Sassy Shakespeare: My favorite one-liners

There's a lot of these "Shakespearean insult generator" memes out there, where you choose one item from each column to create a sufficiently archaic-sounding verbal poo-fling. Gems such as "gleeking knotty-pated harpy" or "puking beef-witted apple-john" or "yeasty tardy-gaited moldwarp." Most of these sound more like Harry Potter incantations than insults.

As giggle-inducing as some of them are, they aren't genuine, actual lines from the plays. And after you'e heard some of the more pointed and exotic barbs, you begin to find it a tragedy that these colorful words and phrases aren't used more today. For example, I was irrationally tickled that the word "clotpole" is often utilized in one of my favorite BBC series: Merlin. Lear used it, as did Guderius in Cymbeline. Having encountered it before, and read about its very bawdy origins, I gasped when I heard it uttered in such a family-friendly TV show. Of course, no one outside an English Lit professor would normally pick up on it.

But it's not just the bawdy stuff I love. It's the clever throw-away lines and the chronically taken-out-of-context quotes that I've highlighted throughout my Complete Works that I feel could be useful in everyday conversation. Enjoy!

"I like this place, And willingly could waste my time in it."
--Celia, "As You Like It," Act II, Sc. IV

"You do assist the storm."
--Boatswain, "The Tempest," Act I, Sc. I

"In nature, there's no blemish but the mind; None can be call'd deform'd but the unkind."
--Antonio, "Twelfth Night," Act III, Sc. IV

"Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall..."
--Escalus, "Measure for Measure," Act II, Sc. I

"Scratching could not make it worse and 'twere such a face as yours were."
--Beatrice, "Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Sc. I

"This is the fruit of rashness!"
--Gloster, "King Richard III," Act II, Sc. II

"He that loves to be flattered is worthy of the flatterer."
--Apemantus, "Timon of Athens," Act I, Sc. I

"For defect of judgment Is oft the cure of fear." 
--Belarius, "Cymbeline," Act. IV, Sc. II

"O, pardon me; For when no friends are by, men praise themselves."
--Lucius, "Titus Andronicus," Act V, Sc. III

"Where's hourly trouble for a minute's ease."
--Helicanus, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," Act II, Sc. IV

"No sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir; but I do bite my thumb, sir."
--Sampson, "Romeo and Juliet," Act. I, Sc. I

"Most spend their mouths when what they seem Runs far before them."
--Dauphin, "King Henry V," Act II, Sc. IV

"Unquiet meals make ill digestions."
--Abbess, "The Comedy of Errors," Act V, Sc. I

"More matter with less art."
--Queen, "Hamlet," Act II, Sc. II

"Trifles light as air Are to the jealous confirmation strong As proofs of holy writ."
--Iago, "Othello," Act III, Sc. III

"...didst thou ever hear that things ill got had ever bad success?"
--King Henry VI, "3 King Henry VI," Act II, Sc. II

"'Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation."
--Falstaff, "1 King Henry IV," Act I, Sc. II

All the world's a stage

Benedict Cumberbatch's "jaguar curled inside a cello" voice is perfectly suited to at least two things in this world: rattling off impressive strands of Holmesian deductive observations and conclusions... and reciting Shakespeare. Those pipes are a gift from the Universe bestowed upon geeky anglophiles the world over. In the past year, his vocal talents have been tapped like a keg at a frat party, to the squeeing of all fangirls worth their fake British accents (such as me). SO of course, when Google made this advert showcasing both Ben's mellifluous timbre AND the epically famous (abridged) speech from As You Like It, I naturally had to memorize the fucker.

It's spoken by Jaques--a lord with an affected melancholy and a penchant for long discourses on how the world turns. He is one of the blokes who follows the exiled Duke into the Forest of Arden, where they semi-reluctantly philosophize on the superior, more "honest" life to be led within Nature's bosom, compared with the duplicitous existence to be found at court. The entire play is a commentary on the pros and cons of "the simple life" and that of the nobility, mostly played out in the woods, making it one of those popular "pastoral-comical" plays Polonius lists when the players arrive in Hamlet.

