Shakespeare for Every Night of The Year: Verses for April
If anthologies be the food of love… read on! To celebrate the publication of Shakespeare for Every Night of The Year by Colin Salter, we’re sharing some of our favourite Shakespearean scenes and soliloquies to get you feeling literary…
1 APRIL
All Fools’ Day
A fool muses on the nature of foolery. He invents Quinapalus to give his remark some credibility.
FESTE
Wit, an’t be thy will, put me into good fooling!
Those wits, that think they have thee, do very oft
prove fools; and I, that am sure I lack thee, may
pass for a wise man: for what says Quinapalus?
‘Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.’
Twelfth Night | Act I, scene
6 APRIL
In 1896, the first day of the first modern Olympic Games
Rallying after a defeat, the Yorkists prepare for the Battle of Townton in the Wars of the Roses.
GEORGE PLANTAGENET
Yet let us all together to our troops,
And give them leave to fly that will not stay;
And call them pillars that will stand to us;
And, if we thrive, promise them such rewards
As victors wear at the Olympian games:
This may plant courage in their quailing breasts;
For yet is hope of life and victory.
Forslow no longer, make we hence amain.
Henry VI, Part 3 | Act II, scene 3
16 APRIL
Birthday in 1889 of the great clown of silent cinema Charlie Chaplin
Hamlet advises comedians not to improvise, milk the laughter or upstage the serious parts of a play.
HAMLET
O, reform it altogether! And let those that play your
clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them
that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too,
though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered.
That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
Go make you ready.
Hamlet | Act III, scene 2
25 APRIL
St Mark’s Day, also known in Venice as the Festival of the Rosebud
Like the scent within a rosebud, beauty is enhanced by the release of inner beauty.
SONNET 54
O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.
27 APRIL
The Feast of St Assicus, who made precious-metal book covers for churches founded by his friend St Patrick
Juliet’s mother wants her to marry Paris, whom she describes in terms of a beautifully bound book.
LADY CAPULET
What say you? can you love the gentleman?
This night you shall behold him at our feast;
Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face,
And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen;
Examine every married lineament,
And see how one another lends content
And what obscured in this fair volume lies
Find written in the margent of his eyes.
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him, only lacks a cover:
The fish lives in the sea, and ’tis much pride
For fair without the fair within to hide:
That book in many’s eyes doth share the glory,
That in gold clasps locks in the golden story;
So shall you share all that he doth possess,
By having him, making yourself no less.
Romeo and Juliet | Act I, scene 3
Discover Shakespeare for Every Night of The Year.
Illustrations by Dániel Szinvai.
