Shakespeare's Birthday Bash Game

Today, in honor of Shakespeare's birthday, first we're going to eat "Duncan" Donuts, and then we're going to divide the class in two. Each group has to locate the plays, acts, scenes and lines in which the following quotations can be found. You also have to find the characters who said them. For five of the quotations, the groups also have to explain the context of the lines. All of these quotations are what make the Bard so famous and so admired.

As Ben Jonson wrote in his ode to the poet, "Nature herself was proud of his designs/And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines." Notice that this sentiment reinforces the idea we talked about, that Elizabethans loved the artificial, that is, Nature enhanced by art.

Here are the lines the groups have to research:

Friendship is constant in all other things,
Save in the office and affairs of love.
Therefore, all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself,
And trust no other agent.


How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.


Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.


Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.


If I be waspish, best beware my sting.


The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,.
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.


Ay me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.


Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.


Out, out, damned spot.


Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.


This is very midsummer madness.


What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties!
In form and moving, how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.
The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.
And, yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?