ANTONY AND CLEOPATRACleopatra: Eternity was in our lips and eyes Bliss in our brow’s bent. I.iii.35-6 Adam Nolan, who describes himself as ‘one of love’s failures, but an incurable romantic’, finds these the most moving lines in the play. Enobarbus: The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burnt on the water. The poop was beaten gold, Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them. II.ii.191-4 Charles Davis, novelist and travel writer (see his blog: www.redroom.com/author/charles-davis) writes: Looking at the whole of the barge description, it seems a bit overwrought (though perhaps
that’s the point of the 'beggar’d description') and I’m not sure you’d
get away with ‘pretty-dimpled boys’ nowadays, but when I first read
it, the phrase ‘word picture’ suddenly had real meaning. I still like
'love-sick' winds.
Lepidus: What manner of thing is your crocodile?
Antony: It is shap’d, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. Lepidus: What colour is it of? Antony: Of its own colour too. Lepidus: ‘Tis a strange serpent. Antony: ‘Tis so. And the tears of it are wet. II.vii.41-49 Christopher Hudson, ‘quondam associate professor, Addis Ababa University; also of Alexandria’, comments as follows: 'There is much to enrich this comic exchange, though it could stand on its own. The dramatic context heightens the mood: a possible assassination is in the air. Then there is the deft delineation of character. Wine-flown Antony swashbuckles with the panache of an Egyptian adventurer; his traveller’s account of foreign exotica is rational and informative. By contrast, Lepidus, the non-entity of the triumvirate, contributes only resounding fatuities. His wine-fuddled mind fixes tenaciously on ‘your crocodile – bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun’ as he proclaims. He it is, though, who articulates its fascination as a symbol of Cleopatra’s world – incongruously, just as it had been for plain-spoken Enobarbus to portray the voluptuous splendours of Cleopatra’s barge. Lepidus is laid open to Antony’s tease because he can neither pursue the subject intelligently, nor escape its fascination. The tease itself leaves the crocodile’s mystery, elaborately undisclosed, making a pretty variation on a recurring symbolic motif in the play.' Cleopatra: The crown o’ th’ earth doth melt. My lord! Oh, withered is the garland of the war, The soldier’s pole is fallen! Young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon. IV.xv.63-8 Sarah Badel (whose stage and film career has included many Shakespeare roles) finds the image ‘deeply moving in the sheer scale of the imagery and the way Cleopatra magnificently portrays the terrible sense of her loss and the utter nothingness of a life lived without Antony’. She contrasts Cleopatra’s response to the death of Antony with Macbeth’s response to the death of his wife. AS YOU LIKE IT Celia: (reading from one of Orlando's poems) Thus Rosalind of many parts By heavenly synod was devis'd, Of many faces, eyes, and hearts, To have the touches dearest priz'd. (III.ii.149-152) Dilly Bundy, writer an artist writes: 'Rosalind is among Shakespeare's greatest and most fully realised female characters. So says Harold Bloom. She is the embodiment of a many-sided, dominant woman, who, according to Peggy Ashcroft, could exist—did exist in Shakespearean England: someone not inferior to men but powerfully different. I like that about Rosalind. I applaud Shakespeare for creating such a heroine. Not only does she assertively play many parts in As You Like It but she explores the fascinating idea of being multiple. As a prize-winning painter of self-portraits, I have been exploring visual interpretations of such challenging ideas for a number of years.'
