No Fear Shakespeare: Twelfth Night: Act 2, Scene 3, Page 6 No Fear Shakespeare Home → No Fear Shakespeare → Twelfth Night → Act 2, Scene 3, Page 6 Twelfth Night (sings) Shall I bid him go? SIR TOBY BELCH (singing) Should I tell him to go? FOOL (sings) What an if you do? FOOL (singing) What if y,ou do? SIR TOBY BELCH (sings) Shall I bid him go, and spare not? SIR TOBY BELCH (singing) Should I tell him to go, and be harsh with him? FOOL (sings) O no, no, no, no, you dare not. FOOL (singing) Oh no, no, no, no, don’t you dare. SIR TOBY BELCH Out o' tune, sir. You lie. Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? SIR TOBY BELCH That’s out of tune, sir. You lie. (to MALVOLIO) You’re nothing more than a servant here.

Do you think that just because you’re a goody two shoes, no one else can enjoy himself? FOOL Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth too. FOOL They certainly will. They’ll have double helpings, too. SIR TOBY BELCH Thou'rt i' the right. Go, sir, rub your chain with crumbs. A stoup of wine, Maria! SIR TOBY BELCH You’re right. (to MALVOLIO) Go polish your steward’s chain, sir. Maria, bring us some wine! 110 MALVOLIO Mistress Mary, if you prized my lady’s favor at anything more than contempt, you would not give means for this uncivil rule. She shall know of it, by this hand. MALVOLIO Miss Mary, if you cared what Lady Olivia thinks about you at all, you wouldn’t contribute to this rude behavior. I assure you, she’ll find out about this. Exit Go and wiggle your ears! SIR ANDREW 'Twere as good a deed as to drink when a man’s a-hungry, to challenge him the field and then to break promise with him and make a fool of him.

SIR ANDREW There’s nothing I’d love more than to make a fool out of that guy somehow. I could challenge him to a duel and then not show up. That would do the trick. SIR TOBY BELCH Do ’t, knight. I’ll write thee a challenge. Or I’ll deliver thy indignation to him by word of mouth. SIR TOBY BELCH Do that. I’ll write a letter challenging him to a duel on your behalf. Or I’ll deliver your insults to his face. Cakes and ale - eNotes Shakespeare Quotes Cakes and ale Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale? Feste: Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' th' mouth too. Sir Toby: Th' art i' th' right. Go, sir, rub your chain with crumbs. A stope of wine, Maria! Mistress Mary, if you priz'd my lady's favor at any thing more than contempt, you would not give means for this uncivil rule. She shall know of it, by this hand. Read on Owl Eyes This eText is now on Owl Eyes.

Clicking this link will open a new window. While the Lady Olivia ostentatiously mourns her brother's death, her uncle Sir Toby Belch presides over late-night misrule in other quarters of her house. Olivia's dour, puritanical steward Malvolio gladly plays the law-enforcement officer, telling Toby and company, in effect, to cut the racket or pack off. Toby pulls rank on the steward, sarcastically demanding whether Malvolio thinks his "virtue" can be forced on everybody else, so that "there shall be no more cakes and ale." "Cakes and ale" is Toby's phrase for what Malvolio uncharitably calls "uncivil rule." This is the earliest recorded instance of the phrase, though "as good as cakes and pudding" predates Twelfth Night. Americans understand a "cake" to be a fluffy confection preferably made with lots of chocolate and thickly layered with plenty of icing—not the sort of thing one normally serves with ale. The way Toby means it, however, a "cake" is merely a fancy or sweetened bread, which he classes with ale on the shopping list for the good life.

Shakespeare's Food & Drink: 20 Shakespeare Quotes On Food & Drink Shakespeare Quotes on Food and Drink You are here: Home / Shakespeare Quotes / Shakespeare Quotes on Food and Drink Shakespeare’s plays are full of food and drink quotes. As usual with Shakespeare, he uses such everyday things to characterise the people who populate the world of his plays. He also uses food and drink as metaphors to create accurate impressions of the times he lived in. No Sweat Shakespeare has browsed through the plays to delight you with the top 20 Shakespeare quotes on food and drink. 1. Twelfth Night: Act 2, Scene 3 Do you think because you are virtuous, that there shall be no more cakes and ale? 2. Othello: Act 2, Scene 3 Good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used. 3. Henry V: Act 3, Scene 2 I would give all my fame for a pot of ale. 4. As You Like It: Act 3, Scene 2 Truly, thou art damned like an ill roasted egg, all on one saide. 5.

