(I mean, if I had to choose.)
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.— Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Sc. 1
I remember when I first heard that line, I was a kid … and at the word “naughty” a strange chill went up my back. A chill of fear, and foreboding … “Naughty” is such a potent world to a child. To think of the entire “world” as naughty …
As I have grown up, that line has taken on different meanings for me, it has different impacts at different times … but it’s always with me, for some reason.
The entire “St. Crispin’s Day” speech just sends chills down my spine, especially when Branagh does it in the film version.
“we few, we happy few…”
Olivier’s version is well-worth seeing, although it is a different style of acting.
When he cries out Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ he does this crazy thing with his voice on “George” – it swoops up and up and up and up … I have no idea how he came to that choice, but he did. it’s kind of unbelievable.
I liked Branagh’s much better, though – even though it certainly is something to see Olivier. I liked how Branagh played it as this kind of pouty boy-king. The first shot of him in the throne, and his golden hair – he looks like a little kid.
My favorite lines from Shakespeare are the ones I don’t have to read. I hate that crap.
I liked the boy-king angle, it isn’t that far off, as Henry was fairly young.
Shakespeare is one of the few high school reading assignments I liked.
Another favorite exchange goes something like:
“There’s Cinna the conspirator, tear him!”
“No, I’m Cinna the poet!”
“Then tear him for his bad verses!”
I’m not a big fan either but I have a wonderful memory of sitting at the kitchen table with my father (probably about age 11 or 12) – and he was going through Portia’s “Quality of Mercy” speech so that I could understand what it was I had to memorize. I’m sure the assignment was for J.G. to perform in the Kingston Free Library (he he) – but I’ll always remember the connection with my father.
I used to be in the same camp with Emily – in high school I detested Shakespeare because I saw his fame as a triumph of style over substance. In later years, however, I’ve somewhat softened my position. Substance notwithstanding, the guy did have a way with words. If I had to choose a quote with relevance for my own life, I’d probably go with this from Measure For Measure:
Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.
To be fair, I haven’t given any of his stuff a shot since high school, where I found the effort to figure out just what in the hell he was saying too exhausting.
That’s pretty much where I am with all verse or literature. None of it makes a damn bit of sense.
I should add, “…to me”. I’m not trying to say there’s something wrong with either of those arts. The problem is with my own density.
I wonder if “naughty” had quite the same meaning in Shakespeare’s day…today, I think of it more as something an overly-energetic and playful child would do than as something a truly rotten person would perpetrate.
“Out, out brief candle! Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player who 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”.
Not too bad, from memory too! Thanks, Mr. Crothers, for making us memorize this piece- 20 years and I still remember!!!
“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York; and all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried” from Richard III. Purely for the sound.
Et tu, Brute?
Lord Polonius (scene three, if I remember correctly):
“This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Corny, but it helps me to steer the course.
I had this great teacher in H.S. who taught English my junior year (16 years old). She tried really hard to teach us Shakespeare but since she was fresh out of college, had half the division football champs in the classroom, and could have starred in “Boobs – Strindberg’s lost masterpiece” we didn’t learn shit.!
What I am about to say is highly pretentious, and i can’t help it. I can be rather pretentious.
When I had to actually ACT Shakespeare’s lines, and try to bring them to life, and speak the speech “trippingly on the tongue” – as opposed to reading it on the page – was when I understood it better, was when I really got his genius.
He wrote them to be performed, not read. I didn’t really understand that until college, when i did Shakespeare plays, and had to speak the words.
I have yet to perform in Boobs – Strindberg’s Lost Masterpiece.
Oh, and David Foster, about “naughty” –
Not to get all weird here, but I believe when I first heard those words as a kid, I was picking up on something else. Not just my own limited life experience.
I felt that “naughty” was … a terrible word … perhaps it was from my Catholic upbringing, and my feelings about the Devil and the “mischief” the Devil does.
“Naughty” to me had connotations of darkness, of – nothing ever going right – of a world all awry.
Or – it DID after I heard that line.
But I would like to know the meaning of the word in the day. In the context of the play, and with what just happened, I can guess where Portia is coming from, but you never know.
Sheila,
I don’t have your perspective, but I have a greater appreciation for them when I see them performed, rather than reading the dry text off the page.
Noggie –
Funny story about Polonius. Or – it’s funny to me, anyway.
Doug Moston, one of my acting teachers (I memorialized him on this post – he just died) taught a Shakespeare class. He was amazing. He made us really look at the text, try to find the pulse of Shakespeare. We read Hamlet, of course – and he pointed out to us when characters would break into verse, when they would speak in “prose” – and what that might have meant, what it might signify. Verse tends to mean something a bit more formal, a bit more declamatory.
And Doug Moston said, “Polonius ALWAYS speaks in verse. He is ALWAYS formal. Polonius was BORN speaking in verse.”
I just love that.
Don’t know that I have a favorite line or anything like that. I do have a favorite stage direction, and a favorite moment from a viewing. From A Winter’s Tale, in Act III, scene 3, Antigonus gives a little bit of a twisted soliloquy, abandoning a baby in the wilderness…his scene is ended with the stage direction:
Exit, pursued by a bear.
I saw a Winter’s Tale put on not long ago. It wasn’t good, except for this scene, where the bear wanders on stage about halfway through Antigonus’ speech, and Antigonus is wary of the bear, and walks away from it throughout the scene. The bear, at one point, stands up on hind legs and does a hilarious hip thrust at Antigonus. Antigonus’ speech gets quicker and quicker, and Antigonus practically delivers his last lines yelled from offstage, as the bear has already begun to chase him.
Not the most memorable, but still humorous or useful:
“Get thee to a nunnery!”
“I am slain…”
“Fair is foul and foul is fair…”
“Tis Greek to me…”
They go on and on. The influence of this one poet upon the language is astounding.
“Exit, pursued by a bear”
God, that is funny.
I can’t begin to pick a single favorite line from Shakespeare. That’s like asking to pick a favorite parent: even if you can, it’s just wrong. And you’re so right that he wrote for his work to be performed, not read. Yet those qualifiers said, what first comes to my mind is Miranda from The Tempest:
“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!”
DaveJ –
Even though it most definitely is wrong to ask people to make such a Sophie’s choice, I am so glad you did … That is one of my favorite lines too.
Thanks!
Two come to mind…the first from Macbeth:
“Blow, wind! Come, wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our backs!” I’ve always had that little bit of Gotterdammerung in me, that “if we’re going to fail, let’s leave a great big crater for them to remember us by.” Apropos perhaps of nothing, Macbeth, Cyrano de Bergerac, and An Enemy of the People are my favorite plays.
The other? The last two lines of Sonnet 116:
“If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
Somehow, I think both sets of lines spring from the same well of sentiment, somehow.
I heartily agree with most of the comments above… the one I use most is “Lord!!! what fools these mortals be!!” need I say??? Puck??? from the Midsummer’s Night’s Dream?