1/13/2024 0 Comments Romeo and juliet first folioSticking with latter-day minstrels, when Iron Maiden named their song Where Eagles Dare, they were borrowing a phrase from Richard III. Hamlet also yielded the title of Agatha Christie's theatrical smash, The Mousetrap, Alfred Hitchcock's evocative spy thriller, North by Northwest, Ruth Rendell's Put on by Cunning, Philip K Dick's Time Out of Joint, and Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten. "I must be cruel only to be kind," the Prince of Denmark tells her in a wriggling kind of apology for killing a courtier and meddling in her new relationship. Shakespeare's influence is evident in pop culture as well: singer-songwriter Nick Lowe's 1970s earworm, Cruel to be Kind, took its title from lines Hamlet addressed to his mother. That's in part because fellow artists draw so readily on him in their paintings, operas and ballets. Speak the English language, and he's impossible to avoid. Even if you've never read one of his sonnets or seen one of his plays – even if you've never so much as watched a movie adaptation – you're likely to have quoted him unwittingly. He gave us uniquely vivid ways in which to express hope and despair, sorrow and rage, love and lust. Without him, our vocabulary would be just too different. During his 52 years on Earth, he enriched the English language in ways so profound that it's hard to fully gauge his impact. That isn't a wish likely to be granted to Shakespeare himself any time soon. "Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood" might just do it, borrowed from King Lear railing against his daughter, Goneril. Then again, perhaps he'd settle for more aloof damnation, along the lines of Orlando's insult to Jaques in As You Like It: "I do desire we may be better strangers." If the fact that William Shakespeare's First Folio, that legacy-defining collection of his plays, is turning 400 has passed you by, you can be sure he'd have had a zinger of a putdown to sling your way.
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