A tribute to the words and phrases so familiar to us today and attributable to Shakespeare:
Knock Knock! Who’s There? Heart of Gold Good Riddance Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve Come What May Set Your Teeth on Edge Fair Play/Foul Play Love is Blind Seen Better Days Baited Breath Laughing Stock Fight Fire with Fire Vanish into Thin Air Lie Low Too Much of a Good Thing A Piece of Work In a Pickle Be All/End All Not Slept One Wink Heart of Hearts Break the Ice Come What May For Goodness Sake Green Eyed Monster Off with His Head A Sorry Sight Makes Your Hair Stand on End Breathed His Last Naked Truth Out of the Jaws of Death Dead as a Doornail Send Him Packing Brave New World Wild Goose Chase The Game is Up The World is My Oyster Full Circle So-So Faint Hearted
Bedazzled: The Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, Scene V
“Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes, that have so bedazzled with the sun that everything I look on seemeth green…” – Katherina
Cold-Blooded: King John, Act III, Scene I
“Thou art cold-blooded slave, hast thou not spoke like thunder on my side? Been sworn my soldier, bidding me depend upon thy stars, thy fortune and thy strength, and dost thou now fall over to my foes? Thou wear a lion’s hide! Doff it for shame, and hang a calve’s skin on those recreant limbs.” – Constance
Multitudinous: Macbeth, Scene II, Act II
“What hands are here? Hah! They pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.” – Macbeth
Eyeball: The Tempest, Act I, Scene II
“Go make thyself like a nymph o’ th’ sea; be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible to every eyeball else.” – Prospero
Swagger: A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Act III, Scene I
“What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here, so near the cradle of the Fairy Queen?” – Puck
I am largely ignorant of the works of great bard or the bard of Avon except for one saying; that is, “To be or not to be…” from Hamlet.
And if I may digress to my youthful days on weekends at the neighborhood movie, the World, at 6th and National on the south side of Milwaukee:
“White man speak with forked tongue.” Author unknown.
Both have great relevancy today to many of our elected representatives.
“The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
– Edgar; King Lear
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
— Sonnet 116