if this thread is only for me, I will be happy sharing my favorite Shakespeare with myself, and if anyone else comes to play, I will welcome them with warm and open arms.

Shakespeare = :love:

oblivion · Thu Apr 15, 2010 2:22 am

Thanks, Eden! Enjoyed that very much!

bleachededen · Thu Apr 15, 2010 2:32 am

Yay!!!

There will be much more to come, and you're welcome to share your own favorite Shakespeare, too!

bleachededen · Thu Apr 15, 2010 1:13 pm

My favorite sonnet, which I once chose to memorize for a poetry assignment in my first college poetry class.
Here, Shakespeare asks how he can handle knowing that, since Time "makes fools of us all," as they say, how his love for his lady can last when even her beauty will fade, like everything else, concluding that nothing can change the aging process, and all we can do as humans is to enjoy life, and live and love until it is our time to die.

Take a look!

***

Sonnet 12

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

***

DWill · Thu Apr 15, 2010 4:33 pm

Good to see any sonnet by Shakespeare. I recall this one as being from that string of sonnets where the speaker is trying desperately to convince his young and beautiful male friend to get married and make kids! That is the only way we have to reach anything like immortality.

We should have Randy come back to talk about the sonnets. He was a big fan of them and was reading a book about them. The sonnets are varied, but one thing that unites them is Shakespeare's brilliant execution. Some of the themes are actually conventional, but he manages to make them shine through his exposition. Some express universal emotions, while others do the opposite, expressing the somewhat peculiar passions of what appears to be an actual love affair. I don't know how it could be that the writer who wrote the best plays in the world could also write perhaps the best book of poetry. And such a mysterious man at that, about whom relatively little is known.

bleachededen · Thu Apr 15, 2010 9:35 pm

You got down the gist of this sonnet quite well, DWill. I remember discussing it in class, and the professor (who was one of the oddest women I have ever met, go figure), ended her analysis of the work by saying, "He's trying to say there's nothing we can do to stop death, so we should go make babies!" It was just so odd the way she said it...I guess you had to be there.

More sonnets and ....well, more...to come!

DWill · Fri Apr 16, 2010 5:06 am

I've picked the second most famous of Hamlet's soliloquies. He says these anguished, bitter words before he learns from the Ghost the truth of how his his father died. Hamlet is a shattered idealist, the philosophy student who sees with horror how the world really is, and he doesn't get over it. A lot of other texts have the word "sullied" for "solid" in line one. I much prefer solid.

(bleachededen, have you seen Zeffereli's film of Romeo and Juliet (late 60s, I think)? The actor playing Mercutio was fabulous and unforgettably delivered the lines you quoted.)

Act 1 Scene2: O That This Too Solid Flesh Would Melt (Spoken by Hamlet)

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month--
Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she--
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

bleachededen · Fri Apr 16, 2010 6:00 pm


	DWill wrote: (bleachededen, have you seen Zeffereli's film of Romeo and Juliet (late 60s, I think)? The actor playing Mercutio was fabulous and unforgettably delivered the lines you quoted.)

YES! I loved that guy! :lol:

I'm pretty sure that actor is actually the reason I love Mercutio so much. I had a huge crush on him as a kid, despite him not being the most attractive guy around, because of the way he portrayed that character. No one has ever spoken that speech better, in my opinion, and every time I read the play I hear all of Mercutio's lines in his voice.

oblivion · Sat Apr 17, 2010 2:33 am

I actually have that version on dvd. I have a great version of Hamlet portayed in India. Works well.

bleachededen · Sat Apr 17, 2010 1:22 pm

My favorite Hamlet on film is the Kenneth Branagh version.

There is an interesting modern version from 2000 with Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, and Liev Schreiber (with Bill Murray as Polonius, no less), and it is interesting to see how they modernized the setting and the "play" in which the conscious of the king is captured, but all the lines seem to be lackluster and delivered without emotion, so although I think it modernizes Shakespeare much better than Baz Lehrmann's Romeo + Juliet did, it still falls short for me (I really hate the Baz Lehrmann movie. HATE).

bleachededen · Sat Apr 17, 2010 1:27 pm

Another of my all-time favorite sonnets, which, somehow, has been running through my head since yesterday.

***

Sonnet 116

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.

***

bleachededen · Sat Apr 17, 2010 1:36 pm

Just so everyone knows -

I read aloud every piece of Shakespeare I come upon, so rest assured that I will be reading aloud anything from Shakespeare you post in this thread (I just read the Hamlet soliloquy DWill posted, with much emotion, pretending I was Hamlet, and it was an awesome experience). I strongly recommend you do the same, because in speaking the lines aloud, the line breaks become more obvious and the lines flow from one to the next. I always cringed in classes when students would read Shakespeare (and other poetry) aloud and stop at every line break just because it was a break in space and not necessarily in flow, and for some reason most people can't seem to grasp this concept. In grad school my professor thanked me for being such a good reader, that she could see that I had a knack for reading poetry aloud, even on a first reading. It's probably owed a great deal to my musical background and knowledge of a lot of songs, but probably also because I started reading poetry, especially Shakespeare, at a very early age, and watched Shakespeare plays performed or listened to them read aloud on my dad's records, so I grasped the melody of poetry very early on.

Sorry, I'm not trying to brag, I just want to share how much I enjoy reading Shakespeare aloud. :blush:

bleachededen · Sun Apr 18, 2010 2:12 am

A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!

I do not give you that speech but another, just as memorable, from the start of that same play.
Ah, Richard, how fun it is to hate you, and to watch your scheming plans come crashing down around your head.

***

from Richard III, Act I, scene i

RICHARD: Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes.

***

DWill · Mon Apr 19, 2010 6:24 pm

A good villian is fun to watch, and Shakespeare has many of them. He has good rogues, too, the most famous perhaps being Falstaff, who has his biggest role in Henry IV, Part I. Last winter I took the family down to a replica Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton, Virginia, where we saw that play. I hadn't remembered just how much of what is memorable about the play is due to Falstaff's scenes. The audience was loving it when he was on stage. By comparison, the political and warfare scenes were sort of ho-hum.

"Well, 'tis no matter; honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off, when I come on? how then? Can honor set to a leg? no. or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no: Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honor? a word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. 'Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore, I'll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism." (V,1,131)

Prince Hal gets him but good in several places:

Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack, and
unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches
after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which
thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the
time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes
capons, and the blessed Sun himself a fair hot wench in
flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be
so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

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