The Merry Wives Of Windsor: Act 1, Scene 1 Why, sir, for my part I say the gentleman had drunk himself out of his five senses. 6. Antony and Cleopatra: Act 2, Scene 1 Eight wild boars roasted whole at breakfast, but twelve persons there. 7. Romeo and Juliet: Act 4, Scene 2 Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers. 8. Twelfth Night: Act 1, Scene 3 I ama great eater of beefd and I believe that does harm to my wit. 9. Henry IV Part 1: Act 2, Scene 1 He hath eaten me out of house and home; he hath put all my substance into that fat belly of his. 10. Macbeth: Act 2, Scene 3 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 takes away the performance. 11.

Henry IV Part I: Act 3, Scene 1 O, he is as tedious as a tired horse, a railing wife; worse than a smokey house: I had rather live with cheese and garlic in a windmil, far, than than feed on cates and have him talk to me in any summer-house in Christendom. 12. The Comedy Of Errors: Act 5, Scene 1 Unquiet meals make ill digestions. 13. Richard III: Act 3, Scene 4 My lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn I saw good strawberries in your garden there; I do beseech you send for some of them. 14. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act 4, Scene 2 And, most dear actors, eat no onions or garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy. No more words: Away! Go, away! 15. Henry IV Part II: Act 5, Scene 1 A’ shall answer it.

Some pigeons, Davy, a couple of short-legged hens, a joint of mutton, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws, tell William cook. 16. All’s Well That Ends Well: Act 5, Scene 3 Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon. 17. Romeo and Juliet: Act 4, Scene 4 They call for dates and quinces in the pastry. 18. Henry IV Part II: Act 2, Scene 4 A man cannot make him laugh – but that’s no marvel; he drinks no wine. 19. As You Like It: Act 3, Scene 5 I pray you, do not fall in love with me, For I am falser than vows made in wine. 20. Othello: Act 2, Scene 3 O thou invisible spirit of wine! If thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil! 6 replies The Food of Shakespeare | Transmedial Shakespeare Home > Multimedia Essays > The Food of Shakespeare The Food of Shakespeare October 2, 2012 Jerome Abellon Leave a comment Go to comments All of Shakespeare’s plays all revolve around love, drama, tragedy etc.

People all over the world have read his play but little do they know that there’s one occurring topic that revolves around in his plays: Food. Here are some of his play that have bits and pieces of “food’ and “drinks” scattered throughout his plays: 1. Twelfth Night: Act 2, Scene 3 Do you think because you are virtuous, that there shall be no more cakes and ale? 2. Othello: Act 2, Scene 3 Good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used. 3. Henry V: Act 1, Scene 3 I would give all my fame for a pot of ale. 4. As You Like It: Act 3, Scene 2 Truly, thou art damned like an ill roasted egg, all on one saide. 5. The Merry Wives Of Windsor: Act 1, Scene 1 Why, sir, for my part I say the gentleman had drunk himself out of his five senses. 6. Antony and Cleopatra: Act 2, Scene 1 Eight wild boars roasted whole at breakfast, but twelve persons there. 7.

Romeo and Juliet: Act 4, Scene 2 Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers. 8. Twelfth Night: Act 1, Scene 3 I ama great eater of beefd and I believe that does harm to my wit. 9. Henry IV Part 1: Act 2, Scene 1 He hath eaten me out of house and home; he hath put all my substance into that fat belly of his. 10. Macbeth: Act 2, Scene 3 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 takes away the performance. 11. Henry IV Part I: Act 3, Scene 1 O, he is as tedious as a tired horse, a railing wife; worse than a smokey house: I had rather live with cheese and garlic in a windmil, far, than than feed on cates and have him talk to me in any summer-house in Christendom. 12. The Comedy Of Errors: Act 5, Scene 1 Unquiet meals make ill digestions. 13.

Richard III: Act 3, Scene 4 My lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn I saw good strawberries in your garden there; I do beseech you send for some of them. 14. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act 4, Scene 2 And, most dear actors, eat no onions or garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy. No more words: Away! Go, away! 15. Henry IV Part II: Act 5, Scene 1 A’ shall answer it. Some pigeons, Davy, a couple of short-legged hens, a joint of mutton, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws, tell William cook. 16. All’s Well That Ends Well: Act 5, Scene 3 Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon. 17. Romeo and Juliet: Act 4, Scene 4 They call for dates and quinces in the pastry. 18. Henry IV Part II: Act 2, Scene 4 A man cannot make him laugh – but that’s no marvel; he drinks no wine. 19.