The Ages of Man was a cliché in Shakespeare's time, but the eloquence of the speech--spoken by someone little more than a jester--heightens its dramatic effectiveness and memorability. What tickles me about this speech is that, as Marjorie Garber points out in her book Shakespeare After All, the ages match up with the classical conceptions of the planets: mercurial boy, venereal lover, martial soldier, jovial justice, saturnine old man. And every age is marked by the sounds of their voices, my favorite being the lover "sighing like furnace." It's at once recognizable and absolutely truthful in its poetry.

P.S. Notice that some of the "friends" names in the advert are characters from the play! Corin, Sylvia, Celia, Audrey, Orlando, Phebe. The baby's name is William, as well. It's cute. Probably TOO cute.

As You Like It, Act II, Sc. VII

Jaques: All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Yea, from the table of my memory

Sir Kenneth Branagh working with John Gielgud on the set of Hamlet (1996)

Not long ago, I made up my mind that I would read EVERYTHING SHAKESPEARE EVER WROTE. After years of on-off studiousness and a final flourish of reading Sonnet 154, I celebrated my achievement by having a few pumpkin ales and reciting every Shakespeare speech I knew from memory to an empty house. This was made possible because several weeks before, as an amendment to my resolution, I had passed a personal law to learn a new speech from Shakespeare every week until I knew at least one from every play.

Halfway to my goal (and still going strong), I realized that there's not a whole lot of Suzy Q, non-theatre/non-lit scholar folks who take up memorizing tracts of Shakespeare for fun (or at least they don't blog about it). This disappointed me. I thought for sure someone would have the same idea and felt it was worthy of rumination... but not so much. This had to be amended.

All my inspiration for this can be traced thusly:

In my studies, the name Kenneth Branagh came with the wheat separated from the chaff. He was mentioned so often that I could come to one of two conclusions: this guy is a genius or a total dick. Outside of a random viewing of As You Like It and Thor, I was tragically unconscious of his extensive  work.

But then came Henry V. I thank Netflix everyday for streaming this masterwork. Sir Ken's wooing of Catherine of Valois rendered me a puddle of sighs. Then his Hamlet entered my Blu-Ray player, and I beheld this ballsy, epic undertaking of recording the entirety of my favorite on film for the first time. I was done. I was nuclear-reactor-level smitten with this man. It was inevitable, I suppose, given his passionate grasp of the material and my recent re-upped love of the plays. I floated on an inexplicably delirious intellectual high for days, nursing the brand of fawning, explosive fangirl crush that has become my trademark since I first posted on LiveJournal ten years ago.

The second time I watched Hamlet, I listened to the director's commentary. It was the most edifying four hours of movie commentary I had encountered since The Lord of the Rings. Sir Ken lit up the movie with insights. Along the way, I found myself envious of his ability to rattle off quotes to make his points. I came away thinking: "I want to be the person who can quote Shakespeare."

I was going to seriously memorize some shite.

Having already undertaken memorizing the Periodic Table from hydrogen to americium, I felt it was entirely achievable and sufficiently challenging. Memorization is a parlour trick in the end. Humans are capable of memorization feats that boggle human minds. People have long set themselves to committing holy scriptures to heart in the hopes that it will enrich their souls. Shakespeare's words are so essential to and ingrained in the English language and culture that they command no less respect than divine inspiration. That's why I've not only resolved to memorize these speeches, but to deeply analyze them within their contexts to discover clues as to how to properly recite and ruminate over them and gain understanding of the characters' thoughts.

These selected speeches have become, for me, a living canon--the soul's scripture--as accessible to me as my thoughts, and as important to me as my journey through life. It's as serious as it is comic at times, but always enriching, always nourishing, and completely worth enduring the wide-eyed looks of bemusement I get when I tell people what I'm doing.