William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
English playwright and poet, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.
Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's,
Therefore on him no speech!
The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakspere.
There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.
"With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart," once more!
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!
'I'm always ill after Shakespeare,' said Mrs Wititterly. 'I scarcely exist the next day; I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakespeare is such a delicious creature.'
If music be the food of love, play on.
When great poets sing,
Into the night new constellations spring,
With music in the air that dulls the craft
Of rhetoric. So when Shakespeare sang or laughed
The world with long, sweet Alpine echoes thrilled
Voiceless to scholars' tongues no muse had filled
With melody divine.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burnt on the water.
Few of the university pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down. Aye, and Ben Jonson too. O that B. J. is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow, Shakespeare, hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.
The course of true love never did run smooth.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
Our myriad-minded Shakespeare.
Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving.
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.
Over the past two centuries, there has hardly been an author, certainly in the English-speaking world, who has commanded greater reverence than Shakespeare. … There is only one text in the English language that carries comparable prestige to the works of Shakespeare: the Bible, in particular in its most renowned version, the King James Bible, otherwise known as the Authorized Version, of 1611. … In view of the persistent juxtaposition of these two Anglophone cultural icons … it is hardly surprising that they also feature together in a number of fictions of Shakespeare's life, in the form of the fantasy of the Bard as co-translator of the Authorized Version. The originator of this motif seems to have been Rudyard Kipling. In his story "Proofs of Holy Writ," Kipling imagines Shakespeare in the process of revising parts of the Authorized Version with the help of Ben Jonson.
Shikspur, Shikspur! Who wrote it?
No, I never read Shikspur.
Then you have an immense pleasure to come.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's;
Therefore on him no speech!