As You Like It: Act 3, Scene 5 I pray you, do not fall in love with me, For I am falser than vows made in wine. 20. Othello: Act 2, Scene 3 O thou invisible spirit of wine! If thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil! I get the feeling that Shakespeare was hungry while he was writing his plays. source: How Shakespeare Lives Now | by Stephen Greenblatt | The New York Review of Books How Shakespeare Lives Now Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh/Bridgeman Images John Martin: Macbeth, circa 1820 Shakespeare’s death on April 23, 1616, went largely unremarked by all but a few of his immediate contemporaries. There was no global shudder when his mortal remains were laid to rest in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. No one proposed that he be interred in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer or Spenser (where his fellow playwright Francis Beaumont was buried in the same year and where Ben Jonson would be buried some years later).

No notice of Shakespeare’s passing was taken in the diplomatic correspondence of the time or in the newsletters that circulated on the Continent; no rush of Latin obsequies lamented the “vanishing of his breath,” as classical elegies would have it; no tributes were paid to his genius by his distinguished European contemporaries. Shakespeare’s passing was an entirely local English event, and even locally it seems scarcely to have been noted. The death of the famous actor Richard Burbage in 1619 excited an immediate and far more widespread outburst of grief. England had clearly lost a great man. “He’s gone,” lamented at once an anonymous elegist, and, with him, what a world are dead, Which he revived, to be revivèd so No more: young Hamlet, old Hieronimo, Kind Lear, the grievèd Moor, and more beside That lived in him have now for ever died.

William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, was so stricken by the actor’s death that months later he could not bring himself to go to the playhouse “so soon after the loss of my acquaintance Burbage.” It was this death that was publicly marked by him and by his contemporaries, far more than the vanishing of the scribbler who had penned the words that Burbage had so memorably brought alive. The elegy on Burbage suggests that for some and perhaps even most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the real “life” of the characters and their plays lay not in the texts but in the performances of those texts. The words on the page were dead letters until they were “revived” by the gifted actor. This belief should hardly surprise us, since it is the way most audiences currently respond to plays and, still more, to film. There was also a social dimension specific to the age. A grand aristocrat like William Herbert could acknowledge his acquaintance with a celebrity actor like Burbage (though his father was a carpenter) far more readily than he could show a connection to a social nonentity—a bourgeois entrepreneur and playwright without Oxbridge honors or family distinction—like Shakespeare.

A hidden connection may all the same have existed: William Herbert is one of the perennial candidates for the sonnets’ “Mr. W.H.” But it would not do to display it in public. Though Shakespeare’s theatrical artistry gave pleasure, it was not the kind of pleasure that conferred cultural distinction on those who savored it. He was the supreme master of mass entertainment, as accessible to the unlettered groundlings standing in the pit as to the elite ensconced in their cushioned chairs. His plays mingled high and low in a carnivalesque violation of propriety. He was indifferent to the rules and hostile to attempts to patrol the boundaries of artistic taste. If his writing attained heights of exquisite delicacy, it also effortlessly swooped down to bawdy puns and popular ballads. In Twelfth Night, one of those ballads, sung by a noisy, festive trio of drunkard, blockhead, and professional fool, enrages the censorious steward Malvolio.

“Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?” he asks indignantly, to which he gets a vulgar reply—“Sneck up!”—followed by a celebrated challenge: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Shakespearean cakes and ale may have been beloved by the crowds drawn to the Globe, but they were not fit fare for the champions of piety or decorum. The pleasure they offered was in indefinable ways subversive. It was not until seven years after his death that Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies were gathered together by his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell in an expensive edition, dedicated to William Herbert and his brother, that first laid claim to their status as high culture. And it was only then, in his commendatory poem to the volume, that Ben Jonson for the first time evoked a larger landscape in which to understand the significance of Shakespeare’s career, one that would make it appropriate for a nobleman to acknowledge a connection to a middle-class writer of popular plays.