HAMLET
Barnardo: Who’s there? Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself. Barnardo: Long live the King! Francisco: Barnado? Barnardo: He. I.i.1-5 Sam West, actor and theatre director, chose these opening lines. In his Shakespeare, Bill Bryson writes of this opening: ‘No one set scenes more brilliantly or economically than Shakespeare...In five terse lines Shakespeare establishes that it is night-time and cold ..., that the speakers are soldiers on guard, and that there is tension in the air. With just fifteen words- eleven of them monosyllables- he has the audience’s full, rapt attention’. Hamlet: I did love you once. III.i.114 Brian Patten (the poet) remembers vividly a moment from a production where Hamlet’s words to Ophelia were given new meaning as:
'the actor saying this line paused after the word "you". This put the emphasis on the word "once", which was accompanied by a lewd gesture. In one moment he'd totally transformed the audience’s view of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia. A good example of how Shakespeare’s language is open to interpretation, and why actors and directors love him.' Hamlet: Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart – but it is no matter. V.ii.12-13 Veronica Cutler, PGCE tutor, writes: 'Hamlet is proceeding towards the duel with Laertes and there is a sense of foreboding. You feel he knows he will not survive and that his fate is approaching. The lines can be spoken only slowly because of their monosyllabic weight. The vocabulary is of the simplest but the feeling is deep. The assonance of ‘ill’ and ‘all’ and the long vowel of ‘all’ take an effort to speak. Prose may be considered at times the proper medium for lighter exchanges, but the prose here is as eloquent as the verse could be.' Hamlet: There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come –the readiness is all. V.ii.219-222 Dame Judi Dench chose this as a favourite image. HENRY VA parted ev’n just between twelve and one, ev’n at the turning o’ th’ tide. For after I saw him fumble with the sheets , and play with flowers, and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was a sharp as a pen, and ‘a babbled of green fields. II.iii.12-17 Here is the ending of the Folio version of these lines: I knew there was one way: for his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields. Duncan Salkeld (author of Shakespeare and Madness) writes: 'The hostess’s words have long been a problem. How could Falstaff’s nose be "as sharp as a pen and a table of greene fields"? Since 1733 editors have corrected the line to "…and a’ babbled of greene fields" in order to make sense of it. But "tables" was the Elizabethan word for the game of backgammon, a common tavern game. Each quadrant on the surface of a backgammon board contains six sharp triangular shapes known as "points". The playing area of the board is known as the "field". Backgammon boards at the time would have been wooden and some are likely to have been painted. Mistress Quickly was never a speaker in command of her words, but if we understand it as a double simile alluding to the sharpness of a quill and a "point" in the Elizabethan game of "tables", the line as originally printed in the Folio poses little difficulty’. Duncan points out that a number of academics have recently supported the Folio reading and that it has been acknowledged as a possible explanation by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen in their RSC edition of the Complete Works. Dominic Dromgoole in Will and Me writes: ‘that detail of babbling of green fields always finishes me off. It is the perfect match to the addled mysticism of an old English drunk.’ Hostess: So ‘a cried out, “God, God, God!” three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him ‘a should not think of God; I hop’d there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So ‘a bade me lay more clothes on his feet. I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and so up’ard and up’ard, and all was as cold as any stone. II.iii. 19-26 Giles Power, ‘a modern antiquarian’ writes: 'These lines combine Mistress Quickly’s good-hearted tenderness with just a hint of unintentional obscenity. Is it serendipity or artistry which led Shakespeare to parallel Falstaff’s death with Plato’s account of the death of Socrates, in which the man who has administered hemlock feels first Socrates’ foot "and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and showed us he was cold and stiff"?' JULIUS CAESAR Cassius: 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. I.ii.135-8 Kate Betts, whose play, On the Third Day, was the winner of Channel 4's The Play's the Thing and went on to run in the West End at the New Ambassador theatre, writes: 'This passionate outburst by Cassius about Julius Caesar resonates over time as a perfect metaphorical image of jealousy, frustration and fear of the power and dominance of one'. Cassius: Come Antony, and young Octavius come, Revenge yourselves alone on Cassius, For Cassius is a weary of the world: Hated by one he loves; brav'd by his brother; Check'd like a bondman; all his faults observ'd, Set in a note-book, learn'd, and conn'd by rote, To cast into my teeth. O! I could weep My spirit from mine eyes. IV.iii.93-99 Hugh Adlington, Lecturer at Birmingham University, writes: 'Sheer agony. Cassius knows that Brutus's accusations are just, but despairs that his 'brother', of all people, should hold him to account. The switch in rhythm - to half-lines that imitate the bean-counting manner of Brutus's charge, as Cassius sees it - is electric. Histrionic, self-pitying, and appalled; and, to me at least, unbearably moving.' KING LEARLear: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child. I.iv. 288-9 Maggie Sawkins, whose recent collection of poetry, The Zig Zag Woman, has won critical acclaim (and who regards Bob Dylan as the greatest living poet) chooses these lines as a favourite image. She remembers her mother quoting these lines to her (with a grin) and looks back on the words as her mother’s last attempt to make a peace-offering. Her mother, she says, was ‘more of a mathematician than a poet’. Kent: Thou whoreson zed. Thou unnecessary letter. II.ii.64 Angus Alton (who describes himself as an ‘erstwhile teacher and examiner and now time-serving messenger with the examinations regulator) chooses these words from Kent’s infuriated tirade against Goneril’s time-serving messenger, Oswald. He writes: 'It is a useful reminder of the extent of Shakespeare’s skill, going well beyond the conventionally poetic, and the sheer vigour of his language. It is also wonderfully predictive of Basil Fawlty’s famous "waste of space" insult to Manuel.' Lear: Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here’s three on’s are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. III.iv.103-8 Hugh Dunkerley (currently the West Sussex Poet Laureate) writes as follows on the strange encounter between Lear and Poor Tom: 'When I first read these lines at school, they seemed to say something fundamental about the human condition, that without culture and society we are in fact little more than ‘poor, bare, forked animals’. The strangeness of that word ‘forked’ carries so much power. It suggests to me both a visual image of a naked human, with branch-like limbs, but also one who is divided like a fork in a road, divided perhaps between the world of nature and the world of culture. Like so many of Shakespeare’s images, it is its own small constellation of meanings, to borrow a phrase from Ted Hughes.' Lear: Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks: Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it. IV.vi.166-7 Jan Rees, teacher, humanist and golf widow, marvels at the way in which this image,'sums up timelessly the difference between power and powerlessness'. Lear: If you have poison for me, I will drink it. I know you do not love me, for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: You have some cause, they have not. Cordelia: No cause, no cause. IV.vii.70-74 Vicki Feaver (whose most recent collection of poems, The Book of Blood, was short-listed for the 2006 Forward Prize) writes: 'It is in the simple words of Cordelia’s answer that I find the greatest poetry of the play. It was her refusal to use the embroidered language that cut her off from her father’s love and set the tragedy in motion, and now it is her simplicity of language that brings her (and him) back into the redeeming intimacy of love and forgiveness.'
