Thursday Thirteen 21- I Will Sell My Soul For Something Pure And True

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In honor of my upcoming trip to Ashland for the Shakespeare Festival my next two TT will be dedicated to Mr. Will. First up, 13 quotes from Romeo and Juliet. Well not so much quotes as passages.

The Queen Mab Speech. My personal favorite! Points if you can name the Duran Duran video in which Simon LeBon quotes the opening lines ;)



Mercutio
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,

O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,

And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:

This is she-

Romeo
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk'st of nothing.

Mercutio
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south

O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright (my second favorite line)

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow

When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.

O, swear not by the moon, the fickle moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circle orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous; and it pricks like thorn.

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, W
hich as they kiss consume.

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear.

A plague o' both your houses,
They have made worms' meat of me.

See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O that I were a glove upon that hand that I might touch that cheek!


What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence and have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardoned, and some punished. For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.