How can we celebrate William Shakespeare's birthday on Fluther?

I’ll raise a glass of ale from a bench at the Elizabethan Gardens
One of my favorite places to be :))
If you’d like,I will recite the St.Crispen’s Day Speech in the voice of Kenneth Branagh,but that will take at least 4–5 glasses of ale.

“Shall I compare thee to a brick outhouse?”
“Is this a dagger I see before me? Nay! I’m merely happy to cast eyes upon thy beauty.”
“But soft, what light through yonder trousers breaks?”

He’d have appreciated the wit, he was such a card….bard!

Oh, you mean that Upstart Crow fellow I’ve heard tell about?

Here’s my favorite sonnet:

William Shakespeare – Sonnet #29

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

@janbb, this is mine, #116:

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:
O no! it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

Nice initiative.

@aprilsimnel I love this

My favorite:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause – there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered

This is on my profile:
Duke Orsino:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction
-Merchant of Venice, Act 3, scene 1

The Oh-God-Morning-After poem

Sonnet 129

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme,
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe,
Before a joy proposed behind a dream.
All this the world well knows yet none knows well,
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Begin by recognizing his contribution to British cuisine.

In the poison’d entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
3 WITCH. Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches’ mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg’d i the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingrediants of our caldron.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

Much Ado About Nothing has a special place in my heart.

“O that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass: though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.”

Turns out, knowing who wrote Hamlet is a question on an IQ test. Not knowing can make you seem less intelligent.

Some expressions coined by William Shakespeare. These (and many others) are still in common usage in the UK and I think the US as well…...

Bated breath (The Merchant of Venice)
Be-all and the end-all (Macbeth)
Brave new world (The Tempest)
Dead as a doornail (2 Henry VI)
Eaten me out of house and home (2 Henry IV)
In my heart of hearts (Hamlet)
Kill with kindness (Taming of the Shrew)
Milk of human kindness (Macbeth)
More in sorrow than in anger (Hamlet)
Parting is such sweet sorrow (Romeo and Juliet)
Make short shrift (Richard III)
Set my teeth on edge (I Henry IV)
Wear my heart upon my sleeve (Othello)
The world’s my oyster (2 Henry IV)

“They do not love that do not show their love”.
~Shakespeare

Polonius: What is the matter my lord?

Hamlet : Between who?

Polonius: I mean the matter that you read my lord.

Hamlet: Slanders sir! for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their face are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plumtree gum together and that they have a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak hams. All of which sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, and yet a hold it not honesty to have it thus set down. For yourself, sir, should be as old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.

I memorized that bit of the scene earlier this year. I can tell a hawk from a handsaw.

GQ GQ GQ GQ!!! hats off to you… here’s one of my many favorites:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny nonny.

Think like Shakespeare.

Here’s another… before I go to bed.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

I bite my thumb at you!

It’s Shakespeare.

Our revels now are ended.

These our actors—as I foretold you—we are all spirits!
And are melted into air—into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers,
The gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples
—The great globe itself!
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
And our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare
The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

Happy birthday, old man!

SONNET 66
Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.