Amanda's Shakespeare Blog

The right edition of a Shakespearean play can enhance any student's understanding. Here are some tips on how to select the edition best for you.

Here are our most frequently asked questions about Shakespeare. Detailed answers are provided.

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• Which is the shortest Shakespearean play?
  
  
• Tennis balls are significant in which Shakespearean play?
  
  
• In which play would you find the passage on the seven ages of man?
  
  
• How many plays did Shakespeare actually write?
  
  

Henry Bolingbroke usurps the throne of which king? Give the quiz a try! Detailed answers are provided.

Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself,
As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on,
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
With arms encumber'd thus, or this head-shake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As 'Well, well, we know'; or 'We could, an if we would';
Or 'If we list to speak'; or 'There be, an if they might';
Or such ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me: this is not to do,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you.
(1.5.187-198)

The following introduction to the many instances of deception in Hamlet will help you plan your own essay on the broader topic of how this important theme relates to the play on the whole.

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• The Revenge Plot of Hamlet
  
  
• The Romance Between Hamlet and Ophelia
  
  
• Fortinbras and the War with Norway
  
  
• Top 10 Quotations from Hamlet
  
  

These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse,
and fight for bitten apples; that no audience, but
the Tribulation of Tower-hill, or the Limbs of
Limehouse, their dear brothers, are able to endure.
"Henry VIII" (5.4.65-8)

Unfortunately, Shakespeare and his acting troupe had to endure those nasty hecklers and riffraff who would come from the seedy parts of London (hence the reference to the "Tribulation of Tower-hill" and the "Limbs of Limehouse"). Over all, Shakespeare's audience was far more boisterous than are patrons of the theatre today. They were loud and hot-tempered and as interested in the happenings off stage as on. Read on...

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...

Here is our analysis of one of Shakespeare's most romantic sonnets. Included is a paraphrase of the poem in contemporary English, full explanatory notes, and a detailed commentary.

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• Iambic Pentameter and the English Sonnet Style
  
  
• Essential Sonnet Facts
  
  
• Quotable Shakespeare: Love
  
  
• The World's Most Popular Love Poem
  
  

Renaissance records of Shakespeare's plays in performance are exceedingly scarce. However, those few contemporary accounts that have survived provide brief yet invaluable information about a handful of Shakespeare's dramas. They give us a sense of what the play-going experience was like while Shakespeare was alive and involved in his own productions, and, in some cases, they help us determine the composition dates of the plays. Of all the records of performance handed down to us, none is more significant than the exhaustive diary of a doctor named Simon Forman, from which we obtain lengthy descriptions of early productions of four of Shakespeare's plays. On to Dr. Forman's Account of the Plays...

How many witches appear in Macbeth? How many sonnets did Shakespeare write? Take our quiz and see how well you know the important numbers in Shakespeare's life and work. Detailed answers are provided.

More Shakespeare Quizzes:

• Shakespearean Couples
  
  
• Shakespeare's Opening Lines
  
  
• Shakespeare's Odd Words

Why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?
(Hamlet, 5.1.109-114)

Related Resources:

• Shakespeare on Jealousy
  
  
• Shakespeare on Revenge
  
  
• Shakespeare on Pride and Greed
  
  

Where the bee sucks, there suck I
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily:
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
"The Tempest" (5.1.97-103)

For more quotations on fairies from Shakespeare's plays, click here.