The Silver Gleams of William Shakespeare

"The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;What is her burying grave, that is her womb" …. Father Laurence, 'Romeo & Juliet'.
William Shakespeare, apart from Rabindranath Tagore, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Frost, has been a major philosophic inspiration to my life. Shakespeare saw the beauty of the corollaries and expressed the essence of every feeling or character. Be it virtuous or viced, Shakespeare had the eye to enjoy the beauty of it all.
"from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,then from hour to hour we rot and rot" …. designed to be mouthed by Touchstone, As You Like It: Shakespeare created picturesque characters in his plays, sometimes framed as the court jester Touchstone or at other times as the melancholy Jaques, in ‘As You Like It’, or as the foolish Greek Champion Ajax, in ‘Troilus and Cressida’: characters that spoke the bare essence of life.
“What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! 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? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.” …. spoken by Hamlet, when he is fickled about deciding whether man is noble or evil….is one of my favorites. What inspires me in Shakespeare’s work is his ability to realize the silver lining even behind the darkest of clouds, his ability to make smiles out of the gravest of graves, and his ability to inspire so well through petty fiction. He can mock life and admire it….all at once, and express his gratitude for being what he is even when he is mouthing his inconveniences. Hail thee!