UPDATED September, 2010 – My new book, Hear My Soul Speak : Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare, is available now!

This article from Newsweek about how to give a wedding toast recommends not quoting Shakespeare. As the article says, “Some of your guests may have even heard on MTV that he’s dead.”

But it did get me thinking. Shakespeare’s not exactly known for writing many happily married couples, or having much that’s very nice to say on the subject. If you’re in the market for Shakespeare wedding quotes, what have you got?

When I asked my wife to marry me I said, ‘There’ll be time enough for Shakespeare, and limousines and travelling around the world…” before popping the question. So I knew that I’d have to do something at the wedding. We didn’t do much with speeches (not even the dads, just the best man), so pulling the microphone over for myself and giving a speech to everybody would have been a little over the top. So instead, during one of our dances together, I whispered this in her ear:

Who will believe my verse in time to come, if it were filled with your most high desserts? Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty in your eyes, and in fresh numbers number all your graces? The age to come would say This poet lies, such hea’enly touches ne’er touched earthly faces. So should my papers yellowed with their age be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue, and your true rights be termed a poet’s rage, stretched meter of an antique song. But if some child of yours were live in this time, you should live twice, in it and in this rhyme.

That’s Sonnet 17, if you don’t recognize it. I realize that some of my grammar is off, and I deliberately didn’t type it out in the correct format, because I did it from memory whispering it in her ear, and I’m not sure it really matters where the linebreaks were.

When we did the wedding video I made sure to work the “If I could write the beauty in your eyes…” bit right into one of the credit screens.

Thank Shakespeare High for the word that there’s a new Henry V movie in the works. It looks like something independent, without even a reference on the Internet Movie Database. Perhaps they should have chosen something that Kenneth Branagh hasn’t already tackled? The comparisons are going to be obvious (and, I expect, fairly painful for Mr. Babakitis….)

Flickr: Photos tagged with shakespeare

It’s a slow Shakespeare day :). So have a link to Flickr’s interesting photos that have a Shakespeare tag on them. Part of the fun is guessing the relevance to Shakespeare before you click.

Titles from HAMLET, Act I

This site is cool and deserves mention if only for the amount of work it must have taken. Start with Hamlet alone, and work your way through the entire play, finding quotes that have been referenced as the title of other works. Example: Edith Wharton’s “The Glimpses of the Moon” is probably referenced back from I,iv: “What may this mean That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon…”

The entire play is analyzed like this. I think I’d like some links, where relevant, to the resources cited. After all, what good is having this master list of references (I presume that they are all books, no movies) if I can’t explore them further? Philip K. Dick wrote a book/story called “Time Out of Joint.” Great. I want more info. Now what? I can go search Amazon, but this is a resource just screaming out for some affiliate links.

I think that Lunar Park is going on my reading list. For one, it’s written by Brett Easton Ellis, author of such classics as American Psycho, Less Than Zero, and The Rules of Attraction. But moreso for this paragraph of exalted praise, way down the article:



And yet, for all of the references to himself and his work, the shadow of another famous writer looms over Lunar Park: Shakespeare. To begin with, there are numerous nods to Hamlet in the story itself: the father’s ghost haunting the son wrapped in turmoil, Ellis wracked with remorse and near disintegration (not to mention the fact that Ellis and his family live on Elsinore Lane, and that local landmarks include the Fortinbras Mall and Horatio Park). And yet — with all of Lunar Park’s rich fantasy and horror elements — the Shakespearean character that looms the largest over Lunar Park isn’t Hamlet but is instead the magic-illusionist Prospero from Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest. Ellis — like Prospero — is ultimately the creator of the novel’s increasing chaos.

So for those of us out there that are keeping notes of “novels that have lots of Shakespeare bits”, this one might be a keeper. That is, if you’re into the dark and gory side of things. Ellis is not known for writing about puppies romping in fields of daisies.