The Bard's Most Quotable Quotes
Written: Nov 12 '05 (Updated Oct 31 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: entertaining, edifying, addictive
Cons: filmography includes the bad and the ugly as well as the good
The Bottom Line: a great little compendium that puts the Bard's most famous lines in their context and explains them in a lively and entertaining manner
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| jc_hall's Full Review: |
Review of Brush Up Your Shakespeare! by Michael Macrone,
revised with a Shakespeare filmography (2000 edition by Harper Resource, with a different cover than that shown above)
Subtitled ‘An Infectious Tour Through The Most Famous And Quotable Words and Phrases From The Bard’, this little gem of a book lists over a hundred of the most familiar and quotable phrases taken from the Bard’s much-loved plays, puts them in their context, and then proceeds to dissect and explain, in a lively, cogent, and knowledgeable manner, the ins and outs of Shakespeare parlance.
‘The Quotable and the Notable’—famous phrases from Shakespeare
This makes up the major part (roughly 80%) of the book. As ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ (Hamlet), the author does not take up more than a page or so with each explanation, and with such clear and concise notes, there’s very little of ‘pomp and circumstance’ (Othello). So, no need to ‘cudgel thy brains’ (Hamlet) any more, and allow me to ‘put money in thy purse’ (Othello). Read Shakespeare without a guide and ‘that way madness lies’ (King Lear), but if you read with a friendly little guide like this one, you wouldn’t be saying ‘what the dickens’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor) quite so often.
‘More matter with less art’ (Hamlet), I hear you cry. Very well, ‘friends, romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ (Julius Caeser), and without further ado, here’s an example of how it’s done:
Unsex Me Here
Lady Macbeth:
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty!
Macbeth Act I, sc V, 38-43
Lady Macbeth, upon receiving word that King Duncan of Scotland will be arriving that night, begins sharpening her talons. She isn’t sure there’s enough manhood to go around between herself and her husband, so she calls upon scheming spirits to ‘unsex me here’. This is her vivid way of asking to be stripped of feminine weakness and invested with masculine resolve…One thing nobody, spirit or otherwise, has ever poured into her is ‘the milk of human kindness’ (see p. 81).
The prefix un- is abnormally frequent in Macbeth. The protagonists constantly try to undo what is done, take back what is given, and cancel reality by appending negatives. All the powers of language, however, cannot cancel their unconscious conflicts, which manifest themselves in hallucinations and bad dreams.
I also like the numerous black-and-white illustrations, some of which, especially the one for ‘What light through yonder window breaks?’ (Romeo and Juliet), are hilarious. ‘Too much of a good thing’ (As You Like It)?, I hear you ask. Not at all, good my friend, there’s even more to come. And thus I shall pronounce them, ‘trippingly on the tongue’ (Hamlet):
‘Household Words’—common and uncommon words coined by Shakespeare
a list of words attributed to Shakespeare by the Oxford English Dictionary—these include such commonplace words as ‘archvillain’, ‘courtship’, ‘dawn’, ‘employer’, ‘priceless’, ‘schoolboy’, ‘shooting star’, ‘swagger’, ‘time-honoured’, ‘tranquil’, and more esoteric ones like ‘implorator’ for ‘solicitor’ and ‘pauser’ for ‘one who hesitates’
Faux Shakespeare—phrases often misattributed to Shakespeare
a number of phrases found in Shakespeare’s writings but deriving from a previous source, e.g. ‘laughing stock’, ‘cold comfort’, ‘fool’s paradise’, ‘thereby hangs a tale’, ‘the naked truth’, ‘the weaker vessel’, etc.
Good Enough To Call Your Own—titles borrowed from Shakespeare
Novelists, playwrights, essayists, composers, biographers and critics alike have not been shy to borrow from the Bard. Aldous Huxley takes the biscuit, swiping no fewer than seven times, including Mortal Coils (Hamlet), Brief Candles (Macbeth), Brave New World (The Tempest), Time Must Have A Stop (Henry the Fourth, Part I), and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Macbeth).
Shakespeare On Screen
Adaptations of the Bard’s work go back to the silent movie era. Macrone has compiled an exhaustive (perhaps too exhaustive, as he includes not only the good but the bad and the ugly as well) list. I was going to recommend this book to young students, but Macrone has included some pornographic adaptations, and I fear youngsters might, for a laugh, seek these out. Other than that, it’s a fair list, including all of Kenneth Branagh’s work as well as the classic Laurence Olivier versions.
All in all, I think this is a fun little book to have around the house. The famous quotes/phrases and explanations which make up the main part of the book are very well done, and so infectious that you really can’t just read one and put the book down. Rather like chips (crisps), you might say. Certainly very addictive. This would be a great little stocking stuffer for lovers of the Bard.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jc_hall
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Member: JC Hall
Location: Toronto, Canada
Reviews written: 199
Trusted by: 54 members
About Me:
Going back to Vancouver for Christmas! Happy Holidays, everyone!!
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