"Shakespearian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... below the mark—I may say how I wonder and delight in it. I am rejoiced to find that this is so; and I am quite sure that it is not owing to my old prejudice, but to the intrinsic merit and beauty of the Book itself. With all its faults of detail, often mere carelessness, what a broad Shakespearian Daylight over it all, and all with no Effort, and—a lot else that one may be contented to feel without having to write an Essay about. They won't beat Sir Walter in a hurry (I mean of course his earlier, Northern, Novels), and he was such a fine Fellow that I really ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... all this sounds like child's play, but it is astonishing how many of our Shakespearian critics commit one or all of these faults. Forgetting entirely that criticism demands common sense, impartial judgment, intense sympathy, a total absence of prejudice, and a great deal of general information, they bring ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... previous visits to Page he had found means to see her two or three times each week. Once, even, he had asked her to marry him, but she, deep in her studies at the time, consumed with vague ambitions to be a great actress of Shakespearian roles, had told him she could care for nothing but her art. He had smiled and said that he could wait, and, strangely enough, their relations had resumed again upon the former footing. Even after she had gone away they had corresponded regularly, and he had made and sent her a tiny window—a ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Forty-second Street, opposite the entrance to the Empire Theatre. The younger man was pale and sickly looking, and his long hair, classic features, and general seedy appearance stamped him as a "legit," or a player whose theatrical activities had been confined to Shakespearian ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... poignant in its appeal to living minds now than ever before in the history of our civilization. But it occupies only one province of poetry. A lover of poetry desires, far more keenly than the general reader, to have verse of his own day that is more Shakespearian, more Miltonic, more Sophoclean than this. He wants poetry that lifts spacious times into spacious verse, poetry that "enlumynes," like Petrarch's "rhetorike sweete," a race and a civilization. He desires, in addition to what he is already getting, precisely that poetry so ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Shakespearian. Well, as I was telling you, it has come to a jolly little company of four in my surrey, which, after all, is perhaps nicer than a dozen in a tallyho, though of course it won't impress the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... gay clique in the church who eagerly welcomed the pastor's wife to their circle. They organised a literary society and gave Shakespearian entertainments. ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... should repeat from hearsay what several of the seven brothers have reported from authoritative memory. It is admitted, by them and by all who have understood the movement, that Gabriel Rossetti was the founder and, in the Shakespearian sense, "begetter" of all that was done by this earnest band of young artists. One of them, Mr. Millais, was already distinguished; two others, Mr. Holman Hunt and Mr. Woolner, had at that time more training ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... not mean torment, and everlasting does not mean everlasting, perhaps hell does not mean hell; in which case, it is a waste of time to argue about details, when the whole establishment, to use a Shakespearian ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... letter to Collier that has been preserved. John Payne Collier (1789-1883), known as a Shakespearian critic and editor of old plays and poems, was then a reporter on The Times. He had recently married. Wordsworth also wrote to Collier on this subject, Coleridge's lectures were delivered in 1818, beginning on January 27, in Flower-de-Luce Court. Their preservation ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Shakespeare. Every person present except the king of the feast was an American, and a Shakespeare fanatic as well. Rather to the surprise of even his most ardent admirers, the great tragedian proved to be a keen and intelligent Shakespearian scholar, not only of the roles that he has made his own, but also of the whole of the works of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... diction and melody, but in that supreme Shakespearian poetic gift of imagination which can vividly portray, body forth in clear form, what others can only feel in a vague and misty way while lacking the power to express it—in this gift also the great poet is known, not ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... You are not to suppose that I am anything but disconcerted to-day, in the agitation of my soul concerning Christmas; but I have been brooding, like Dombey himself, over Dombey these two days, until I really can't afford to be depressed." To his Shakespearian suggestion I replied that it would hardly give him the claim he thought of setting up, for that swimming through your troubles would not be "opposing" them. And upon the other point I had no doubt of the wisdom of delay. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and I got it just as I was wanting something of the sort. I take less pleasure in books than heretofore, but I like books about books. In the second volume, in particular, are treasures—your discoveries about "Twelfth Night," etc. What a Shakespearian essence that speech of Osrades for food!