“And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” Jonson wrote, “I would not seek/For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,/Euripides, and Sophocles to us.” These immortals could worthily bear witness to the greatness of Shakespeare as a tragic playwright; as for his comedies, Jonson added, these surpass everything “that insolent Greece or haughty Rome/sent forth.” Jonson made Shakespeare into a global artist. Not in the sense that he imagined his work was or would ever become famous outside of England, but that he insisted it could bear comparison with the best that the world of letters had ever brought forth. Even if nothing in Shakespeare’s personal circumstances—his birthplace, parentage, education, affiliations, and the like—bore recording, he was nonetheless a national treasure.

“Triumph, my Britain,” Jonson proclaimed, “thou hast one to show,/To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.” To this proud boast he added the famous line: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” The enduring and global success of Shakespeare’s work is due in part to his willingness to let go of it, a willingness perhaps conveyed by titles like As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, What You Will (the subtitle of Twelfth Night), and All’s Well That Ends Well. It is as if he were refusing to insist upon his own identity and proprietary claim. It goes without saying that Shakespeare was a genius who left his mark on everything he touched. But there is also a strange sense that his characters and plots seized upon him as much as he seized upon them. Even at this distance in time, Shakespeare’s greatest contemporary playwrights, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, both seem directly and personally present in their work in a way that Shakespeare does not.

In the case of Jonson—too eager to display his scholarly mastery over his source materials, too bound up with the drama of his own life, and too anxious to retain absolute control over his own finished work—that presence is explicitly avowed in a variety of prefaces, prologues, and authorial interventions, with the result that his work, though splendid, seems entirely of a particular time and place and author. Shakespeare seems to have felt no comparable desire to make himself known or to cling tenaciously to what he had brought forth. The consequence is that it is not really necessary to know the details of Shakespeare’s life in order to love or understand his plays. This does not mean that Shakespeare was not present in every moment of his work. On the contrary, his vocation obliged him to use his personal experience, and his mastery of his medium meant that he managed to use an uncanny amount of it, mixing it with what he had read and observed and digested. He was an expert—perhaps the greatest expert the world has ever known—in what the brilliant English anthropologist Alfred Gell called “distributed personhood.” Gell’s interest was exclusively in visual representations, paintings, sculptures, and the like.

But the core of what he discovered in the analysis of Polynesian tattoos or Malangan carvings may be found as well in literature: the ability of an artist to fashion something—Gell called it an “index”—that carries agency, his own and that of others, into the world where it can act and be acted upon in turn. * A part of the personhood of the creator is detached from his body and survives after he or she has ceased physically to exist. Transformed often out of recognition, feared or attacked or reverenced, these redistributed parts live on, generating new experiences, triggering inferences, harming or rewarding those they encounter, arousing love. Shakespeare created out of himself hundreds of secondary agents, his characters, some of whom seem even to float free of the particular narrative structures in which they perform their given roles and to take on an agency we ordinarily reserve for biological persons. As an artist he literally gave his life to them. We speak of Shakespeare’s works as if they were stable reflections of his original intentions, but they continue to circulate precisely because they are so amenable to metamorphosis. They have left his world, passed into ours, and become part of us.

And when we in turn have vanished, they will continue to exist, tinged perhaps in small ways by our own lives and fates, and will become part of others whom he could not have foreseen and whom we can barely imagine. On April 23, 2014—the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth—a company of actors from London’s Globe (the modern reconstruction of the Elizabethan playhouse) embarked on a two-year tour with the ambition of performing Hamlet in every country of the world. The project makes vivid what has already been happening for a very long time. Shakespeare’s works have been translated, it is estimated, into more than a hundred languages. They have profoundly shaped national literary cultures not only in Great Britain and the United States but also of countries as diverse as Germany and Russia, Japan and India, Egypt and South Africa. William Shakespeare; drawing by David Levine A few years ago, during a merciful remission in the bloodshed and mayhem that has for so many years afflicted Afghanistan, a young Afghan writer, Qais Akbar Omar, had an idea. It was, he brooded, not only lives and livelihood that had been ruthlessly attacked by the Taliban, it was also culture.

The international emblem of that cultural assault was the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas, but the damage extended to painting, music, dance, fiction, film, and poetry. It extended as well to the subtle web of relations that link one culture to another across boundaries and make us, each in our provincial worlds, feel that we are part of a larger humanity. This web is not only a contemporary phenomenon, the result of modern technology; it is as old as culture itself, and it has been particularly dense and vital in Afghanistan with its ancient trade routes and its endless succession of would-be conquerors. Omar thought that the time was ripe to mark the restoration of civil society and repair some of the cultural damage. He wanted to stage a play with both men and women actors performing in public in an old garden in Kabul. He chose a Shakespeare play. No doubt the choice had something to do with the old imperial presence of the British in Afghanistan, but it was not only this particular history that was at work. Shakespeare is the embodiment worldwide of a creative achievement that does not remain within narrow boundaries of the nation-state or lend itself to the secure possession of a particular faction or speak only for this or that chosen group.

