WILLIAM SAKESPEARE

 

                WILLIAM SAKESPEARE

            William Shakespeare was a great British poet and dramatist, not for his own country and times but for the whole mankind and for all the times to come.   He was born at Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April 1564 and died there on the same date in 1616.

            His surviving works consist of 38/39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other poems.

            His most famous plays are: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Tempest, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard III, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, V, VI,  VIII , The Winter’s Tale, Comedy of Errors,  A Midsummer Night’s Dream,  King John, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well

               The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) said: “Shakeapeare is a great psychologist and whatever can be known of the heart of man may be found in his plays.“

            In his famous sonnet “Shakespeare,” the English poet and critic  Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)  portrays him as an unapproachable, self-secure genius who stands “out-topping knowledge”. He considers him as a “self-school’d, self-scanned, and self-honoured” figure whose work is divine, independent, and ultimately beyond comprehension.

            What follows are a few quotations from Shakespeare’s works:

*Lovers are given to poetry, and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign.----From As You Like It.

**Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.---From Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

 

***The quality of mercy is not strain’s,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,

Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

‘T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown.---From Merchant of Venice.

 

 

****What is a man,

In his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.

Sure he hath made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and god-like reason

To fust in un us unus’d.-----From Hamlet.

 

 

*****What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!  in action how like an angel ! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! ------From Hamlet.

     

 

******The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is the madman; the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name,-------From Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

 

                                                            *****

G.R.Kanwal

23 April 2026