Tales from Shakespeare

“oftentimes these ministers of darkness tell us truths in little things, to betray us into deeds of greatest consequence.””

— Charles Lamb

“for he knew it was no usual name, but had been invented by himself for his own child to signify seaborn:””

— Charles Lamb

“bade her to doubt the stars were fire, and to doubt that the sun did move, to doubt truth to be a liar, but never to doubt that he loved;””

— Charles Lamb

“Romeo, Romeo!' said she, 'wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father, and refuse thy name, for my sake; or if thou wilt not, be but my sworn love, and I no longer will be a Capulet.””

— Charles Lamb

“Now all things that were ordained for the festival were turned from their properties to do the office of a black funeral. The wedding cheer served for a sad burial feast, the bridal hymns were changed for sullen dirges, the sprightly instruments to melancholy.bells, and the flowers that should have been strewed in the bride’s path now served but to strew her corse. Now, instead of a priest to marry her, a priest was needed to bury her, and she was borne to church indeed, not to augment the cheerful hopes of the living, but to swell the dreary numbers of the dead.””

— Charles Lamb

“But though the two young writers are ostensibly concerned with children, they do not only mean children: when Coleridge invokes the imagination of a child, he is yearning for its power for himself. The child might be father to the man, as Wordsworth famously wrote in his ode, 'Intimations of Immortality', but that paternity was, ideally, internal and present and active: the Romantics were the first to conceive of the Inner Child, and to yearn to reinstate the child's sway over the adult. They expressed nostalgia for childhood; but even more acutely, they longed for childlikeness to endure in order to keep their faculties quick and fertile. And between them, Charles Lamb and Coleridge pioneered the idea of the crossover text, the work of fantasy that appeals across generations, such as 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', or, as it would turn out, .””

— Charles Lamb

“Adriana had so well profited by the good counsel of her mother-in-law, that she never after cherished unjust suspicions, or was jealous of her husband.[Pg 189]””

— Charles Lamb