He is the antithesis of intolerant provinciality and fanaticism. He could make with effortless grace the leap from Stratford to Kabul, from English to Dari. Omar did not wish to put on a tragedy; his country, he thought, had suffered through quite enough tragedy of its own. Considering possible comedies, he shied away from those that involved cross-dressing. It was risky enough simply to have men and women perform together on stage. In the end he chose Love’s Labour’s Lost, a comedy that arranged the sexes in distinct male and female groups, had relatively few openly transgressive or explicitly erotic moments, and decorously deferred the final consummation of desire into an unstaged future. As a writer, Omar was charmed by the play’s gorgeous language, language that he felt could be rendered successfully in Dari. The complex story of the mounting of the play is told in semifictionalized form in a 2015 book Omar coauthored with Stephen Landrigan, A Night in the Emperor’s Garden. Measured by the excitement it generated, this production of Love’s Labor’s Lost was a great success.

The overflow crowds on the opening night gave way to ever-larger crowds clamoring to get in, along with worldwide press coverage. But the attention came at a high price. The Taliban took note of Shakespeare in Kabul and what it signified. In the wake of the production, virtually everyone involved in it began to receive menacing messages. Spouses, children, and the extended families of the actors were not exempt from harrassment and warnings. The threats were not idle. The husband of one of the performers answered a loud knock on the door one night and did not return. His mutilated body was found the next morning. What had seemed like a vigorous cultural renaissance in Afghanistan quickly faded and died. In the wake of the resurgence of the Taliban, Qais Akbar Omar and all the others who had had the temerity to mount Shakespeare’s delicious comedy of love were in terrible trouble. They are now, every one of them, in exile in different parts of the world. Love’s labors lost indeed. But the subtitle of Omar’s account—“A True Story of Hope and Resilience in Afghanistan”—is not or at least not only ironic.

The humane, inexhaustible imaginative enterprise that Shakespeare launched more than four hundred years ago in one small corner of the world is more powerful than all the oppressive forces that can be gathered against it. Feste the clown at the end of Twelfth Night sings a farewell ditty: A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, But that’s all one, our play is done. For a split second it sounds like it is all over, and then the song continues: “And we’ll strive to please you every day.” The enemies of pleasure beware. * Top 10 novels inspired by Shakespeare | Books | The Guardian Top 10s Top 10 novels inspired by Shakespeare It's the end of Shakespeare's birthday week, but the playwright has provided year-round inspiration for writers from Herman Melville to Patricia Highsmith Words, words, words … Scott Shepherd (with Richard Burton on film) playing Hamlet in The Wooster Group's production at the Edinburgh International festival. Photograph: Paula Court Sally O'Reilly Share on Messenger Close Shakespeare famously customised existing plots when writing his plays, and added to them an acute perception of human experience which gave them universal significance.

