QUIZ: WISDOM FROM SHAKESPEARE

Given below are some famous lines from the plays of Shakespeare. Can you recall the plays they have been taken from and also the characters who spoke them?

1 There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger

2. The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.

3. Ay, every inch a king:
When I do stare, see how the subject shakes.

4. How weak a thing
The heart of woman is.

5. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Then are dreamt of in your philosophy.

6. God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.

7. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

8. Better a little chiding than a great deal of heart-break.

9. If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

10. Self-loves, my liege, is not so vile a sin
As self-negating

Answers:

1. Menenius in ‘Coriolanus’

2. Edgar in King Lear

3. Lear in King Lear

4. Portia in Julius Caesar

5. Hamlet in Hamlet

6. Clown in Twelfth Night

7. Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

8. Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor

9. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice

10. Lewis, the Dauphin, in King Henry V