Unit 2: Selection Vocabulary 1

We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people.

Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects...

...and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.

In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

I grieve and dare not show my discontent

I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.

My care is like my shadow in the sun—
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it

His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph

I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.

There is an extraordinary—seemingly an insatiable—urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plays, it is held, so brim with expertise—on law, medicine, statesmanship, court life, military affairs, the bounding main, antiquity, life abroad—that they cannot possibly be the work of a single lightly educated provincial.

The presumption is that William Shakespeare of Stratford was, at best, an amiable stooge, an actor who lent his name as cover for someone of greater talent, someone who could not, for one reason or another, be publicly identified as a playwright.

PBS, the American television network, in 1996 produced an hour-long documentary unequivocally suggesting that Shakespeare probably wasn’t Shakespeare.

Similarly, in the normally unimpeachable History Today, William D. Rubinstein, a professor at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, stated in the opening paragraph of his anti-Shakespeare survey: “Of the seventy-five known contemporary documents in which Shakespeare is named, not one concerns his career as an author.”