The Arden Dictionary of Shakespeare Quotations

Abstract

THE ARDEN DICTIONARY OF SHAKESPEARE QUOTATIONS. Compiled by Jane Armstrong. 396 pp. London : Thomson Learning, 2000 (1999).

The present compilation contains 3000 quotations, both well-known and lesser-known, from Shakespeare's plays and poems. The quotations vary in length from short sentences such as "For he was great of heart," through to longer passages such as Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be," which can run to almost a page or more. Most quotations, however, are quite short, and many consist only of "a strikingly expressed thought or resonant phrase" such as "Do you smell a fault?"