Knave Shakespeare Quotes

I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

Officers, what offence have these men done? DOGBERRY Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us.

LEIA Ah! Gov’nor Tarkin, scurvy knave art thou.

You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, Wears out his time, much like his master's ass, For nought but provender; and when he's old, cashier'd: Whip me such honest knaves.

Though this knave came something saucily into this world before he was sent for, yet was is mother Fair; there was good sport at his making, and the Whoreson must be acknowledged.

Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not. Kent: Fellow, I know thee. Oswald: What dost thou know me for? Kent: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy; worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou denyest the least syllable of thy addition.

If I be drunk, I’ll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.

I’ll beat the knave into a twiggen bottle.

A halter pardon him! and hell gnaw his bones! Why should he call her whore? who keeps her company? What place? what time? what form? what likelihood? The Moor’s abused by some most villainous knave, Some base notorious knave, some scurvy fellow:— O heaven, that such companions thou’dst unfold, And put in every honest hand a whip To lash the rascals naked through the world Even from the east to the west! IAGO Speak within door. EMILIA O, fie upon them! some such squire he was That turn’d your wit the seamy side without, And made you to suspect me with the Moor.

The upper class made their names for the lower classes--villain, knave, varlet, boor--into terms of contempt because the people they described had to wriggle through life as best they could: their first and almost their only rule was survival. The deadliest insult one gentleman could give another then was to call him a liar, not because the one being insulted had a passion for truth, but because it was being suggested that he couldn't afford to tell the truth.

Well, I must do’t. Away, my disposition, and possess me Some harlot’s spirit! My throat of war be turn’d, Which quier’d with my drum, into a pipe Small as an eunuch, or the virgin voice That babies lull asleep! The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys’ tears take up The glasses of my sight! A beggar’s tongue Make motion through my lips, and my arm’d knees, Who bow’d but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath receiv’d an alms! I will not do’t, Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, And by my body’s action teach my mind A most inherent baseness.

This is in thee a nature but infected; A poor unmanly melancholy sprung From change of fortune. Why this spade? this place? This slave-like habit? and these looks of care? Thy flatterers yet wear silk, drink wine, lie soft; Hug their diseased perfumes, and have forgot That ever Timon was. Shame not these woods, By putting on the cunning of a carper. Be thou a flatterer now, and seek to thrive By that which has undone thee: hinge thy knee, And let his very breath, whom thou'lt observe, Blow off thy cap; praise his most vicious strain, And call it excellent: thou wast told thus; Thou gavest thine ears like tapsters that bid welcome To knaves and all approachers: 'tis most just That thou turn rascal; hadst thou wealth again, Rascals should have 't. Do not assume my likeness.

I am myself indifferent honest ; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me : I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all ; believe none of us.

Whoreson dog,” “whoreson peasant,” “slave,” “you cur,” “rogue,” “rascal,” “dunghill,” “crack-hemp,” and “notorious villain” — these are a few of the epithets with which the plays abound. The Duke of York accosts Thomas Horner, an armorer, as “base dunghill villain and mechanical” (Henry VI., Part 2, Act 2, Sc. 3); Gloucester speaks of the warders of the Tower as “dunghill grooms” (Ib., Part 1, Act 1, Sc. 3), and Hamlet of the grave-digger as an “ass” and “rude knave.” Valentine tells his servant, Speed, that he is born to be hanged (Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 1, Sc. 1), and Gonzalo pays a like compliment to the boatswain who is doing his best to save the ship in the “Tempest” (Act 1, Sc. 1). This boatswain is not sufficiently impressed by the grandeur of his noble cargo, and for his pains is called a “brawling, blasphemous, uncharitable dog,” a “cur,” a “whoreson, insolent noise-maker,” and a “wide-chapped rascal.

