Wednesday, April 13, 2011

A green and yellow melancholy

It's always a wrench, coming to the end of a play. This will be my last post about Twelfth Night, by some distance my most successful production so far. And while I couldn't have asked for a better cast, the real star was the English language, in Shakespeare's incomparable hands. Here are just a few of my favourites quotes from the play:-

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool.

You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard.

You are all idle, shallow things. I am not of your element.

Let us draw the curtain and show you the picture.

Madam, I will.

A very dishonest paltry boy.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenge.

Get him to say his prayers Sir Toby, get him to pray.

She sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief.

Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil ... are empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the Devil

And it is with a green and yellow melancholy that I say goodbye to the characters and the words. Plays are labours of love: maybe one day I'll be brave enough to choose the wonderfully-named Love's Labour's Lost.

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