Shakespeare
Here, we list some musings of Darwin and Shakespeare. After a few of Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, we quote Shakespeare.
Whether there are environmental changes or not, evolution can occur from various reasons. With environmental changes, of course evolution will favour variations that result in a better fitness in the new environment. Even without environmental changes, the status quo will be difficult to be maintained in a real world.
Theories favoured by eminent physicists:
“Natural selection favors both extremes of continuous variation. Over time, the two extreme variations will become more common and the intermediate states will be less common or lost.”
(Disruptive selection)
Teaching excellent students:
“Sexual selection is a type of selection in which the forces determined by mate choice act to cause one genotype to mate more frequently than another genotype.”
(Sexual selection)
Engineering a theory looking different from others:
“Males look different from females of the species. Some of the most obvious examples involve animals that attract mates by virtue of their appearance, such as peacocks with larger, more flamboyant tail fans. The male that is most attractive will win the right to mate with the female.”
(Sexual diomorphism)
The band wagon effect among particle theorists:
“Over time the favored extreme will become more common and the other extreme will be less common or lost.”
(Directional selection)
Same transparencies among particle physicists’ talks:
“Natural selection favors the intermediate states of continuous variation. Over time, the intermediate states become more common and each extreme variation will become less common or lost.”
(Stabilising selection)
Nominating the same group member to various prizes:
“Natural selection favors a trait that benefits related members of a group. Altruistic behaviors of the worker bees are a result of kin selection, and are best illustrated by animals with complex social behaviors.”
(Kin selection)
Choosing excellent speakers at big conferences:
“As with appearance, males that have the most attractive mating ritual potentially win the right to mate with the female.”
(Mating)
Big Bang versus stationary state of the universe:
“In species with males that battle over rights to mate with females, such as elephants and deer, the male that wins a fight because he is the strongest, most dominant, or most intelligent will win the right to mate with the female. Over time, the features that allow the males to win (larger tusks, larger antlers, larger body size) will become more common.”
(Dual fight)
Given his general acceptance as the greatest writer of the English language, it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are so frequently quoted. Here, we apply the selected lines he wrote to the fascinating subject of particle theory.
Lack of a complete particle theory:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
(Hamlet)
Darwin and Newton were both born in England, which has one percent of the total population:
“This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
(Richard II)
In favour of collaboration between particle theorists:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”
(Sonnet)
The difficult challenge of particle theory:
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
About naming particles:
“What’s in a name? A rose by any name would smell as sweet.”
(Romeo and Juliet)
On the future of particle theory:
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
(Hamlet)
The quality of a particle theory paper:
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
(Hamlet)
So many parameters in the Standard Model:
“Now is the winter of our discontent.”
(Richard III)
“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”
(Hamlet)
Atomism:
“It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.”
(As You Like It)
Understanding Nature:
“In nature’s infinite book of secrecy, a little I can read.”
(Antony and Cleopatra)
Aristotle:
“SIR TOBY BELCH: Does not our lives consist of the four elements?
SIR ANDREW AGUECHEEK:
Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.
SIR TOBY BELCH:
Thou’rt a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink.”
(Twelfth Night)
Unimportance of fame:
“I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety.”
(Henry V)
Becoming an established particle theorist:
“Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
(Julius Caesar)
Achieving greatness:
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
(Twelfth Night)
“Come what come may, time and the hour runs
through the roughest day.”
(Macbeth)
Self-unimportance:
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on;
and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
(The Tempest)
Playwright’s view of particle theorists:
“All the world’s a stage and all the men and
women merely players.”
(As you like it)
A particle theory’s superficial attractiveness:
“All that glisters is not gold.”
(Merchant of Venice)
Persistence of time:
“When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.”
(Sonnet)
Waiting for the result of particle experiment:
“I am to wait, though waiting so be hell.”
(Sonnet)
“How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel’s end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say, Thus far the miles are
measured from thy friend!
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider lov’d not speed, being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on,
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind,
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.”
(Sonnet)
Effect of tiredness:
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee!
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”
(Macbeth)
Music inspires particle theorists:
“If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
(Twelfth Night)
When a theoretical result is suspicious:
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
(Hamlet)
Quantum gravity, longer version:
“To be, or not to be, that is the question,
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.”
(Hamlet)
Becoming established, longer version:
“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that ‘Caesar’?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ’em,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was famed with more than with one man?
When could they say till now, that talk’d of Rome,
That her wide walls encompass’d but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
O, you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.”
