Bored? Try Bard!

I grew up in a family of Shakespeare scholars (my grandfather is the author of a tome "Shakespeare: His world and his art", published in 1964 for the first time), so using words like "forsooth" and "alackaday" and saying things like "Out damned spot" when referring to laundry and "Give me my robe, put on my crown" when asking for my coat was "normal".

My mother, (also a Shakespeare scholar) and I recently enjoyed watching The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by the Reduced Shakespeare company on DVD. It had us literally rolling on the floor with laughter. (http://www.reducedshakespeare.com/)

Sent by Bhuvana | 2:07 PM | 4-26-2007

I used to tease my kids with "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." (though they really weren't thankless.
Beth

Sent by Beth Lepinski | 2:51 PM | 4-26-2007

As an English teacher in a suburban high school, I often "quoted" the bard's:

"Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance."

Only after I discovered Will never wrote such a thing did I have to stop the attribution. But it is still my favorite thing to quote to indoloent students.

Anyone out there know more about the source of this?

Sent by Jim Bouman | 2:51 PM | 4-26-2007

I borrowed from the Bard when my infant daughter,Rose,needed a diaper change. I would quip,"Would a baby by any other name smell so bad?"

Sent by emily mackenzie | 2:52 PM | 4-26-2007

To the caller who wanted to teach Shakespeare to all children -- there is a program in Madison, Wisconsin, where kids aged 7-18 produce full-length Shakespeare plays all year round. They use the original language, nothing else. It's a great program, and everyone of the kids would have a favorite quote. Young Shakespeare Players (www.ysp.org)

Sent by Joanne Brown | 2:56 PM | 4-26-2007

Jim,
I've seen it attributed to Roger Bacon before, but if you can't identify it for sure, try this one.

"Knowledge by suffering entereth,/And Life is perfected by Death." Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "A Vision of Poets"

Sent by Barrie Hardymon | 2:57 PM | 4-26-2007

I remember finding some comic books of Shakespearian plays from the '60s. I think that sort of thing would help to popularize these works again. Also, It would help to clue people in to the meanings of their allusions.

pete b

Sent by Peter Burchell | 2:57 PM | 4-26-2007

Never did my little boys go off to bed without me saying " Goodnight foot prints.. flights of angels sing thee to thy rest ! " and never did it fail to elicit gales of laughter from them

Sent by bryan tarantola, Jackson Hole Wyoming... | 2:57 PM | 4-26-2007

As an actor, I often am able to slip some Shakespearian quotes into daily quotes. My favorite: "Lead on, MacDuff." Which I will change with the situation, so it becomes: Read on... Drive on... Play on... etc.

Sent by Jon Wilson | 2:57 PM | 4-26-2007

I have lots of "favorite" quotes, but I more have a favorite description; that of Hamlet as the Melancholy Dane. I guess I would be the Melancholy Iowan, as I always loved Hamlet and could relate to his "pain." As an Inflammatory Breast Cancer survivor undergoing radiation and chemo yet again, I guess my favorite quote would be "How poor are they who have not patience. What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"

Sent by Gloria James | 3:03 PM | 4-26-2007

I am a business consultant and trainer. My parents were considerably older when I was born (father born in 1900, mother born in 1907) and, given their experience with work - very traditional, unionized, large corporations in mainly assembly and manual labor jobs - they were never able to understand why anyone would pay me to do what I do. They were always supportive but I think they both died thinking I had managed to pull off a monumental scam. My son, on the other hand, can't understand how I can keep going into messed up organizations by choice. He works as an engineering manager in a multinational plastics company and really likes the predictability of a routine. To each his or her own.

Sent by Jeff Crow | 3:23 PM | 4-26-2007

My friends and I are HUGE Shakespeare fans! We are always emailing each other and calling each other Knave, and using a lot of his language.

My favourite quote is probably "This above all, to thine own self be true", because I have a lot of self esteem issues, and once I found Shakespeare in high school, I was hooked.

Sent by Kel in Iowa | 10:56 PM | 4-26-2007

Here in Boulder they have a Shakespeare festival every summer. One summer (I believe it was 1988), one of the 3 plays they did was Hamlet - with Val Kilmer playing the title role! Unsurprisingly, having a Hollywood star as Hamlet attracted a somewhat different mix of audience members than the usual Shakespeare buffs. The production was good, but it was distracting to listen to all the teenagers in the audience who kept reacting to the many familiar lines in the play. Many of them seemed to think that those phrases had been inserted into the play to make it more up-to-date and entertaining, rather than that the familiar phrases had originated with the Bard.

Sent by Nancy Norton | 2:42 PM | 4-27-2007

I think you are all nuts! I have been to plays and was forced to read this junk in High School. It should all be re-written into "real english", and the old fashioned books burned. If it needs interpretation to understand, why not just interpret it, and then print that. It is all garbage in my opinion.
I got my Bachelors degree in Elementary Education, and I would never have tried to force that on children's young minds. Life is complicated enough.

Sent by Ken Hebel | 10:23 AM | 5-4-2007