6 Famous Quotations from Shakespeare

Hello. I'm Gill at engVid, and today we have a lesson on Shakespeare, and this is a way

of introducing you to some of Shakespeare's plays, and I'm giving a quotation from each

one to illustrate also what Shakespeare's language looks like. Okay. You may be familiar

with it already, but this is also a way of introducing it to anyone who hasn't really

read Shakespeare or heard Shakespeare very much before. Okay. Obviously, it was written

a long time ago, a few hundred years ago, so the style is very different from modern

English, so where it's difficult, I will do my best to explain the meaning. Okay. So,

we have one, two, three, four, five, six examples here from six different plays, and some are

tragedies, some are comedies, one is a history play. So, Shakespeare's plays divide up into

these categories of tragedy, comedy, history, and other types of play as well. So, let's

have a look, and I've also included the dates of when they were first performed, so just

to give you an idea. So, let's have a look, then, the first one. "That one may smile and

smile and be a villain." Okay? So, a villain is a bad person. So, if somebody who's a bad

person smiles and they're really nice to you, and you think, "Oh, what a nice man. What

a nice woman." But sometimes it may not be true, so sometimes they may be a deceptive

person. So, Hamlet himself says this about one of the other characters who is a dishonest

character in the play because it's a tragedy. It's a very sad and serious play. It has a

bit of humour in it as well in places, but it's... It's a tragic story. Okay, so Hamlet

says that, and the play itself is called Hamlet. It's one of Shakespeare's most famous plays

about a prince whose father has died, but rather than him becoming king himself to follow

his father, his uncle steps in instead. So, that's the basic situation. And so, Hamlet

is really talking about his uncle here, you know, that he can smile and smile and be a

villain. That one, you know, "one" meaning a person, that a person can smile at you,

and they're a bad person, and they're being dishonest and deceptive. So, that one may

smile and smile and be a villain. It's a comment on a human nature, a certain type of person

who you can't really trust, you can't believe them. So, that's from Hamlet.

And these numbers here, because Shakespeare's plays divide up into five acts, and within

each act you get separate scenes. There are five acts, but within each act you could have

a different number of scenes. That varies. So, this quotation comes from Act 1, Scene

5, and what I've done, I've used the numbers, the normal numbers for the act numbers, but

I've put the scene numbers in Roman numerals. There are different ways of doing this, but

this is my own choice. So, Act 1, Scene 5, and Hamlet was written between 1599 and 1601.

Okay? In the Elizabethan period when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne, and you can

see my other video on that subject of different periods in history. Okay.

Right, so next one. So, this is from a comedy, and it's from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Okay?

Which is a play about what happens to some people who go into the forest on Midsummer

Night, the middle of summer. It's meant to be a sort of magic time. So, somebody, a character

says, "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania." So, "ill met", this is actually... Titania

is the queen of the fairies, and the person speaking to her is Oberon, who is the king

of the fairies. So, they're a couple. Oberon and Titania are king and queen. A married

couple, I suppose, if fairies get married. But... So... But the trouble is, why "ill

met", meaning, oh, you know, he's not very happy to see her, really. "Oh, it's you, is

it?" That sort of thing. "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania." He's criticizing her for being

proud, and she... They've had an argument recently. They're not talking to each other.

So, he's not happy to see her, and she's not happy to see him. They didn't really want

to meet like this. So, that's what he says. "Oh, it's you, is it?" That sort of idea.

And they are part of the situation, the magic of Midsummer Night's Dream, where fairies

are in the wood, but some humans are in the wood as well, and everything gets quite complicated.

But these are the fairies who live there, the sort of fairy community with their king

and queen. They have their own hierarchy, just like the human society has, well, a duke

who's in charge, and then the people in his society. So, okay, that's it. And we've got

M and M, a little bit of alliteration, which is always interesting, sort of sound pattern.

"Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania." Okay. Right, next one from King Lear, which is another

tragedy, and this quotation illustrates the tragic side of human life. So, this is King

Lear himself speaking. So, he says, "When we are born, we cry that we are come to this

great stage of fools." So, this is what he thinks about the world. He thinks the world

that we live in is a great stage of fools, and that's ironic because it's in a play,

so Shakespeare does this from time to time. He uses the word "stage" in a metaphorical

way, but what you're doing, you're watching actors on a stage already, so it has a kind

of double meaning in it. But King Lear is not happy. Things have gone badly wrong. He's

divided up his kingdom. Instead of staying king, he's divided his kingdom up between

two of his daughters, and they are treating him badly. They just want to get on with life

and being in charge of the country, and he's lost his power, and he's not happy at all.

So, he says when we are born... If a baby's born, when the baby's born, the baby often

cries immediately. It's a way of... You know, because the baby's lungs are filling with

air, and it's all a bit of a shock being born, I suppose. I don't remember, but I guess it

is a bit traumatic, so the baby will cry to be out in a new environment. So, babies do

cry when they're born, but he's saying the reason that they cry is because, "Oh my gosh,

where am I? I'm in a crazy place now. A great stage of fools." So, it's a rather clever

kind of thing to say, really, that that's why babies cry.

So, that's from King Lear, Act 4, Scene 5, and I forgot to say Midsummer Night's Dream,

Act 2, Scene 1, 1595, and King Lear a little bit later, 1605-6. So, this was actually in

the next period, the Jacobean period. Elizabethan period had gone by this time because Queen

Elizabeth I had died in 1603. So, then James I came to the throne, so this is in the Jacobean...