(Julius Caesar)
About great scientists being born in England:
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’.”
(Henry V)
Requesting divine intervention:
“Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die:
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day instead of him.
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”
(Richard III)
Particle theories are often publicly debated like the oratory against (Brutus) and for (Antony) Julius Caesar at the funeral.
Brutus:
“Be patient till the last.
Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my
cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me
for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that
you may believe: censure me in your wisdom, and
awake your senses, that you may the better judge.
If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of
Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar
was no less than his. If then that friend demand
why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: —
Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved
Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and
die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live
all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him;
as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was
valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I
slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his
fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his
ambition. Who is here so base that would be a
bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended.
Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If
any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so
vile that will not love his country? If any, speak;
for him have I offended. I pause for a reply.
Then none have I offended. I have done no more to
Caesar than you shall do to Brutus. The question of
his death is enrolled in the Capitol; his glory not
extenuated, wherein he was worthy, nor his offences
enforced, for which he suffered death.
Here comes his body, mourned by Mark Antony: who,
though he had no hand in his death, shall receive
the benefit of his dying, a place in the
commonwealth; as which of you shall not? With this
I depart, — that, as I slew my best lover for the
good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself,
when it shall please my country to need my death.”
(Julius Caesar)
And, the response:
Antony:
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest —
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men —
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.”
(Julius Caesar).
England as the birthplace of Newton and Darwin:
“Methinks I am a prophet new inspired
And thus expiring do foretell of him:
His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!”
(Richard II)
Dark matter:
“O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,
And not in fear of your nativity.
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth
Our grandam earth, having this distemperature,
In passion shook.”
(Henry IV)
Eclipses of the Sun and Moon:
“These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son
and father. This villain of mine comes under the
prediction; there’s son against father: the king
falls from bias of nature; there’s father against
child. We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall
lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the
noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
offence, honesty! ’Tis strange.”
(King Lear)
Imperfections in a particle theory:
“Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud:
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.”
(Sonnet)
Permanent contribution to particle theory:
“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”
(Sonnet)
“The hour’s now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear;
Obey and be attentive. Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?
I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not
Out three years old.”
(The Tempest)
Fate of the universe:
“These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with sleep.”
(The Tempest)
Abandoning a failed particle theory:
“I will have none on’t. We shall lose our time
And all be turned to barnacles, or to apes
With foreheads villainous low.”
(The Tempest)
Dark energy:
“This thing of darkness
I Acknowledge mine.”
(The Tempest)
Creativity:
“Thought is free.”
(The Tempest)
“Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough.”
(The Tempest)
Knowledge:
“They say miracles are past;
and we have our philosophical persons,
to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.
Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors,
ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge,
when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.”
(All’s Well That Ends Well)
The standard model:
“Age cannot wither her,
nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
(Antony and Cleopatra)
Lunar eclipse:
“Alack, our terrene moon
Is now eclipsed; and it portends alone
The fall of Antony!”
(Antony and Cleopatra)
Playwright’s view of particle theorists, longer version:
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
(As You Like It)
Speed of light:
“Time travels at different speeds for different people.
I can tell you who time strolls for, who it trots for,
who it gallops for, and who it stops cold for.”
(As You Like It)
Teaching:
“It is far easier for me to teach twenty what were right to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”
(As You Like It)
Action:
“Action is eloquence.”
(Coriolanus)
Elegant theory:
“O, why should nature build so foul a den,
Unless the gods delight in tragedies?”
(Titus Andronicus)
“Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion,
A great-siz’d monster of ingratitudes.
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour’d
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done”
(Troilus and Cressida)
Greatness:
“Be not afraid of greatness.”
(Twelfth Night)
Comets:
“When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
(Julius Caesar)
Life and death:
“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worst than worst
Of those lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling? ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisionment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.”
(Measure for Measure)
“LEPIDUS: What colour is it of?
ANTONY: Of its own colour, too.”
(Antony and Cleopatra)
Physic(s)
“Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.”
(Macbeth)
Philosophy of physics:
“For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods,
And made a push at chance and sufferance.”
(Much Ado About Nothing)
Music and mathematics:
“I do present you with a man of mine
Cunning in music and the mathematics
To instruct her fully in those sciences.”
(Taming of the Shrew)
Philosophy about particle theory:
“It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame,
the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.
This most excellent canopy the air, look you,
this brave o’erhanging, this majestic roof
fretted with golden fire —
why, it appears no other thing to me
than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man.