Thwarted love, ambition, greed, jealousy, fear – if you want to write a story about a fundamental predicament, there is a Shakespeare play to fit the bill. So it's not surprising that he has inspired so many writers, from Herman Melville to Angela Carter. He dealt in archetypes before anyone knew such things existed, and his ability to take an emotion or a situation and push it to the limit helped create a cadre of plays that have been endlessly staged – and copied. Apart from the examples below, Romeo and Juliet inspired Malorie Blackman 's Noughts & Crosses, there are references to Hamlet in Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis and The Tempest was the cue for The Magus by John Fowles. But Macbeth is my favourite – a preference I apparently share with Jo Nesbo, who recently announced that his new noir crime novel would be based on the Scottish play. Its sinister magic is also the inspiration behind my historical novel Dark Aemilia. In Jacobean times, the occult was accepted as part of everyday life, and witchcraft was both feared and sought out as a useful resource. I tried to channel some of this, and recreate the psychology of a fearful, superstitious age. 1.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Macbeth/King Lear) Melville's Great American Novel draws on both Biblical and Shakespearean myths. Captain Ahab is "a grand, ungodly, god-like man … above the common" whose pursuit of the great white whale is a fable about obsession and over-reaching. Just as Macbeth and Lear subvert the natural order of things, Ahab takes on Nature in his determination to kill his prey – and his hubristic quest is doomed from the start. 2. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (Richard III) Richard III gets a sympathetic makeover in Josephine Tey's 1951 whodunnit, which reads like a cross between Rear Window and Time Team. Detective Alan Grant, confined to bed after an accident, begins to take in interest in the much-maligned king after studying his portrait. Although clearly Richard III was a real person, the false picture we have of him was originally created by Shakespeare, Tey argues. He created a pantomime villain and child murderer in order to curry favour with his Tudor patron, Elizabeth I. 3.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (The Tempest) Huxley makes numerous references to the work of Shakespeare in this dystopian novel, and the title is taken from the Tempest: "O brave new world, / That has such people in 't!" Like Caliban, John "the Savage" is an outcast, despised for his appearance, and Huxley is exploring ideas about the power of art and the nature of humanity as Shakespeare does in his haunting and, possibly, final play. 4. Cakes and Ale by W Somerset Maugham (Twelfth Night) I discovered Maugham when I was about 14. He was out of fashion then, and is completely below the radar now. But this is a fascinating novel about literary snobbery. The portrayal of "loose woman" Rosie Driffield is sexist in modern terms, but her unapologetic hedonism is inspired by Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" 5. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (Macbeth) Like Macbeth, Ripley wants what someone else has got.

And just as Macbeth murders Duncan, Ripley bumps off golden boy Dickie Greenleaf, seeking to take his place. Then the body count rises as Ripley attempts to secure his position. This isn't a direct retelling, but the parallels are clear: Macbeth is accused of taking on "borrowed robes" and Ripley literally steals Dickie's clothes and identity. For me, the main difference between the Scottish king and the young American is that Ripley is a proper psychopath – he doesn't feel remorse. 6. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (Hamlet) This is a brilliant depiction of obsessive love, though its plot is a typically convoluted Murdochian creation which is inspired by Freud and Plato as well as Hamlet. It tells the story of a twisted friendship between two writers, and features some cheekily cross-dressed sex scenes in which Julian (a young woman) dresses up as the gloomy Dane. Murdoch is strongest on the unpredictability of love, and the black comedy that can result. 7. The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth (Julius Caesar) Shakespeare's exploration of violence and treachery has inspired numerous contemporary writers.

Forsyth references Julius Ceasar in the title of his novel about mercenaries fighting in a fictional African republic: "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." The themes also reflect those in this brutal play: the story shows these ruthless men operate by their own code, consistent but merciless, and difficult for outsiders to understand. 8. Wise Children by Angela Carter (The Taming of the Shrew et al) Twins, doubles and paradoxes abound in Carter's final novel, as they do in Shakespeare. The story of twins Dora and Nora Chance explores ideas about paternity and incest, and the novel is written in five chapters like the five acts in a Shakespeare play. One of the themes is "high art" versus "low art" and Carter jokily refers to Shakespeare via Kiss Me Kate, a populist adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. I loved the audacity and sheer verve in this novel, and the way it both challenges and celebrates the Shakespeare legacy. 9. Love in Idleness by Amanda Craig (A Midsummer Night's Dream) This is a modern reworking of A Midsummer Night's Dream set in contemporary Tuscany, which gently ridicules the chattering classes.

The familiar tropes of Shakespearean comedy are all there – confusion, heartache and eventual resolution. Like Murdoch, Craig has some fun with names – my particular favourites are Theo Noble and Ellen and Ivo Sponge – as well as exposing some of the frailties and inconsistencies in our approach to love and marriage. 10. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (King Lear) Smiley retells the story of King Lear in modern-day Iowa in her Pulitzer-prizewinning novel. The novel is set on a thousand-acre farm which is owned by a father and his three daughters, and told from the point of view of the oldest, Ginny. Instead of dismissing the two older daughters as wicked and grasping, as Shakespeare does, in her novel Smiley explores the family secrets that underpin the drama, and shows the significance of the land itself.

