Celebrating National Poetry Month: Shakespeare at 400

Title page of First Folio, 1623

Copper engraving of Shakespeare by 

Martin Droeshout (from Wikipedia)

In celebration of the 400 anniversary of the death of  William Shakespeare (April 23, 1616), I salute the Bard of Avon with some of his more memorable quotes: 

"Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
 (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2:  Spoken by Cassius to Brutus)

                                   "All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
(As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII: Spoken by Jaques)

"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-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although is height be taken."
(From Sonnet 116)

"What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties, 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-
and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not
me-nor woman neither..."
(Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, Hamlet speaking to Rosencrantz)

For my prior articles celebrating  National Poetry Month, click here.

The best way to appreciate poetry is to listen to you tube readings of famous actors reciting their favorite poems.