Edgar: I asked his blessing, and from first to last
Told him of our pilgrimage. But his flaw’d heart (Alack too weak the conflict to support!) ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief. Burst smilingly. V.iii.196-200 Sam West has chosen the above account of Gloucester’s death as one of Shakespeare’s greatest images. LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOSTCostard: And I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy Gingerbread. Hold, there is the very remuneration I had of thy master, thou halfpenny purse of wit, thou pigeon-egg of discretion. V.i.70-75 Patrick Garland (Author and Theatre Director) writes: 'Characteristic only of W.S. it is a line, comical in character, even ridiculous, but full of immense generosity. It is a gift for any actor, and has, for me, an admirable simplicity. And it is prosaic, but filled with an effortless poetry. I cannot imagine any other writer in all the world would ever think of it.’ MACBETHLady Macbeth: Yet I do fear thy nature, It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. I.v.16-18 Gary Bathis, a modern Marco Polo based in Brisbane, selected these lines as an often forgotten insight into Macbeth’s character before his fall.
Macbeth: No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green, one red. II.ii.58-60 When asked on the Radio 4 to offer the Nation her ‘favourite word’, Antonia Byatt said that though she did not have a favourite word, this was her ‘favourite line’.
Macbeth: I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er. III.iv.135-7 Linda Cookson (who, following a career as writer and academic, has now moved into travel writing - and whose vivid accounts of her journeys recall moments in Othello’s wooing of Desdemona) - chooses this image: 'Partly it’s the simplicity of this that makes it work for me – the graphic image of standing in a sea of blood, and the way the monosyllables mimic a dreadful laboured plod through thick red gore. But mostly it’s the choice of the word "tedious". So understated, the word of a man whose emotional cupboard is bare, it captures terrifyingly his mood of utter exhaustion and hopelessness.'
Ross: where violence seems
A modern ecstasy. IV.iii.169-70 Andrew Motion (Poet Laureate) offers this as ‘a favourite phrase’. It comes from the description of Scotland, under the tyranny of Macbeth, as a country where horror has become commonplace.
Macbeth: 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 an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. V.v.19-28 Sarah Badel contrasts Macbeth’s ‘passionless bone chilling nihilism’ in these lines with Cleopatra’s grief at the loss of Antony. MEASURE FOR MEASUREMariana: O Isabel! Will you not lend a knee? Duke: He dies for Claudio’s death. Isabella: [Kneeling] Most bounteous sir: Look, if it please you, on this man condemn’d As if my brother lived. V.i.442-5 Leon Wyman, a modern Cerimon, finds the silence between the Duke’s pronouncement and Isabella’s kneeling to intercede for Angelo the energy centre of the play. In The Empty Space, Peter Brook recalled a production of the play in which he instructed Isabella to pause before kneeling ‘until she felt that the audience could take it no longer’. This long wait became what Brook described as a ‘voodoo pole, a silence in which all the invisible elements of the evening came together: a silence in which the abstract notion of mercy became concrete for that moment to those present’. OTHELLOIago: Even now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. I.i.88-9 Iago: I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs. I.i.115-17 Bran Nicoll (an authority on Iris Murdoch) says that he first realised that Shakespeare ‘had something’ when he encountered the language of Iago while studying Othello as a set text at school. He remembers how the taunting of Brabantio in these two images was at the dawn of his own awareness of the power of language. Othello: of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline; But still the house-affairs would draw her thence; Which ever as she could with haste dispatch, She'd come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse... I.iii.143-150. This is a section of Othello’s account of his wooing of Desdemona, in which he talks of his fortunes on the field of battle and of the strange landscapes he has encountered. Alison MacLeod (the novelist and short story writer) comments: 'I love the revelation that Othello woos her with stories; that their intimacy is founded, in part, on a sense of shared imagination. I love the sense of the fabulous in his stories (the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders - from Pliny, I assume). I instantly warm to Desdemona for her "greedy ear", for her "world of sighs", and her devouring curiosity about the wide world. We also get a sense of her terrific sympathies in the way she enters each story so fully (which he fondly satirises). And I love Othello because, military man though he is, he obviously cherishes the detail of the world - he's warm with life itself - and that's what makes him a good storyteller as well as a charismatic character. ROMEO AND JULIETRomeo: A grave? O no, a lantern, slaughtered youth!