The best, 'peat-slathered', writers on the dark stories and stark geography of these inhospitable regions Published: 4 Jun 2014 From Proust to the latest neuroscience, the psychologist and novelist rounds up the best reading on the 'slippery charms' of an essential faculty Published: 2 Apr 2014 From Elsinore to Charing Cross Road, novelist Niall Williams browses the best stories you can read about readers Published: 28 May 2014 From Knut Hamsun's classic story of starvation to Karl Ove Knausgård's autobiographical opus, here is the novelist's pick of Norwegian books in translation Published: 21 May 2014 William Shakespeare Essay - Morality - eNotes.com William Shakespeare Essay - Morality link Link Morality Critical interest in Shakespeare's dramatic representation of morality and amorality has touched upon a number of fundamental issues in his plays, including his literary sources, theological insights, critique of society, and depiction of evil. Many late twentieth-century critics have discerned the subject in the underlying thematic structure of Shakespeare's dramas—particularly in the histories and tragedies, which frequently feature elements of the medieval morality tradition.

While scholars have noted that the didactic, allegorical figures—such as Virtue, Vice, and the Everyman—of earlier morality plays do not appear, as such, in Shakespeare's more subtle and complex works, elements of these and other “morality” types inform many characters in the dramas. In such works as Richard III, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Henry IV, Timon of Athens, and more, commentators Alan C. Dessen (1986), Mathew Winston (1981), and others have observed the steady influence of this stage tradition. Additionally, the majority of Shakespeare's plays are at least indirectly concerned with some abiding moral issue that affects its theme and outcome. All of his dramatic works, excepting perhaps some of the comedies, depict a significant moral choice or inversion/disruption of the moral order that results in tragedy or must be set right by the close of the play. When considering the subject of moral corruption in the Shakespearean canon, many critics have focused on the tragedies, particularly Macbeth.

Harvey Birenbaum (1982) studies Macbeth's violation of ethical norms in Shakespeare's bloodiest play, stressing the Scottish king's tragic consciousness of his wrongdoing and alienation from his actions. Similarly, Carol Strongin Tufts (1987) examines Macbeth's violent disturbance of the moral order with his murder of Duncan and considers Shakespeare's intricate representation of evil and its consequences in the play. In another vein, Barbara Riebling (1991) interprets Macbeth in the context of Niccolo Machiavelli's theoretical works The Prince and The Discourses, noting the contradiction between Christian morality and strong leadership as this theme pervades the tragedy. Exploring corrupted morality in regard to Hamlet, Catherine Brown Tkacz (1992) describes the relationship between Hamlet's moral choices and the play's imagery of turning wheels of fortune and the state—motifs that signal the ruin of the royal house of Denmark. The implications of unmitigated evil inform Lee A. Jacobus's (1992) analysis of the amoral figures Iago and Richard III of Othello and Richard III, respectively.

Shakespeare's view of morality in the comedies and romances departs strongly from that of the tragedies, displaying instead an interest in the moral component of social interaction—from politics to love and desire. R. A. D. Grant (1983) views The Tempest as Shakespeare's theodicy, a justification for God's benevolence in a world marred by suffering and evil. According to Grant, Shakespeare concentrates on the interaction of divine Providence, human authority, and moral action in The Tempest. Alice Rayner (1987) investigates the moral structure of Twelfth Night, finding in the work's depiction of moral oppositions—such as those of “virtue and appetite, sobriety and revelry, respectability and knavery, constancy and mutability”—the key to Shakespeare's comic vision. Gene Fendt (1995) interprets As You Like It as a play about desire (eros) that temporarily puts aside judgment of its characters in order to provide audiences with a cultural, moral, and religious catharsis. Critics have also studied specific representations of religion in Shakespeare's plays, focusing on moral issues in theological contexts. Austin C. Dobbins and Roy W.

Battenhouse (1976) probe the ethical problem of Jessica's dissimulation in The Merchant of Venice, finding her concealment of the truth from her father justified according to Hebraic and Christian tradition. Michael H. Keefer (1988) observes the moral strain in King Lear. According to Keefer, the play features a “synecdochic relation between Lear and Calvin's God,” and thus criticizes such theological concepts as predestination and grace. More Content: Morality (hide) Shakespeare » British Humanist Association Hamlet speaks of death as: “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns.” Prospero, at the end of The Tempest, Shakespeares’s last play, says: “We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep.” But this is not the consistent view of all his characters, and some, like Claudius in Hamlet, agonise over their likely punishment after death.