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty,
in form and moving,
how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel!
in apprehension, how like a god —
the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals! And yet to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?
no, nor woman neither,
though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
(Hamlet)
Choice of research project:
“Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics?
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you.
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta?en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.”
(Taming of the Shrew)
Impossibility to predict the future:
“Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,
And yet methinks I have astronomy.
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or season’s quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well?”
(Sonnet)
Astronomical query:
“And teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night?”
(The Tempest)
Properties of time:
“Love is begun by time,
And time qualifies the spark and fire of it”
(Hamlet)
Infinity:
“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite”
(Romeo and Juliet)
“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
(Hamlet)
Blaming the Sun, Moon and Stars:
“We make guilty of our disasters the sun,
the moon, and the stars;
as if we were villians by compulsion.”
(King Lear)
Higher authority:
“You here shall swear upon this sword of justice,
That you, Cleomenes and Dion, have
Been both at Delphos, and from thence have brought
The seal’d-up oracle, by the hand deliver’d
Of great Apollo’s priest; and that, since then,
You have not dared to break the holy seal
Nor read the secrets in’t.”
(Winter’s Tale)
Introspection in solitude:
“Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i’ the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? who does me this? Ha!
’Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion!. Fie upon’t! foh! About, my brain! I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim’d their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I’ll have grounds
More relative than this: the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
(Hamlet)
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell
me one thing.”
(Hamlet)
Confusion:
“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”
(Macbeth)
More confusion:
“O, full of scorpions is my mind!”
(Macbeth)
Permanence of the Pole Star:
“I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”
(Julius Caesar)
Mystery of comets:
“By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wondered at.”
(Henry IV)
“And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe.
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.”
(As You Like It)
All particle theorists are equivalent:
“I think the King is but a man, as I am.
The violet smells to him as it doth to me.
The element shows to him as it doth to me.
All his senses have but human conditions.
His ceremonies laid by,
in his nakedness he appears but a man.”
(Henry V)
Dangerous to think too much:
“Let me have men about me that are fat;
sleek-headed men and such as sleep o?night.
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much.
Such men are dangerous.”
(Julius Caesar)
Crazy ideas may be correct:
“Though this be madness,
yet there is method in’t.”
(Hamlet)
Lack of diplomacy:
“My lord Sebastian,
The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness,
And time to speak it in — you rub the sore
When you should bring the plaster.”
(The Tempest)
Preference for a dream world:
“Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will him about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.”
(The Tempest)
Past may not determine future:
“She that is Queen of Tunis; she that dwells
Ten leagues beyond man’s life; she that from Naples
Can have no note, unless the sun were post?
The Man i’ th’ Moon’s too slow? till new-born chins
Be rough and razorable; she that from whom
We all were sea-swallow’d, though some cast again
(And by that destiny) to perform an act
Whereof what’s past is prologue; what to come,
In yours and my discharge.”
(The Tempest)
Can the Moon influence particle theory:
“Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound;
And through this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.”
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Only humans, not animals, do particle theory:
“There’s nothing situate under heaven’s eye
But hath his bond in earth, in sea, in sky.
The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls
Are their males’ subjects and at their controls.
Man, more divine, the master of all these,
Lord of the wide world and wild wat’ry seas,
Indu’d with intellectual sense and souls,
Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls,
Are masters to their females, and their lords;
Then let your will attend on their accords.”
(The Comedy of Errors)
Relation of Earth to Outer Space:
“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven;
and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown,
the poet’s pen turns them to shape,
and gives to airy nothing a local habitation
and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.”
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Anthropic principle:
“And nature must obey necessity”
(Julius Caesar)
Collaboration, longer version:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring barque,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
(Sonnet)
A good particle theory lasts:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And too often is his gold complexion dimm’d:
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or natures changing course untrimm’d;
By thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”
(Sonnet)
Advantages of education:
“Educated men are so impressive!”
(Romeo and Juliet)
Happiness:
“My Crown is in my heart, not on my head:
Not deck’d with Diamonds, and Indian stones:
Nor to be seen: my Crown is call’d Content,
A Crown it is, that seldom Kings enjoy”
(Henry VI)
A good question:
“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Why so can I, or so can any man.
But will they come when you do call for them?”
(Henry IV)
War and Peace:
“Let me have war, say I:
it exceeds peace as far as day does night;
it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent.
Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy;
mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible;
a getter of more bastard children
than war’s a destroyer of men.”
(Coriolaus)
The passage of particles through time:
“When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.”
(Sonnet)