Winter's Tale
Written: 1609 Text: First Folio 1623 (Comedy), no quarto editions
Source: Robert Greene (c.1558-92). Pandosto (1588); Ovid (43 BC- AD18). Metamorphoses (Arthur Golding's English translation in 1567)
Characters: Leontes King of Sicilia, Paulina, Camillo, Polixenes King of Bohemia, Hermione, Florizel, Perdita, Autolycus, Antigonus
Setting: Sicily and Bohemia
Time: Undetermined
Xxx xxx
Quotes from Winter's Tale
If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia
Read the QuoteArchidamus
If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia
on the like occasion whereon my services
are now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great
difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia.
Camillo
I think this coming summer the King of
Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which
he justly owes him.
… continue reading this quote
My gracious lord, I may be negligent, foolish, and fearful.
Read the QuoteCamillo
My gracious lord,
I may be negligent, foolish, and fearful.
In every one of these no man is free,
But that his negligence, his folly, fear,
Among the infinite doings of the world,
Sometime puts forth. In your affairs, my lord,
If ever I were willful-negligent,
It was my folly; if industriously
I played the fool,
… continue reading this quote
Either thou art most ignorant by age
Read the QuoteEither thou art most ignorant by age,
Or thou wert born a fool.
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I have said She’s an adult’ress
Read the QuoteLeontes
I have said
She’s an adult’ress; I have said with whom.
More, she’s a traitor, and Camillo is
A federary with her, and one that knows
What she should shame to know herself
But with her most vile principal: that she’s
A bed-swerver, even as bad as those
That vulgars give bold’st titles; ay, and privy
To this their late escape.
… continue reading this quote
The silence often of pure innocence
Read the QuoteThe silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.
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I am a feather for each wind that blows
Read the QuoteI am a feather for each wind that blows.
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Woe the while!
Read the QuotePaulina
Woe the while!
O, cut my lace, lest my heart, cracking it,
Break too!
Lord
What fit is this, good lady?
Paulina, to Leontes
What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels, racks, fires? What flaying? Boiling
In leads or oils? What old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst?
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Thou met’st with things dying
Read the QuoteThou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born.
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I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty
Read the QuoteShepherd
I would there were no age between ten and
three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the
rest, for there is nothing in the between but getting
wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing,
fighting—Hark you now. Would any but these
boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt
this weather? They have scared away two of my best
sheep,
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Better not to have had thee
Read the QuoteBetter not to have had thee than thus to want thee.
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