Some overtly religious characters, like the ironically named Angelo in Measure for Measure, who sentences Claudio to death for “fornication” (something that the more humane characters in the play see as “a fault alone”), are seen as hypocritically harsh on others, and misguided. The nun-like Isabella, who in the same play chooses to preserve her chastity rather than her brother’s life, is not shown as an entirely likeable character. The Puritan Malvolio in Twelfth Night is mocked by the more hedonistic characters: “Dost thou think that, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” The “Christians” in The Merchant of Venice are portrayed as cruel in their treatment of the Jewish Shylock. Although Shylock is a spiteful villain, he is portrayed compassionately and is given a famous plea for understanding: “…Hath not a Jew hands organs, dimensions, senses, passions… If you prick us, do we not bleed…” His daughter, Jessica, is sympathetically drawn, and Shakespeare may not have shared the anti-semitism common in his era.

The Christian view of suicide, that it was a sin, is seen in Hamlet when Ophelia’s funeral ceremony is very perfunctory (“maimed rites” Laertes calls them) and she is only permitted burial in consecrated ground, grudgingly, because of her high connections. But Shakespeare does not condemn Ophelia, or the many of his other protagonists who die by their own hands: Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Brutus. Instead, the plays often show pity for the problems that have driven them to suicide, and some approval of their courage. The portrayals of Shakepeare’s villains do not draw on the Christian concepts of “original sin” or “divine grace”.

Some of his characters are robustly sceptical about the supernatural: when the egotistical, verbose Glendower claims, in Henry IV, Part 1 , that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep”, the pragmatic Hotspur replies: “Why so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?” And perhaps Shakespeare is expressing his own views about human free will, as opposed to fatalism or a belief in divine predestination, when Edmund remarks in King Lear: “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune – often the surfeit of our own behaviour – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, the stars… as if we were fools by heavenly compulsion…and all that we were evil in, by a divine thrusting on.” There is certainly little feeling in the plays that the stars or gods are responsible for human failings, or that the characters lack free will. In his sonnets, which can more fairly be taken as expressing his personal viewpoint, Shakespeare’s main themes are love, death and immortality.

But immortality is not seen as something metaphysical – it can be achieved by having children or by being immortalised in poetry: “… But were some child of yours alive in that time, You would live twice, in it and in my rhyme.” (Sonnet 17) “And nothing gainst Time’s scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.” (Sonnet 12) Present day humanists share this belief that you can only live on after death in the memories of those that knew you, or in the work or children you leave behind. Critics have frequently noted Shakespeare’s broadly humanistic view of life: Dominic Dromgoole, then Artistic Director of Oxford Stage Company, future Artistic Director of The Globe Theatre, wrote in The Guardian (13/07/05): “ …. Each age re-imagines Shakespeare to suit the pressure of its own moment. He suits now as well as ever. Yet he does not only match this age, in which religion has mumbo-jumboed its way back into muscular authority. He also offers a desperately needed alternative. For many he is now a non-religious icon, a secular saint.

The Complete Works comprises an imagined world of stories, insights, rituals and beauties, more varied, more complex and more true to the nuttiness of our present world, than the streamlining or simplifications of any religious texts. It is governed not by the reductions of moral certainty, nor by the delusions of spiritual redemption, but by a sensibility that is confused, yet full of mischief and kindness. A sensibility that is happy to be human rather than straining to be better than human. …He celebrated all the world, not the section he favoured.

We keep going back to him – now more than ever – because we know that his spirit of inclusion, his love for everything, is our last best hope.” The Rev J R Green, a distinguished 19th century historian, wrote: “On the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant.” J M Robertson (1856-1933) wrote in Elizabethan Literature: “Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, after Marlowe, is persistently non-religious in his handling of life.” Algernon Swinburne, Victorian poet: “Shakespeare was in the genuine sense – that is, in the best and highest and widest meaning of the word, a Freethinker.” Ivor Brown (1891-1974), drama critic, said in Shakespeare: “In so far as his view of death can be discovered from the plays, it shows remarkably little belief in any Christian heaven or hell… The conception of death and the after-life in Hamlet provides us with some glorious poetry, but not with any clear intimation that Shakespeare himself held clear opinions.

‘To die, to sleep’ is not the Christian attitude… When his imagination was working upon death with full intensity, he showed in his plays, a view of ‘the invisible event’ which is more pagan than Christian.” Corliss Lamont in The Philosophy of Humanism: “Shakespeare himself indicated little interest in or support of religious supernaturalism. As George Santanaya points out in his penetrating essay The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare, England’s greatest poet ‘chose to leave his heroes and himself in the presence of life and death with no other philosophy than that which the profane world can suggest and understand’, namely a species of Humanism.”

Question: ‘There shall be no more cakes and ale’ is a line from which Shakespeare play?
Answer: Twelfth Night