Brush up your Shakespeare (a game)

Dang, the site slowed down just as there was one I could answer.

Could we have some happier quotes? I know that war is on everyone’s minds, but

About brought me to tears already.

That sounds like 3 Henry VI. Can’t remember the speaker offhand though…

Okay, happier quotes. Though all my favorite Shakespeare quotes are horrible and bleak, I shall try to oblige… :wink:

“And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing,
Like to the Garter’s compass, in a ring:
The expressure that it bears, green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;
And ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ write
In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white;
Let sapphire, pearl and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood’s bending knee:
Fairies use flowers for their charactery.”

I’m betting on The Taming of the Shrew for this one.

OK, here’s an easy happy one:

“The world must be peopled!”

Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing.

Here’s mine:

“The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor’s edge invisible.”

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Here’s mine:

What should I do with him—dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.

Much Ado About Nothing

I think Beatrice said it.

And mine is:

“I am one, sir, who comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs.”

That’s Othello, 1.1 – Iago informs Brabantio of Desdemona and Othello’s marriage.

BTW, nobody’s guessed the quote in my last post yet.

Back to the bleak and relevant quotes for a second – this is the one that’s been in my head recently:

“But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all the legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle will join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place’: some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.”

Henry V, when the common soldier Michael Williams (played by Judi Dench’s husband in the 1989 version) is grousing about the disguised king.

My previous quote, "Why, headstrong liberty. . . " was from The Comedy of Errors.

OK, try this one on. . .
" O! who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?
O, no! the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:
Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more
Than when it bites, but lanceth not the sore."

Katisha: was your first quote from A Midsummer’s Night Dream?
And is the second from Troilius and Cressida

My quote is: " The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon."

Let it never be said I can’t spot a Richard II quote from a mile off! That’s from 1.3 – Bolingbroke points out the flaws in Gaunt’s advice on making the best of his exile.

I’ll just repost the quote nobody’s guessed yet:

“And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing,
Like to the Garter’s compass, in a ring:
The expressure that it bears, green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;
And ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ write
In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white;
Let sapphire, pearl and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood’s bending knee:
Fairies use flowers for their charactery.”

Sorry, try again! I picked a slightly misleading quote on purpose, just to be nasty… :wink:

The Merry Wives of Windsor, I believe, when Mistress Ford and Mistress Page dress up like fairies and torment Falstaff.

OK, here’s another one. . .

"In peace and honour rest you here, my sons;
Rome’s readiest champions, repose you here in rest,
Secure from worldly chances and mishaps!
Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
Here grow no damned drugs, here are no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep:
In peace and honour rest you here, my sons! "

Titus

"But I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. "

the Scots play, V, iii, 11.

My quote:

“And do as adversaries do in law –
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.”

amarinth: is it The Taming Of The Shrew?

Amarinth: That’s Othello, right? Spoken by Iago’s wife, whose name I forget just now…
Okay, here’s mine:

“Who steals my purse steals trash - 'twas something, nothing
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands -
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of something that not enriches him
But makes me poor indeed.”

I apologize if the punctuation isn’t correct - I’m quoting from memory.

Ooh, that’s from Othello, my favorite! And it’s spoken by Iago, the most excellent of villains.
For your consideration, something that I have often been asking myself recently:

“Where is the life that late I led?”

Crap, I just realized that line was made into a song in a musical! Too easy!
So here’s another quotation to use instead:

“If hearty sorrow be a sufficient ransom for offence,
I tender it here. I do as truly suffer as e’er I did commit.”

Northern Piper’s is Taming of the Shrew. (I thought I had bookmarked a collection of Shakespeare quotations about lawyers, but I can’t find it.)

Here’s one that if not happy at least has nothing to do with war:

Make me a willlow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
cry out…

Viola, in male clothes, inadvertantly seducing Olivia in “Twelfth Night.”
Here’s another one not war-related:

Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things… nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance: therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.