knots.................

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;

It is too hard a knot for me t' untie.

-Viola

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or, What You Will:  Act II, Scene II

confine........................

 

Maria.   Ay, but you must confine* yourself within the modest limits of order.

Toby.    Confine?  I'll confine myself no finer that I am.  These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these boots too.  And they be not, let them hang themselves by their own straps.

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or, What You Will:  Act 1, Scene III

*i.e., clothe

image via

Checking in with Will.......................

 

Toby.  Approach, Sir Andrew.  Not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes; and "Deliculo surgere," thou know'st.*

Andrew.  Nay, by my troth, I know not, but I know to be up late is to be up late,

Toby.  A false conclusion; I hate it as an unfilled can.  To be up after midnight, and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes.  Does not our lives consist of the four elements?

Andrew.  Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.

Toby.  Th' art a scholar!  Let us therefore eat and drink.  Marian I say, a stoup of wine!

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night,  Act II, Scene III

*Ed. Note:  Those of Shakespeare's time would have recognized Diluculo surgere saluberrimum est as "it is most beautiful to rise early.

Finding good advice where you can..........

 

     The popularity of health books or "dietaries" attested to people's concern bout personal health, as did the sections on home remedies for the sick to be found in many cookbooks.  The dietaries were comprised largely of advice on diet as related to health.  Every edible thing was analyzed with relation to its effect on health.  Those with "melancholicke" nature were advised to eat certain foods and avoid others; those of "cholericke" temperament were warned against foods that might increase their choler.  Some foods were dangerous because they caused "bad blood"; still others could fill the body and head with "evil vapours."  And some foods could "increase man's seed," a desirable thing, it may have seemed to many, since so many children died young.

-Madge Lorwin, Dining With Shakespeare:  Thirteen complete Shakespearean feast menus, spiced with essays and comments on the food and social customs of Elizabethan England

A Shakespeare jukebox.................

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

via

Re-reading Shakespeare.................

The following lines are all to be found in Act 2, Scene 2 in Hamlet

Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.

Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!

I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is
southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-
comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or
poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor
Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the
liberty, these are the only men.

I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this: the play 's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

Fun with the language...............

 Having beers with Shakespeare would be extraordinary.

• Sir Nathaniel. I praise God for you, sir: your reasons 
• at dinner have been sharp and sententious; 
• pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, 
• audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, 
• and strange without heresy. I did converse this quondam 
• day with a companion of the king's, who is intituled, nomi-
• nated, or called, Don Adriano de Armado.
• 
  

• Holofernes. Novi hominem tanquam te: his humour 
• is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, 
• his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general
• behavior vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is
• too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it
• were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.

• Sir Nathaniel. A most singular and choice epithet.

       -William Shakespeare,  Love's Labour's Lost:  Act Five, Scene 1

      thrasonical is a new one for me.  According to our friends at Dictionary.com it means boastful; vainglorious.

Stand thou forth.........................

I am not a day of season,
For thou mayst see a sunshine and a hail
In me at once.  But to the brightest beams
Distracted clouds give way, so stand thou forth,
The time is fair again.

-The King, as channeled by Wm. Shakespeare in Act Five Scene Three of All's Well That Ends Well

Still haven't come across where..............

.......................................................Shakespeare wrote this:

Rarest............................

They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.  Hence it is, that we make trifles out of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.  Why, 'tis the rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times.

-Lafeu, as channeled by Wm. Shakespeare in Act Two Scene Three of All's Well That Ends Well

Remedies................................

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven.  The fated sky
Gives us free scope;  only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

-Helena, as channeled by Wm. Shakespeare in Act One Scene One of All's Well That Ends Well

On dreams.............................

"I had a dream that feels important, but I don't know for sure."

"I guess that would depend on whom you believe."

"How so?"

"William Shakespeare called dreams the 'children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy.'"

"What's my other choice?"
"Dreams have also been called a sign of ambition.  I think the quote was" 'Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.'"

"And who said that?"

"That was also William Shakespeare."

"He couldn't make up his mind?"

She shrugs.  "I would say if it feels important it probably is.  Our subconscious can be downright persistent in prodding us along our path, even if it is a road we'd rather not travel."

-Camron Wright,  The Rent Collector

The question...........................

To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. 

-William Shakespeare, channeling Hamlet

Willing to hope..........................

     That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.

-Samuel Johnson,  Johnson on Shakespeare:  essays and notes

Making it up as he went along................

...Shakespeare  accelerated his pace as his career proceeded.  In plays written during his most productive  and inventive period - Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear - neologisms occur at the fairly astonishing rate of one every two and a half lines.  Hamlet alone gave audiences about six hundred words, that according to all other evidence, they had never heard before.
       Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, excellent, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless).  Where would we be without them?  He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to words to make new words that no one had thought of before - unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil, and no fewer that 309 others in a similar vein.  Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English.

-Bill Bryson,  Shakespeare:  The World as Stage

Lest you long for the "good old days"......

     William Shakespeare was born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had.  In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million - much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous,  heavy toll.  Now the number of living Britons was actually in retreat.  The previous decade had seen a fall in population nationally of about 6 percent.  In London as many as a quarter of the citizenry may have perished.
     But plague was only the beginning of England's deathly woes.  The embattled populace also faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles, rickets, scurvy, two types of small pox (confluent and hemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery, and a vast amorphous array of fluxes and fevers - tertian fever, quartian fever, puerperal fever, ship's fever, quotidian fever, spotted fever - as well as "frenzies," "foul evils," and other peculiar maladies of vague and numerous type.  These were, of course, no respecters of rank.  Queen Elizabeth herself was nearly carried off by smallpox in 1562, two years before William Shakespeare was born.

-Bill Bryson,  Shakespeare:  The World as Stage

Opening sentences...........................

Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.
-Bill Bryson,  Shakespeare:  The World as Stage

With apologies to Bill Shakespeare......

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 can be found here.

Monday's Poem.....................

              Sonnet XXXVI

LEt me confeſſe that we two muſt be twaine,
Although our vndeuided loues are one:
So ſhall thoſe blots that do with me remaine,
Without thy helpe, by me be borne alone.
In our two loues there is but one reſpect,
Though in our liues a ſeperable ſpight,
Which though it alter not loues ſole effect,
Yet doth it ſteal ſweete houres from loues delight,
I may not euer-more acknowledge thee,
Leaſt my bewailed guilt ſhould do thee ſhame,
Nor thou with publike kindneſſe honour me,
Vnleſſe thou take that honour from thy name:
But doe not ſo,I loue thee in ſuch ſort,
As thou being mine,mine is thy good report.

-William Shakespeare, The 1609 Quarto Version


It might be easier to read this version.

Let me confess that we two must be twain,
Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone.
In our two loves there is but one respect,
Though in our lives a separable spite,
Which though it alter not love's sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love's delight.
I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:
But do not so, I love thee in such sort,
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.


For everything you wanted to know about Shakespeare's
Sonnets, and more, go here