—Shakespeare is coarse to it—beginning "Forbear and eat no more." Osrades warms up to that, but does not set out ruffian-swaggerer. The character of the Ass with those three ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... immediate future. They visited Exeter and Bath, and then went to London, where they found lodgings at No. 5, Woburn Place. There MacDowell's interest in the outer world was divided between the British Museum, where he found a particular fascination in the Egyptian and Syrian antiquities, and the Shakespearian performances of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. He was captivated by their performance of "Much Ado About Nothing," and made a sketch for a symphonic poem which was to be called "Beatrice and Benedick"—a plan ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... mere understanding, inasmuch as they supposed an ideal state rather than referred to an existing reality,—yet it was a reason which was obliged to accommodate itself to the senses, and so far became a sort of more elevated understanding. On the other hand, the romantic poetry—the Shakespearian drama—appealed to the imagination rather than to the senses, and to the reason as contemplating our inward nature, and the workings of the passions in their most retired recesses. But the reason, as reason, is independent of time and space; it has ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... listened to in silence, and the applauding was done after the curtain was down. The doors opened at half past four, the play began promptly at half past five, and within two minutes afterward all who were coming were in their seats, and quiet reigned. A German gentleman in the train had said that a Shakespearian play was an appreciated treat in Germany and that we should find the house filled. It was true; all the six tiers were filled, and remained so to the end—which suggested that it is not only balcony people who like Shakespeare in Germany, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the slop-chest I knew nothing, so that what I witnessed came with a shock of sudden surprise. I had just finished sweeping the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf Larsen into a discussion of Hamlet, his favourite Shakespearian character, when Johansen descended the companion stairs followed by Johnson. The latter's cap came off after the custom of the sea, and he stood respectfully in the centre of the cabin, swaying heavily and uneasily to the roll of the schooner and ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... "I think the Shylocks must be picture-dealers, you know. But their conversation isn't very Shakespearian, is it? I heard Hamlet say, just now, that the floor was too perfect for anything, and Ophelia—she was dancing with a Pierrot incroyable—told her partner that she adored waltzing ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Twain outdid himself in the Elizabethan field. It was written as a letter to that robust divine, Rev. Joseph Twichell, who had no special scruples concerning Shakespearian parlance and customs. Before it was mailed it was shown to David Gray, who was spending a Sunday at Elmira. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of his Shakespearian impersonations, and I shall have indicated enough, in advance of Mr. Fechter's presentation of himself. That quality of picturesqueness, on which I have already laid stress, is strikingly developed in ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... He has an impressionability—not to panic, not to depression, not to wounded vanity, but to the appropriateness and the demands of an environment, which is something miraculous. I have already remarked, that the infinite variety of his oratory is Shakespearian in its completeness and abundance. The speech on April 6th was an additional proof of this. Comparisons were naturally made between this speech and the speech by which he introduced the Bill, and everybody who was competent thought ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... don't" and "I ain't feeling good to-day" and once even "I done it"—can you imagine such a thing? Every other word was "guess," and yet they had the impertinence to laugh at me when I said "reckon," which, I am sure father told me was Shakespearian English. Well, we stood it as long as we could, and then we started having our meals here, and it is so much nicer. Oliver says the change from the boarding-house has given him a splendid appetite, and he enjoys everything that I make so much—particularly ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... persuaded me to join both a Shakespearian and a Browning Society, and as I could not plunge into such things by myself I dragged Jack with me. The Shakespearian Society was pleasant enough, but after two meetings of the Browningites Jack said flatly that he would not go again. Some ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... the sweeping method of M. Taine. Neither does he seem to love Shakespeare himself as he loves Rousseau or Richardson. He speaks contemptuously of the Sonnets and Poems, and, though I respect his sincerity, I think that such a verdict necessarily indicates indifference to the most Shakespearian parts of Shakespeare. The calm assertion that the qualities of the Poems are the reverse of the qualities of the plays is unworthy of Hazlitt's general acuteness. That which really attracts Hazlitt is sufficiently ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... difficulty of introducing any particular Turk, by assuming a foregone conclusion in the reader's mind; and adverting, in a casual, careless way, to a Turk hitherto unknown as to an old acquaintance. . . . "THIS Turk he had" is a master-stroke, a truly Shakespearian touch'—(Note.) The lady, in her father's cellar ('Castle,' Old Woman's text), consoles the captive with 'the very best wine,' secretly stored, for his private enjoyment, by the cruel and hypocritical Mussulman. She confesses the state of her heart, and inquires as to Lord Bateman's real ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... an abounding variety. This unity or identity Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural organism, and the associative act which effected it into something closely akin to the primitive power of nature itself. "In the Shakespearian drama," he says, "there is a vitality which grows and evolves ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... snap in discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh. Yet, he was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from it men and women that live. He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, and speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the pageant of his persons. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... George I, with either Walpole or Marlborough as Sir John Pudding. Nevertheless, there are carefully interpolated overtones regarding Falstaff and Hal. "One knows not where to have him" (Key, p. 25) is one of several apt Shakespearian ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... definitely established in the Elizabethan Age. The England of Elizabeth, of Shakespeare, of Drake and the sea-dogs, is seldom thought of as the cradle of the science of electricity. Nevertheless, it was; just as surely as it was the birthplace of the Shakespearian drama, of the Authorized Version of the Bible, or of that maritime adventure and colonial enterprise which finally grew and blossomed into ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... last six lines) more liberty of rhyme and arrangement is permitted, but a rhymed couplet at the end is not usual except when the sonnet departs from the Italian model and is on the English or, as we say, "Shakespearian" pattern. ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... absurdity, while those who are favourable try to explain it away, but their explanations have always seemed to me more unnatural than the thing explained. Why may we not accept it as it is evidently intended? In art at least, rationalism has not yet—thanks perhaps to Shakespearian traditions—prevailed so far that we must exclude supernatural motives altogether. Wagner could scarcely have used the myth and the names of Tristan and Isolde without introducing the philtre with which they have always been associated. It would be just as reasonable to explain ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... a success. Mrs. Gray's delight at seeing her "Christmas children" and having her beloved nephew with her was worth seeing. The young people did all the "stunts" they knew for her entertainment, and the boys repeated their Shakespearian performance for the old lady, who laughed until she could laugh ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... been Avon's geese, I think, if they had deemed anything of the kind. Joanna Baillie's dramas are "nice," and rather dull; now and then she can write a song with the ease and sweetness that suggest Shakespearian echoes. But Scott's judgment was obviously blinded by his just and warm regard for ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... arch of the South bridge is a huge mastiff, sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in his pockets; he is old, gray, brindled, as big as a little Highland bull, and has the Shakespearian dewlaps shaking as ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... through five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor Macbeth ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... that Dickens knew and studied, the wit of the older cabmen and 'bus drivers, the wit of the street boy. It is racy, it is understood, and the illustrations are always concrete and massive, never vague or unsubstantial. Apt Shakespearian quotations, familiar and unfamiliar, embellish the speeches. Personality, vital personality, counts for so much in the orator of the market place. The speaker must be alive to his audience, he must convince by his presence no less than by ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... be a very disputable judgment to say that the most nearly Shakespearian literary production of modern times—at least of those which have gained any measure of fame—is M. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Immediately on its publication it was greeted in America with hardly less enthusiasm than in Paris; and within a few weeks it became the chief topic of conversation ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... that give the critic most qualms. Daudet seems to have introduced them—De Gery, the Joyeuse family, and the rest—as a concession to popular taste, and on this score was probably justified. A fair case may also be made out for the use of idyllic scenes as a foil to the tragical, for the Shakespearian critics have no monopoly of the overworked plea, "justification by contrast." Nor could a French analogue of Dickens easily resist the temptation to give us a fatuous Passajon, an ebullient Pere Joyeuse—who seems to have ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... to quote him a good deal, also, as a sample of a certain Shakespearian boldness of personification in which the men sometimes indulged. Once, I remember, his captain had given him a fowling-piece to clean. Henry Ward had left it in the captain's tent, and the latter, finding it, had transferred the job ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... which no writer equals him, is in the language of nature. So correct is it, that we can see ourselves in every page. The style and manner have also that felicity, that not a sentence can be read, without its being discovered if it is Shakespearian. In observation of living characters—of landlords and postilions—Fielding has great excellence; but in drawing from his own heart, and depicting that species of character, which no observation could teach, he failed in comparison with ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... really or seemingly secured, begin to slacken. The whole art of love, it has been well said, lies in forever finding something new in the same person. The art of love is even more the art of retaining love than of arousing it. Otherwise it tends to degenerate towards the Shakespearian lust, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... proverbial so commonly is it repeated, whose heart-whole devotion to her game will make true Elians whist players when bridge is forgotten. In "A Chapter on Ears," Elia expatiates upon his insensibility to music; in "All Fool's Day" he puts wisdom under motley in a truly Shakespearian fashion, with the fine conclusion, "and take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... couplet gg. This looser structure, simpler in music and in arrangement of subject matter, soon became a favorite, was used by Surrey and by Sidney, and was adopted by Shakespeare for his hundred and fifty-four sonnets[64]—hence it is sometimes called the Shakespearian sonnet. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... described, I liked them best when they dealt with our own family and its traditions. My father, though without a trace of anything approaching pride of birth, knew his own family history well, and was never tired of relating stories of "famous men and our fathers that begat us." As a great Shakespearian devotee, he specially delighted to tell us of our direct ancestor, William Strachey, "the friend of Ben Jonson," for ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... at the action of the American Senate is more difficult to say. From a certain point of view the sight of the august senators of a great Power rushing to New York and beginning to bully and badger the luckless "Yamsi"—on the very quay-side so to speak—seems to furnish the Shakespearian touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the fatuous drowning of all these people who to the last moment put their trust in mere bigness, in the reckless affirmations of commercial men and mere technicians and in the irresponsible ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... instead of labouring with a Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description. That is why the poets who spring imagination with a word or a phrase paint lasting pictures. The Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most."[10] It is to this, the finest essence of landscape-painting, that most of Browning's landscapes belong. Yet he can be as explicit as any one when he sees fit. Look at the poem of The Englishman in Italy. The whole ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... editions in reading 'VAIL'. The restoration of the latter form needs no defence. The Elizabethan words in the Poem are not infrequent, giving it, as they do, a certain air of archaic dignity, and there can be little doubt that 'vail' was Scott's word here, used in its Shakespearian sense of 'lower' or 'cast down,' and recalling Venus as ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... each other. The sayings of Mr. Harry Foker, of Captain Costigan, of Gumbo, are all like old dear family phrases, they live imperishable and always new, like the words of Sir John, the fat knight, or of Sancho Panza, or of Dick Swiveller, or that other Sancho, Sam Weller. They have that Shakespearian gift of being ever appropriate, ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Edna could not just then summon up a clear recollection of the plot of any Shakespearian comedy or tragedy—and it is quite possible that there are many persons as highly educated as she who might be equally ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of response. In lyrical wealth and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced little since the days of Pippa; but how much he had grown in Shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the contrast between that early, half-legendary lyric child, by whose unconscious alchemy the hard hearts of Asolo are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose power over her world, though not less real, is so much more slowly and hardly ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... already an old man, though full of vigor and work. He told me the following story. Unfortunately, I took no contemporary note. I give it now as I remember it, and if any one who knew Don Pascual, or any student of Shakespearian lore, can correct and amplify it, no one will be better pleased than I. He said that as quite a young man, somewhere in the thirties of the last century, he was traveling through Spain to England, where, if I remember right, he had relations ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the tale, nor are they monstrosities which call forth immediate astonishment and horror. But in each case the ingrained selfishness which spreads misery through a family is the very mainspring of the story; and the dramatic power by which Dickens makes it reveal itself in action has something Shakespearian in it. Here there is still a balance between the different elements, the human interest and the moral lesson, and as works of art they are on a higher plane than Hard Times, where the purpose is too clearly shown. Still if we wish to understand this side of Dickens's work, it ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Othello. On his return to Florence he was hospitably entertained by the marquis of Normanby, then English ambassador to the court of Tuscany, and this enlightened nobleman strongly encouraged him to extend his repertory of Shakespearian characters. In 1865 occurred the sixth centenary of Dante's birthday, and the four greatest Italian actors were invited to perform in Silvio Pellico's tragedy of Francesca di Rimini, which is founded on an episode in the Divina ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... reason in a suggestion from another friend that it had failed because it put Shakespeare on the stage as one of its characters; but it seemed to me that the trouble could be got over by making the poet Heywood represent the Shakespearian epoch. I did this and the sole obstacle to its success seemed removed. It went, as the enthusiastic Barrett used to say, "with a shout," though to please him I had hurt it all I could by some additions and adaptations; and though it was a most ridiculously romantic story of the tragical ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... has pluck," observed Laura, and though her voice was constrained, she was conscious of a sudden moral exhilaration, such as she sometimes experienced after reading a great poem or seeing a Shakespearian tragedy upon the stage. The lights and the noises and the people in the street became singularly vivid, while she moved on in an excitement which she could not explain though she felt that it was wholly pleasurable. Kemper was present to her now in a nobler, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors—or readers of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that matter—have any personal conception of what it means! They may make a fine crescendo with it, but that is all. They have never stood, shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the brink of that vastness along the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the all-in-all, in his poetry, the robustness of his nature, the fulness and splendid equilibrium of his life, protect him against an inarticulate mysticism. Browning is, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, the healthiest of all living poets; and in general constitution the most Shakespearian. