‘The quality of mercy is not strained’: this memorable speech from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is spoken by Portia, who has disguised herself as a male lawyer in order to defend Antonio – the title character of the play – from Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who has demanded a […]
Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a masterclass of irony and the way rhetoric can be used to say one thing but imply something quite different without ever naming it. Mark Antony delivers a funeral speech for Julius Caesar following Caesar’s assassination at the hands […]
‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright’ is a famous speech spoken by Romeo in Act I Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But what does he mean by this speech? Although the meaning may appear to be straightforward, when viewed in the context of the play […]
How to reduce the whole span of an average human life into just a few lines of verse? Shakespeare managed it, in this famous speech from As You Like It, which begins with the famous declaration that ‘All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely […]
The ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ speech from Shakespeare’s Hamlet has become one of the most famous and instantly recognisably theatre tropes – or, at least, those three words, ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, have. Perhaps the rest of Hamlet’s speech is less famous, and certainly many people misquote the next four words that […]