It's called Jacobean Age, so a bit later.

Right, so then we move on to a comedy again, although it's rather a serious comedy. The

thing about Shakespeare is you could have a tragedy, but it will have comic aspects

in it, and then you can have a comedy and it will have tragic or potentially tragic

elements in it. So, they're not pure tragedy and pure comedy; they're a bit of a mixture.

So, The Merchant of Venice is called a comedy, but it has quite a serious story in it. Okay.

So, this is the merchant himself called Antonio, and he says the devil can cite scripture for

his purpose. So, "cite" means to quote, to quote from scripture, meaning to quote from

the Bible. Okay. Scripture here with a capital "S" means the Christian Bible. Okay. A book

of authority. So, he's saying the devil can quote scripture for his own purpose, you know,

which is rather strange. Why would the devil, who is the bad person, quote from the good

book, the Bible, but he does it for a purpose to influence people? And it's sort of a general

comment that people can do that. People do quote from the Bible just to support their

arguments, you know, and to give their arguments some religious authority. It's quite a controversial

issue really, but that's what he's saying. A bad person can quote from the Bible for

their own purposes. Right. Okay, so that's from Act 1, Scene 3, and that play was written

1596-7. So, another comedy, which is more comic than this one, I would say, but it does

have a little episode of tragedy in it as well, but things improve after that towards

the end of the play. It is a comedy. So, this is one of the comic characters, Benedict,

and he's a man who has no intention of ever getting married. He thinks it would be a disaster,

you know. But then people trick him into thinking that the female character, who he's always

having arguments with and joking with, that people trick both of them into thinking the

other one has fallen in love with them. And so they do fall in love with each other because

of that. So, Benedict, who's a sworn bachelor, if you say a sworn bachelor, someone who has

no intention of ever getting married because they prefer to be single. So, he says, "When

I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married. You know,

I just didn't think it would ever happen. So, you know, I said I would die a bachelor,

but oh well, I didn't know, you know, I would actually be getting married." So things have

changed now because he thinks this woman is in love with him, and she... She thinks he's

in love with her, but their friends have tricked them into that. So it's a really funny comic

plot.

So, that's "Much Ado About Nothing". The titles are also very interesting of some of Shakespeare's

plays. "Much Ado About Nothing", meaning a lot of fuss, a lot of trouble about nothing.

The whole play, it's a play of five acts, and it's strange for a playwright to give

it that title. "A Lot of Fuss About Nothing", "Much Ado About Nothing", but it's a comic

title for a comic play. And so that's from Act 2, Scene 3, and that play was written

1598 to 1599.

And then finally, a history play, "Richard III". So, this was a real king in English

history, so Shakespeare wrote quite a lot of history plays which were based loosely

around English history. So, this king was regarded at the time as a bad king, as a villain.

This word "villain", he was regarded as a villain. People, historians nowadays, you

know, think perhaps he wasn't so bad. Perhaps he was made to seem like a villain by the

people who took over from him, the Tudors, because they wanted him to appear worse than

he really was. Anyway, he was king, but he was in a battle, and it's the battle towards

the end of the play, Act 5, Scene 4, right near the end of the play. And he's in the

middle of the Battle of Bosworth, which happened in 1485, and he was killed in that battle,

and that's how the new king, Henry VII, the Tudor king, took over, took power after that.

And he's... They would have horses if they were fighting a battle in those days. A lot

of them would be on horseback, especially the king and all the aristocrats. There would

also be soldiers on the ground, standing on the ground fighting as well, but all the,

you know, the top people would be on their horses. And he's been knocked off his horse,

and he's standing on the ground. He's in a vulnerable position. He needs a horse to get

back up onto. And this is a very, very famous quotation. "A horse, a horse. My kingdom for

a horse." So, he's willing to give his kingdom in exchange for a horse. In a way, he's willing

not to be king anymore if someone would just give him a horse to be able to get up on and

be safer on horseback than he is standing on the ground. So, that's a very famous line.

And also, "A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse. A horse, a horse. My kingdom for

a horse." It's pretty much the line in Shakespeare when it's in poetry, the meter is in sort

of five main beats. "A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse." You can more or less

count the... What's called the iambic pentameter of the line. Even when he's in a panic, he's

speaking in a kind of iambic pentameter meter that's the standard meter in Shakespeare's

plays. Some of the plays, parts of the plays are in prose, but a lot of them are in this

poetic meter. So, that's that one. And of course, he doesn't get a horse. He gets killed

and then the new king takes over. So, that's from Act 5, Scene 4, and it was written in

1592-93.

Okay, so I hope that's been... If you haven't really looked at Shakespeare before. And also

to say, you know, you can watch a lot of film versions of Shakespeare which are an easier

introduction to the plays than trying to sit down and read a printed, published play. It's

quite hard going to sit down and read a play by Shakespeare because they're quite long

in five acts, so it can take a long time to get through them, and the language isn't always

easy. So, I think, you know, to get the overview of a play, to see a film version of it is

a good way of starting, and then you can always sit down and read the play gradually, bit

by bit. Afterwards, when you already know what the story is, it makes it a bit easier.

Okay, so I hope that's been a helpful lesson for you, and thanks for watching, and I hope

to see you again soon. Okay, bye for now.