“‘The best revenge is living well.’ It is a wonderful expression. I just do not know how true it is. You do not see it turning up in a lot of opera plots. ‘Ludwig, maddened by the poisoning of his entire family, wreaks vengeance on Gunther in the third act by living well. Whereupon Woton, upon discovering his deception, wreaks vengeance on Gunther in the third act again by living even better than the Duke.’”
- Niles Crane
“The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.”
- Louis Theroux
‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’
- Reed International Books Ltd. 1992. The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare London, Great Britain: Chancellor Press (1996) p. 427
Tea, coffee, wine, beer and rubber can all be made from dandelions.
Taraxacum or Dandelion
In the Midlands of Britain around the area where Shakespeare came from, a goldenlad is dialect for a dandelion in full yellow flower and a chimney-sweeper is the name for a dandelion ‘clock’.
Flamenco dancer Jose Greco (1918-2000) took out an insurance policy through Lloyd’s of London against his trousers splitting during a performance.
A dancer with the Royal Ballet gets through about 120 pairs of shoes a season.
Dandelions are also known as Pissy beds, Jack-piss-the-bed, Wet-the-bed, Wet-a-bed, Tiddlebeds and Pissenlit.
[Spoken by PROSPERO]:
‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own;
Which is most faint; now ’tis true,
I must be here confin’d by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell:
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.’
- Reed International Books Ltd. 1992. The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare London, Great Britain: Chancellor Press (1996) p. 29
A rhetorical device from the Ancient Greek eirōneía meaning dissimulation or feigned ignorance. It is a technique or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions.
Several types of irony should be distinguished:
Socratic irony; pretending to be dumber than you actually are. When a person asks questions, pretending not to understand, to lure the interlocutor into a logical trap.
Comic irony; “Gentlemen don’t fight, this is the war-room!” Irony that can be called humorous by general standards.
Dramatic irony; When the audience or reader knows a fictional character is making a mistake, because the audience has more information than the character. “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul:—here Clarence comes.” (Shakespeare’s Richard III Act I Scene I)
Tragic irony; A type of dramatic irony. In tragic irony, a character’s actions lead to consequences that are both tragic, and contrary to the character’s desire and intentions.
Situational irony; For instance: a vegetarian pacifist murdered in an abattoir.
Historical irony; A kind of situational irony that takes a long period of years for the irony to become evident.
Verbal irony; A sort of wordplay slightly less contradictory than sarcasm “As clear as mud.”
Verbal and situational irony are often used for emphasis in the assertion of a truth. The ironic form of simile, used in sarcasm, and some forms of litotes emphasize one’s meaning by the deliberate use of language which states the opposite of the truth — or drastically and obviously understates a factual connection.
In dramatic irony, the author causes a character to speak or act erroneously, out of ignorance of some portion of the truth of which the audience is aware. In other words, the audience knows the character is making a mistake, even as the character is making it. This technique highlights the importance of truth by portraying a person who is strikingly unaware of it.
In certain kinds of situational or historical irony, a factual truth is highlighted by some person’s complete ignorance of it or his belief in the opposite of it. However, this state of affairs does not occur by human design. In some religious contexts, such situations have been seen as the deliberate work of Divine Providence to emphasize truths and to taunt humans for not being aware of them when they could easily have been enlightened. Such ironies are often more evident, or more striking, when viewed retrospectively in the light of later developments which make the truth of past situations obvious to all.
King Henry [To Gower, Williams, Warwick, Gloster, and Exeter.]
(…) ‘O God, thy arm was here,
And not to us but to thy arm alone
Ascribe we all! When, without stratagem,
But in plain shock and even play of battle,
Was ever known so great and little loss
On one part and on the other? Take it, God,
For it is none but thine.’
- Reed International Books Ltd. 1992. The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare London, Great Britain: Chancellor Press (1996) p. 465
“We learned the old-fashioned disciplines of the theatre, and one of the most important things was versatility. If you wanted to be a proper actor, if you wanted to be a Larry Olivier, or a Michael Redgrave or a John Gielgud, you had to have versatility.”
- Peter O’Toole
“The theatre aspires to wake the soul by tender strokes of art, to raise the genius and to mend the heart.”
- Alexander Pope
