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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

If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia

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Archidamus
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

Act 1
Scene 1
Line 1

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,

My gracious lord, I may be negligent, foolish, and fearful.

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Camillo
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

Act 1
Scene 2
Line 310

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,

Either thou art most ignorant by age

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Either thou art most ignorant by age,
Or thou wert born a fool.
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Act 2
Scene 1

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I have said She’s an adult’ress

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Leontes
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

Act 2
Scene 1
Line 108

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,

The silence often of pure innocence

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The silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.
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Act 2
Scene 2

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I am a feather for each wind that blows

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I am a feather for each wind that blows.
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Act 3
Scene 2

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Woe the while!

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Paulina
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?
… continue reading this quote

Act 3
Scene 2
Line 190

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, ,

Thou met’st with things dying

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Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born.
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Act 3
Scene 3

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I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty

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Shepherd
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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Act 3
Scene 3
Line 65

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,

Better not to have had thee

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Better not to have had thee than thus to want thee.
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Act 4
Scene 2

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