Customer Reviews

Shakespeare: A Book of Quotations (Dover Thrift Editions)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you're looking for a complete and expensive collection of Shakespeare quotes, then look somewhere else. However, if you're looking for hundreds of his most famous quotes from his plays & sonnets in an abridged 64 page format arranged by subject for only a dollar - then look here!

As the ostensibly wise Polonius so aptly put it, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't." Also recommended: Dover's Oscar Wilde's Wit & Wisdom. I read both of them whenever I'm bored and in need some intellectual stimulation - the best two investments per dollar you can make. Get thee to a nunnery! Urr...read this first.

This book includes famous quotes from a variety of literary works by William Shakespeare. If you love Shakespeare's amazing words but don't have the time to read all of his plays, this book is for you.

Recently I have bought several books of quotations by some of the best minds of all time. Dover editions has several, for example Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde among others.

This particular one has the advantage of being inexpensive, and does contain many great quotations I don't recall reading before, I feel I must mention two of my favorites for you to consider.

My favorite by far, and I think unbeatable is Shakespeare's Wordcraft (Softcover), which breaks down Shakespeare's quotations down into patterns, and shows he crafted many of these quotes, and how you too can craft quotations of similar brilliance.

It does not use fancy jargon or explanations. Mostly, it shows patterns such as reverberations, reversals, repetitions, and then list quotes, and as you read you can discern what is happening, it's really eye opening.

Another one, the Kindle version William Shakespeare Complete Works Ultimate Collection: 213 Plays, Poems, Sonnets, Poetry including the 16 rare, hard-to-get Apocryphal Plays PLUS Annotations, Commentaries of Works, Full Biography, on Kindle. For a ridiculously modest price you have Shakespeare's complete works. If you don't already have Kindle, you can download a Kindle app for your computer here on Amazon, and experience it that way. With that you have a complete Shakespeare database so if you want to look up an obscure quote like; green eyed monster, time out of joint, or beetle oer the base, you can find every reference even if the words are not side by side. If you wish to look up a common structure like neither..nor, it will show you every place where both these words appeared. This search feature beats most quote sites.

The advantage of this book is that it presents quotations without you having to look for the unknown jewel. I read many good quotations I do not recall reading before. If it was a longer book, it's about 64, and included some of the soliloquys more completely I would probably give it five stars. I realise though that a soliloquy goes slightly beyond the usual scope of a quotation, so maybe it's unrealistic on my part to impose this expectation.

Like all quote books it distils the essence from all his works, saving you the time of diving through all his plays to find the particular pearls, showing you a selection of some of the very best quotes by the master wordsmith of all time.

It's well worth it for how little you pay, and how much you can get out of it.

I think you will enjoy it, and I hope you found this review helpful.

bad index...tough to find quotes...quotes are totally random...don't bother

Any disadvantage this book has is that it is so small . . . But it is a good foretaste to his words and wit.

I bought this book as a "gateway" to understanding Shakespeare. We have these long scripts we are reading, these five act plays written in an indented poetic Elizabethan English, sometimes verbose. And our English teachers wonder why it is so hard to understand the Bard.

(I wonder if Shakepseare envisioned people reading his scripts, insteady of watching the scripts acted out on the stage!)

I bought this book and have read it in parallel with the play-scripts that I am studing. I can capture the meaningful quotes and ideas in the plays. And that has made all the differnce in my perosnal enjoyment of Shakespeare!