BIFF - Hast though my homework finish'd yet, McFly? GEORGE - In truth, it is not yet completed, Biff. Because it is not due until far later. [Biff grabs George and begins knocking on his head.] BIFF - I'll bash thee on thy pate, an thou so speakest! Are brains herein, that I must knock and see? Use thou thy mind and with it think, McFly - I must have time enow to write the words In mine own hand, as if the work were mine. Hast thou the consequences consider'd, George, Should I submit some homework pen'd by thee, Writ in the manner of thy shaky hand? I would, most quickly, be sent from the school. Thou wouldst not want that lot for Biff, wouldst thou? Wouldst thou? Speak faster, for thy pause doth vex. GEORGE - Of course not, Biff, 'twould be a tragedy. [Biff notices Marty staring at George.] BIFF - [to Marty:] Upon what lookest thou, thou arse-like pate? SKINHEAD - Behold his life preserver, Biff - ha, ha! This knave, this rogue, this dork thinks he shall drown.

Nature is not like those bad poets, who, in setting a fool or a knave before us, do their work so clumsily, and with such evident design, that you might almost fancy you saw the poet standing behind each of his characters, and continually disavowing their sentiments, and telling you in a tone of warning: This is a knave; that is a fool; do not mind what he says. But Nature goes to work like Shakespeare and Goethe, poets who make every one of their characters—even if it is the devil himself!—appear to be quite in the right for the moment that they come before us in their several parts; the characters are described so objectively that they excite our interest and compel us to sympathize with their point of view; for, like the works of Nature, every one of these characters is evolved as the result of some hidden law or principle, which makes all they say and do appear natural and therefore necessary. And you will always be the prey or the plaything of the devils and fools in this world, if you expect to see them going about with horns or jangling their bells.

THERSITES No, no, I am a rascal, a scurvy railing knave, a very filthy rogue. HECTOR I do believe thee. Live.

Nashe, the city’s most feared and fearless satirist, once compared the closing stanza of Harvey’s latest poem to a fart after a bowel movement. Nashe also transformed Shakespeare’s exalted Venus and Adonis into a porn parody about one man’s epic attempt to bring a London prostitute to orgasm using a dildo. Constantly offending authorities, forever on the run, Nashe jumped pen name to pen name: Cutbert Curry-knave to Pierce Penniless to Adam Evesdropper to Jocundary Merry-brains. A pamphlet got him tossed into Newgate Prison, a satiric play forced him to flee London. A friend and collaborator of Shakespeare’s, Nashe died likely of the plague around 1601, two years after the queen thought it prudent to set his life’s work ablaze in a great bonfire of lost lewd literature.

Persuading him to do so is no easy task. In this attempt, Menenius is joined by Volumnia, who shares his frustration that the stiff-necked Coriolanus could not dissemble just long enough to be elected. “Lesser had been/The taxings of your dispositions,” she tells her son, “if/You had not showed them how ye were disposed/Ere they lacked power to cross you” (3.2.20–23). Coriolanus’s response is “Let them hang,” to which his mother adds, “Ay, and burn too” (3.2.23–24). But cursing the people will not solve the problem. The only intelligent course of action, she says, is for Coriolanus to do what, in effect, the elite have always known how to do: to speak To th’ people, not by your own instruction, Nor by th’ matter which your heart prompts you, But with such words that are but roted in Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth. (3.2.52–57) Just lie. Everyone shares this view, she assures him: “Your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles” (3.2.65). It is in Coriolanus’s power to solve the crisis he has provoked. The price he needs to pay is simply to behave, for once, like a politician. But for him this price is unbearably high. Everything in Coriolanus’s being—the fierce integrity and pride and spirit of command he has imbibed from his mother—rebels against playing so degrading a part. And the conflict is all the more unbearable because it is precisely his mother who now urges him to debase himself. “I prithee now, sweet son,” she tells him, as thou hast said My praises made thee first a soldier, so To have my praise for this, perform a part Thou hast not done before. (3.2.107–10) Volumnia understands perfectly well that her son’s sense of his manhood is at stake and that he has shaped his whole identity from the beginning by trying to please her. The scars that cover his body were never meant for theatrical display before the people; they were adornments offered only to her. But now, devastatingly enough, she tells him that he has been trying too hard: “You might have been enough the man you are/With striving less to be so” (3.2.19–20). Or, rather, he hears from his mother a demand for a different, even more painful form of masochism. She wants him, in his view, to be a beggar, a knave, a weeping schoolboy, or a whore. Worse still, she wants his “throat of war” to be turned “into a pipe/Small as an eunuch” (3.2.112–14). All right, he says, for her and her alone, he will in effect castrate himself: “Mother, I am going to the marketplace