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence, full of light. V.iii.84-6 Walter Saunders (author and editor of Shakespeare 2000, a deftly modernised set of Shakespeare’s best known texts) comments: 'One usually thinks of a lantern as a portable container with glass sides, holding and giving forth some form of light. In architecture a lantern is a structure built on the roof of a church, with open sides to let light into the building. When Romeo enters the tomb and holds his torch forward, he is spellbound, because what he sees is not the grim dark interior of a vault but what seems to him like a church’s lantern that is lit from within by the beauty of Juliet. This is a stunning vision. Or illusion. For what has Romeo to see by? Only his torch, which is at best a fitful and smoky source of light. But that vision, through Shakespeare’s poetry, is what Romeo believes he sees. Furthermore Juliet’s beauty makes the vault look like "a feasting presence, full of light". The phrase "a feasting presence" suggests that for him a royal or even a spiritual feast is taking place. One is taken back with overwhelming vividness to his first vision of her: "O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!". THE TEMPESTCaliban: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that when I wak’d, I cried to dream again. III.iii.135-43 Bethan Roberts ( whose novels, The Pools and The Good Plain Cook, are published by Serpent Press, writes: 'I first came across TheTempest when studying to sit the Oxford entrance exam. I didn’t get into Oxford, but I do remember this quote. Like the play itself, it’s the strangeness of it that is so memorable; I want to be on this isle, to hear and feel those "twangling instruments" and "sweet airs". (I don’t know what "twangling" means, but I can imagine what it sounds like). What’s surprising and rich about this speech is that it belongs to a character who’s usually associated with the bestial and the earthy, and yet here he is – a poetic, yearning, rather literary Caliban – describing his wonderment at the ‘noises of the isle’ and telling us how they open his imagination. The members of the audience will have probably all shared this feeling of loss at the end of a dream (or a novel, play, or film), but perhaps we didn’t expect Caliban to have known that feeling, too. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA Ulysses: Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back Wherein he puts alms for oblivion. III.iii.145-6 Brian Martin (whose recent novel North has bewitched ‘a great variety of readers’) particularly enjoys moments like this when Shakespeare through his ‘apposite imagery’ expresses common thoughts better than any other writer.
Troilus: Within my soul there doth conduce a fight Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate Divides more wider than the sky and earth, And yet the spacious breadth of this division Admits no orifex for a point as subtle As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter. V.ii. 147-52 Antonia Byatt points out that in the name ‘Ariachne’, Shakespeare has conflated Ariadne and Arachne – both of whom had ‘subtle threads’. Is the conflation an error of Shakespeare’s, or a confusion in Troilus’s mind as he struggles to come to terms with the reality of his situation? TWELFTH NIGHTFeste: Any thing that’s mended is but patch’d; virtue that transgresses is but patch’d with sin, and sin that amends is but patch’d with virtue. I.v.47-9 Karen Stevens, writer and academic, admires the wit and wisdom and patterning in Feste’s taunting of Olivia. THE WINTER’S TALEOld Shepherd: I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest: for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting - III.iii.59-63 Gordon Miller, who describes himself as ‘a poor fellow that would live’, says these are his ‘favourite lines from Shakespeare’. THE POEMS‘To kill myself,’ quoth she, ‘alack, what were it But with my body my poor soul’s pollution? They that lose half with greater patience bear it Than they whose whole is swallowed in confusion. That mother tries a merciless conclusion Who, having two sweet babes, when death takes one, Will slay the other and be nurse to none.’ The Rape of Lucrece (1156-1162)
Sandeep Parmar, poet and academic writes: 'As a feminist, I feel this passage redeems The Rape of Lucrece’s troublesome characterization of Lucrece and her rationale for suicide—not the least of which is the poem’s description of her body: "Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of maiden worlds unconquerèd" (407-408). The reader’s foreknowledge of Tarquin’s deception and subsequent brutal act casts Lucrece as so untarnished that she is naïve, and so honoured by the fame of her chastity (in itself a paradox recognized by the poem) that she would rather die than face being blemished. But what I love about this stanza is that here we finally get a sense of her intellect. She is not just the ‘hysterical’, wronged woman—Lucrece approaches her impeding suicide with the rhetorical power of a philosopher. And the final image of the mother absorbed by grief is a refusal to grieve. I think, for Lucrece, this is true chastity.
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