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... the most unexpected places. I was particularly struck with a children's glee-party in Jura (a rough island known chiefly for its sterile Paps). The bairns admirably rendered Ben Jonson's delightful ditty, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," and the Shakespearian song, "Where the bee sucks, there suck I." In such islands a musical teacher is a valuable asset. Let me add that all the libraries have been gratuitously supplied with fine collections of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the houses of the most prosperous townspeople. Some of these were of the old-fashioned, classic type, and others new examples of a national architecture seeking to find itself,—white and yellow colonial, roughcast modifications of the Shakespearian period, and nondescript mixtures of cobblestones and shingles. Each was surrounded by trim lawns and shrubbery. The church itself was set back from the street. It was of bluish stone, and half covered ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... revelation to her. It gave all her imagination full play. Through its pages treaded a stately procession of Kings and Queens—Wagnerian heroes and heroines: Shakespearian creations, melodious in verse; and countless others. It was indeed a treasure-house. It took her back to the lives and loves of the illustrious and passionate dead, and it brought her for the first time to the great fount ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... that the Shakespearian variety of words is multitudinous, is confirmed by statistics. Mrs. Cowden Clarke has counted those words one by one, and ascertained their sum to be not less than fifteen thousand. The total vocabulary of Milton's poetical remains is no ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... purity of style, Miss Baillie has not been surpassed by any of the poets of her sex. Her dialogue is formed on the Shakespearian model and she has succeeded perhaps better than any other dramatist in imitating the manner of the greatest ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... and from then on our hour had been one of spiritual communion. I found the young mind insatiate and I had to ransack the library for stories and poems and pictures suitable to his years, though he rapidly developed a very advanced taste. The morning I read him the Shakespearian lines woven around the little Princes in the Tower, having suitably connected up the story for him with words of my own, we forgot the time and he overstayed his limit, for Dabney was opening the house when he fled. For five mornings he did not come and I could find no way to get news of him. ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... appreciatively dramatized for himself possible minutes of tragedy. They were always opportunities for Shakespearian soliloquy and gesture. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... accursed economic system some shattering blow becomes red-hot, a little chilled, it must be confessed, when one recalls that immense brow, heavy with brooding intellect, and those dreamy, full-orbed Shakespearian eyes. Was the man, one is tempted to wonder then, too great, too lonely, too wise, to believe in any beautiful desperate change in the tragic "pathos of distance" between man and man? Was indeed the whole ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... a piscina in the chancel, and one in the S. wall of the nave; there are also two hagioscopes. "The chancel arch," writes Canon Benham, "seems to me Anglo-Saxon, and the chancel is a most curious apse." Thomas Warner, a friend of Shakespeare, and Isaac Reed, a Shakespearian commentator, ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... reasonably certain that some of the plays generally attributed to Shakespeare are partly the work of other dramatists. The first of these doubtful plays, often called the Pre-Shakespearian Group, are Titus Andronicus and the first part of Henry VI. Shakespeare probably worked with Marlowe in the two last parts of Henry VI and in Richard III. The three plays, Taming of the Shrew, Timon, and Pericles are only partly Shakespeare's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... florins! Phew!" whistled Larry, astonished in spite of his initiation into the mysteries of Italian bargaining. "Well, if you were to ask me the Shakespearian conundrum, Hath not a Jew eyes? I shouldn't give it up; I should say he ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Preface. Introduction. Shakespearian Criticism in the Eighteenth Century. Nicholas Rowe: Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear. 1709. John Dennis: On the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare. 1711. Alexander Pope: Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1725. Lewis Theobald: Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1733. Sir Thomas ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... one which would meet with all this admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time? Surely it offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparison with that offered by other highest ideals—the old Roman and Greek ideals, the Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal." ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... sword; she is not quite unreal, nor yet quite real; something much better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a Beaumont and Fletcher personage of the boards—and as such effective—than a Shakespearian piece of nature. The theatrical limbo to which such almost but not quite embodied ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... And these Shakespearian women, though all radiations from one great ideal of womanhood, are at the same time intensely individualized. Each has a separate soul, and the processes of intellect as well as emotion are different in each. Each, for example, is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... roast fowl, a bit of plum-pudding or fruit tart, a crust of bread and cheese, with—tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askalon—sherry and Madeira at dinner, and a few glasses of fine old fruity port after. Some Shakespearian quotations—unknown to me then, for Shakespeare was little quoted in purely evangelical circles, either in Church or Dissent—a reference to Sir Walter Scott's earlier German translations, formed about the sum and substance of the conversation which took place between the poet and my host; all ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... and the remaining seventy were bought at the sale of his library for seven hundred and fifty pounds by Mr. Huth, who had them printed for presentation to the members of the Philobiblon Society. The Shakespearian collection comprised splendid copies of the first four folios and eighteen of the quarto plays, together with the 1594 and 1655 editions of Lucrece, the 1594 and 1596 editions of Venus and Adonis, and the first editions ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... Bernard Shaw's plays patches of what people would call essentially undramatic stuff, which the dramatist puts in because he is honest and would rather prove his case than succeed with his play. Shaw has brought back into English drama that Shakespearian universality which, if you like, you can call Shakespearian irrelevance. Perhaps a better definition than either is a habit of thinking the truth worth telling even when you meet it by accident. In Shaw's plays one meets an incredible ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... meeting with Professor Bain's rule, I had shown that the difference between the Relatives is generally observed by Shakespeare. See "Shakespearian ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... knew no English, had in a fashion presented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his countrymen; King Lear, Macbeth, King John, Othello (1792) followed. But Ducis came a generation too soon for a true Shakespearian rendering; simple and heroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an age of philosophers and sentimentalists, an age of "virtue" and "nature." Shakespeare's translation is as strange as that of his own Bottom. Ophelia ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the hill until we came to the pit we had noticed when going up. Close by was a neat little cottage, and it occurred to us to try our luck there as a last resort. We were glad indeed when there appeared at the door an educated man, who in excellent Shakespearian English volunteered at once to show us the fossil beds. It was Dr. Ernst Bacmeister, a man of considerable note in his own country, whose life and deeds are duly recorded in "Wer ist's?" He came, with his wife and child, to Wangen in the summer time, to enjoy these ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Shakespearian commentator and first editor of Boswell's Johnson, was as confirmed a reader as it is possible for a book-collector to be. His own life, by Sir James Prior, is full of good things, and is not so well known as it should be. It smacks of ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... even among Senators there were degrees in dogmatism, from the frank South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay, or Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became Shakespearian and bouffe — as Godkin used to call it — like Malvolio. Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at least the merit of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly thought, as Webster had thought before him, that his great services and sacrifices, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... be urged that Rogers exceeds in one direction as unjustifiably as Crabbe in the opposite. But there is room in poetry for both points of view, though the absolute—the Shakespearian—grasp of Human Life may be truer and ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... garden behind the house there was no attempt to construct a Shakespearian plot, for, as she so rightly observed, Shakespeare, who loved flowers so well, would wish her to enjoy every conceivable horticultural treasure. But furniture played a prominent part in the place, and there were statues ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... spectacle is thus presented: on the one hand a writer gaining Shakespearian renown for works he repudiates; on the other, a public reading and admiring him because of the very art he thus repudiates. For 'tis idle to assert that Tolstoy's religious writings are what draws readers unto him. Had he published only his religious writings, they might have indeed ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... of buffoonery, violations of good taste, and occasionally almost vulgar slang, which disfigure its pages. Their patronage is, at the best, of no more value than that of a mob gathered by a showy Shakespearian revival, and it has laid the volume open to the charge of being adapted "laudari ab illaudatis." But the welcome of the work in other quarters is as indubitably duo to higher qualities. In writing Don Juan, Byron attempted something that ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Hamlet may be compressed into a few words. Any one who learns these words may say that in a certain sense he knows the contents of Hamlet; and logically he does. But one who has let all the wealth of the Shakespearian drama stream in upon him knows Hamlet in a different way. A life-current has passed through his soul which cannot be replaced by any mere description. The idea of Hamlet has become an artistic, personal experience ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... lined with spectators, coming from Boston and from all the neighboring towns. At the grove a series of historic tableaux presented the principal personages in significant pictures, and these were accompanied by Old English ballads and Shakespearian songs. The finale was a stately minuet, beautifully danced by four couples. They had been drilled for weeks by Miss Russell and as she was more than satisfied with the performance, it was, no doubt, nearly perfect. The audience seemed to be of that mind as ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears |
